As a productive part of the American capitalist economy, Stanford faced some of the same limitations that capitalism did as a system. It was, as an institution, invested in profit and existing property relations. As I’ll note in the rest of this section, in the electronics industry and way beyond, profit incentives determined Stanford’s real shape. Not the school’s own profit—nonexistent, of course—but profit in general. This was the role of universities in the Giannini cartel model: to take on research and development on behalf of the capitalist class rather than any individual firm. As Jordan designed it, Stanford’s capabilities met America’s pressing modern needs—“an adequate supply of suitably qualified technical personnel and a satisfactory number of first-rate scientists.”62 The fruits of this work, therefore, don’t just “happen” to be bombs, ads, canned food, and Hollywood’s “moronizing entertainment,” Baran writes; for the capitalist system, all that is “the very basis of its existence and viability.”63 We’ve seen this dynamic play out with regard to the modern food system: The state demands canned food for war; firms invest in food processing; then, already halfway down the processed-food path, firms keep going, investing in advertising, shipping, mechanization, and additives research. What we’re left with is a very profitable food system that’s objectively harmful to people and to the rest of the earth. This same dynamic undergirded Provost Terman’s Stanford and the wider “postwar” Palo Alto community.