Ayn Rand

The Passion of Ayn Rand

I read Atlas Shrugged on a plane*. I was flying to Newark for a big pitch meeting. We merged with a company in New Jersey. We were the bitch of the merger, we took the other company’s name. But the new people liked me. I kept getting promoted. I had an equity stake, I thought. It turns out when a private equity place buys you and gives you equity it’s all horseshit. It never pays off no matter what. If they sell you just get a stake in the new company and the payout’s deferred, just a few more years until you sell again, forever. Now I have an equity stake in a startup that’s real stock options. Surely this time. Surely I’ll get the bag and have time at last to write as my career. And if not, some other financial instrument will save me. Surely my investments will go up and up while prices don’t also go up the exact same amount. Maybe The Pussy audiobook- there’s a publisher, we’ll see if they pay me...

I read Atlas Shrugged on a plane. I was ready to hate it. I hated Ayn Rand readers. I hated tech. If I could have created a virus that only killed people with Aspergers I’d have done it. But then if I had the mind to do that it’d take me out as well. Ayn Rand readers should be gassed in camps, Peter Thiel (REDACTED) and (REDACTED) in oil on TV, etc. No one talks about Ayn Rand in anything but the Bill Gates programmer voice. I was ready to hate it. I thought it was the Silmarillion of worshiping rich nerds.

But it’s about creativity. Ayn’s only concept of a big hard project is writing a novel. So when she describes Hank Rearden’s long nights of Promethean metallurgy they sound exactly how it feels to struggle with a novel- the false leads, the oh my God I’ve got it this time and when you execute it’s a complete piece of shit. But you try some stupid throwaway idea and it blossoms into a bridge of gleaming blue steel, ingots glowing hot, molten gold flowing…

If I could only get this chapter... if I could just get everybody off my back... God damn this book really spoke to me, and the plane landed, and the Uber drove me through New Jersey in my nice suit nice haircut, out the window in the green rolling hills I saw the Bell Labs campus. The legend, the Great Pyramid of American industry, where Randian heroes took up the hammer of the gods and forged the transistor, the laser, true miracles were made there, and I felt the genius of those men, and it was a sign. My God I was gonna kill at this meeting. I was gonna take charge and drive this beautiful shining machine with a billion gears bringing (REDACTED product) to America. At the Embassy Suites by Hilton I scripted my pitch. I wrote the entire two hour meeting instead of winging it. I made it with my skill and passion. And I Ubered to the office. And I got there, I had the Powerpoint with embedded videos perfect. And I got to the conference room ready for the well-moneyed 10 years worth of potential business client to come in and took out my Microsoft Surface Pro to hook it to the monitor.

The right cable wasn’t in the drawer. I asked the receptionist who said call the IT guy. Called the IT guy, introduced myself, hey we’re colleagues now this is DT from the West Coast branch. We have a big, big meeting and I need to get my Surface on the big screen. Can you help me get a cable. And he said I don’t know. I said can you help me get another computer to run the presentation. He said I don’t know. I said this is a ten million dollar contract man and he said something like I’m busy fixing the copier. His mouth full of something, maybe Little Caesar’s. I asked some other executive. They said I don’t know. I asked the fuckin CEO, I don’t know.

I don’t remember what happened after that. We got the contract or we didn’t.

The company was shit. In real life rich people buy everything to seek rent through weird financial tricks and make life worse, services worse, everything worse. Promise retards like me we’ll get rich too to channel us into overpromising sales and underdelivering product.. There are a million of these for every two Randian titans and most businesspeople should be gassed in camps, dragged behind pickup trucks.

But the book’s not bad.

* Not all of it