Ayn Rand Didn’t Mean a Technocracy

Ayn Rand

It is a matter of record that many of the most powerful entrepreneurs and VCs of Silicon Valley espouse a distinctly libertarian point of view tinged with shades of Ayn Rand, or at least a half-assed reading of her works.  And this confluence should not be overlooked, if for no other reason than, at least for the moment, what feels like our inexorable march toward a technocracy is being led by a very small group of very young men.

I have opined to friends and colleagues that the last people who should ever read Ayn Rand’s novels, let alone be required to read them, are teenage boys.  No creature that horny and that neophyte in basic literacy should ever be exposed to her particular brand of social philosophy until it is mature enough to realize that, for instance, her masterwork Atlas Shrugged is essentially an unforgivably verbose, adult comic book.  Like The Justice League meets The Story of O, part of the narrative of this undeservedly influential novel is one in which the heroine lives out her rape fantasies with a series of increasingly powerful wizards.

Each of the wizards — all brilliant and good-looking men — are flattering caricatures of 20th century Robber Barons, as if Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie were all dashing, philosophical, and scientific rather than cunning, ruthless, and lucky.  The subplot of Dagney Taggart’s sexual metamorphosis portrays her as a figure who must earn the right through her journey toward ideological enlightenment to finally deserve to be ravished by the man with the biggest machine.  In this sense, Taggart’s sexual “awakening” parallels the overarching implication in the novel that society itself must earn the right for John Galt to return messianic with his intrinsic technology.  All of the action is of course interspersed  with endless and repetitive monologues that might be boiled down to three words — communism is bad.

So, no, we should not assign this novel to adolescent boys, most especially if those boys reveal themselves to be prodigies in a technological field and are, therefore, more apt to imagine themselves possessing the power to “turn off the machine of the world.”  Such comparisons to Galt were made after the blackout of certain websites in protest of SOPA/PIPA. And although the world did, and certainly could, carry on without Wikipedia, it is worth noting that its founder Jimmy Wales considers himself an Objectivist, which is the social philosophy of Rand and her inner circle of thinkers and sex partners.  Of course, it’s hard to imagine many enterprises that would inspire one of the author’s smoky sneers more than Wikipedia might.  Free?  For the greater good?  Managed by a collective?  As I say, Rand leaves almost no English word unused in her excoriation of such ideas.  But this is typical of most people who claim to adhere to a particular philosophy; from traditional religion to vegetarianism, they tend to cherry pick the bits they like and leave out the bits they don’t like or don’t understand.

Visualize the present lifestyles many of Silicon Valley’s boy geniuses, and the parallels with Atlas Shrugged require little imagination.  These contemporary wizards have science and technology, they have extraordinary wealth, and they have private planes they land in their very own magic valley where they construct work spaces, social clubs, and even transportation systems that allow them to exist entirely separate from the population around them.  And like John Galt and those chosen to live in his secret valley, the consistently articulated message from these real-life wizards is that society needs them, and we would be self-destructive to restrain their “genius” no matter where it may lead.  Of course, the fictional Galt had invented a machine that would produce an endless supply of energy while many a real-world Internet entrepreneur has invented a means to waste an endless amount of time; but that’s just life’s way of producing an endless amount of irony.

Needless to say, I am no Ayn Rand fan; I think she was mad as a hatter, desperately in need of an editor, and doesn’t really deserve the philosophical pedestal on which she has been placed.  But one value often overlooked by both her fans and her haters, in industry or in politics, and one she often wrote about quite beautifully, was the notion that a person’s work is irrevocably his own. Be it a technological device, an architectural design, a new formulation for steel, a novel, or a symphony, a person’s work was his or her property; and any other person or entity which sought to profit from or restrain the creator’s right to exploit that work was what she called a “looter.”  And nothing was lower in her view.

While many interpreters of Rand associate her with social Darwinism, I think she makes clear that she doesn’t revile the average citizen but rather reviles the theft of human capacity and theft of genius.  Thus, her characters are caricatures of genius breaking restraints on their abilities, but if you pay attention to the passage in Atlas Shrugged once Dagney arrives in the secret valley, you’ll notice that even the ubermenschen who have formed their own society still honor the boundaries of one another’s individual sovereignty.  They so utterly reject the idea of the collective, that they will not do even the slightest deed as a favor; all interactions and transactions are a form of trade.  And a less jaded reading of this is that all individuals, not just the John Galts of the world, own the sovereignty and dignity produced by their labor.  And that is not a wholly inhuman idea, which is why I’m not surprised it is so often missed by boys who probably didn’t read very carefully.

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Uber – Do you want your daughter to use it?

There are so many stories in circulation this week detailing the sins of the presumptive disruptor of the the hired car industry, that I would feel more than redundant summarizing all of it here.  Read this story by founder and Editor-in-Chief of PandoDaily, Sarah Lacy who was singled out as a journalist whom Uber executive Emil Michael stated publicly he would smear for her criticisms of the company. You can also read about the company’s chauvinistic ad campaign, its tactics to undermine competitors, CEO Travis Kalanick’s boasting about how the company gets him laid, or you can read anecdotes involving some very acute dangers passengers have experienced like a near abduction, or just the data collection being done with all riders.  Or, for a laugh, you can read about Uber investor and movie star Ashton Kutcher wondering on Twitter “What is so wrong about digging up dirt on shady journalists?”  Oh, Ashton, just sit there and look pretty and try not to say things.

The overarching theme from many journalists commenting about the too-aptly named Uber — even Sarah Lacy despite her feeling threatened — is not that the company needs to go away but that its executives need to grow up.  “…the very values at the core of start-up culture — the move fast, break things, us-against-the-world spirit of experimentation — are inconsistent with the kinds of responsibilities that come with being an economically important company that touches millions of customers,” writes Neil Irwin for The New York Times.  He’s right, of course, but I am skeptical that growing up is in the cards for these executivettes.  As the father of sons and a former boy myself, I often generalize that males are pretty immature by nature until they’re at least in their mid twenties, and one way to really stifle potential growth in nearly any male is to value his start-up company at eighteen billion dollars and tell him he’s a genius.

The problem with incubating the kind of permissionless culture that fuels Silicon Valley is that a “boy genius” with too much money in his pockets really cannot distinguish between breaking one set of rules, like a business paradigm in need of change, and breaking all other rules like social responsibility, liability, and personal behaviors that denigrate others. To show how far the dementia goes, read about Standford Law Graduate and co-founder of RapGenius, Mahobod Moghadam, smugly defending his proposal to steal from Whole Foods.  Why?  Because he wants to.  This is what passes for “thought” when the thought leaders all drink the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.

While we could enumerate sundry flaws with traditional taxi and limousine regulations in particular cities, it should be noted that these problems associated with Uber have manifest in a very short time since the company’s launch, and that these ills are the reason state-imposed regulations exist in the first place — because human nature simply isn’t good enough in a permission-free society.  Boys simply do not grow up unless adults force them to do so against their will.

Create an unregulated taxi service, and of course, women are going to be less safe than if they’re being driven by a cabbie who had to pay a fortune for a medallion.  No that system isn’t perfect either, but it’s fundamentally safer, includes oversight and a liability chain backed by insurance; and it never involves a private company collecting data on your comings and goings.  Moreover, I don’t think consumers who see Uber as a real game changer right now have considered the potential for unprecedented price-gouging if traditional T&L services are “disrupted” out of competitive existence.  And drivers are beginning to realize that being an Uber “partner” means having a job without any of the benefits or security of actually being employed.  No rules means no rules. No rules means the owner of the ball always wins.  So, we’ll see where this goes, but for now, if you had to put your teenage daughter in a hired car tonight, would Uber be your first choice?

Critic Cote on Digital-Age Behavior in Theaters

I had to share this article by New York theater critic David Cote because it really is an indictment of digital-age jitteriness screwing up culture and literacy instead of broadening same as was promised.  It’s not really surprising that a contemporary theater audience doesn’t know that a play is not typically an interactive experience, and yet it is still a little surprising.  Cote’s “What Not to Do at Hugh Jackman’s New Broadway Show” is a funny but stern lecture that not only lays down basic rules for audience behavior, but even implies that people need a refresher course in what exactly theater is.  All of his observations — the use of smartphone cameras, the callouts to Jackman as celebrity, applauding at the wrong moments — all reek of digital-age induced illiteracy and narcissism. From Cote’s article:

So thunderstruck are they to be in a theater with the godlike Jackman, they forget to turn off their phones. Or worse, they snap pictures. At the press night I attended, some woman lacking a filter filled in the final, quiet moments of the play with an audible, “Holy shit!” Nice way to ruin a final tableau.

Here’s the first thing to know about a play:  Although you are there to experience it, it is not actually about you.

Read David Cote’s full article at TimeOut New York here.