Episode 133: Transcript
Episode: 133: Silicon Valley vs. Science Fiction: Ayn Rand
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, who do you think is the most popular science fiction author in Silicon Valley right now?
Annalee: [00:00:07] I don't know. I guess if you forced me to answer, I would have to say probably like Isaac Asimov or maybe Robert Heinlein.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:18] That's what I thought too. And you know, when I started researching this episode, I was like, oh, we'll talk about Asimov's influence on Silicon Valley. But after I did some looking into it, what I found kind of shocked me. The most popular and beloved science fiction author in Silicon Valley by a huge margin is, Ayn Rand. The author of Anthem, The Fountain Head, and Atlas Shrugged is a major inspiration to tech billionaires like Steve Jobs, Travis Kalanick, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and countless others.
[00:00:51] And we're gonna get into it. You're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction author. My latest book is Promises Stronger Than Darkness.
Annalee: [00:00:59] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and my latest novel is called The Terraformers.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:08] So, today's episode is all about Ayn Rand's influence on Silicon Valley, and how she's shaping the technology that we're all using.
[00:01:15] And we'll also talk about Ayn Rand in science fiction. We're going to be joined by University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski, co-author of the recent book, The Individualists, and also science fiction author Matt Ruff, who included a very strange version of Ayn Rand as a character in his novel Sewer, Gas, and Electric.
[00:01:36] That's right. We've got a diverse panel of experts today, two white guys named Matt.
Annalee: [00:01:38] I feel like that's really on brand for Ayn Rand.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:43] I know, and they’re both lovely and delightful. I'm really excited to talk to both of them. And in our mini episode next week, we're gonna be talking about dystopias generally since dystopias are a huge theme in Ayn Rand’s work and like what I think is like the major problem with a lot of dystopias.
Annalee: [00:01:58] All right. By the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon? That's right. If you become a patron, you're making this podcast happen. Plus, you get audio extras with every episode, and you get access to our Discord channel where we hang out all the time, and you're gonna learn a lot about my two new kittens if you join that Discord.
[00:02:23] So on top of all of the important—
Charlie Jane: [00:02:24] They're so cute.
Annalee: [00:02:24] Political and literary conversations. Kittens. So, think about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:30] So cute.
Annalee: [00:02:30] All that could be yours for just a few bucks a month. Anything you give goes right back into making our opinions more correct and feeding those kittens. So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:43] Okay, let's get objectivist.
Annalee: [00:02:46] Yeah! let's get individualist, baby.
[00:02:49] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:03:22] All right, so I found a really fascinating article from 2016 from Vanity Fair about the cult of Ayn Rand in Silicon Valley, which we’ll of course link to in the show notes. Annalee, I'm gonna send you a quote from this article to read.
Annalee: [00:03:35] Okay. “Perhaps the most influential figure in the tech industry, after all, isn't Steve Jobs or Sheryl Sandberg, but Ayn Rand. Jobs's co-founder Steve Wozniak, has suggested that Atlas Shrugged was one of Jobs's guides in life for a time. For a time, Kalanick’s Twitter avatar featured the cover of The Fountainhead. And Peter Thiel, whose dissatisfaction with a Gawker story led him to underwrite a lawsuit that eventually killed off the site, and who made the outré decision to publicly support Donald Trump is also a self-described Rand devotee. At their core, Rand's philosophy suggests it's okay to be selfish, greedy, and self-interested, especially in business, and that a win at all costs mentality is just the price of changing the norms of society.
[00:04:23] “As one startup founder recently told me, quote, ‘They should retitle her books, it's okay to be a sociopath’ unquote. And yet, most tech entrepreneurs and engineers appear to live by one of Rand's defining mantras. The question isn't who is going to let me, it's who is going to stop me?”
Charlie Jane: [00:04:44] Whoa.
Annalee: [00:04:46] I know. I really feel like I hear these ideas running underneath a lot of the slogans that have come out of Silicon Valley in the last 10 years. Like “Move Fast and Break Things,” which was a Facebook slogan and it's funny because a lot of these industry leaders that we're talking about, like Kalanick and Musk and even Bill Gates, you know, they embrace this kind of ideology of elitism and anti-populism, like, embracing the idea of great men leading us forward, and yet they spend their time creating these social media technologies that allow mobs of people to get together and harass individuals.
[00:05:27] So, are these powerful billionaires just paying lip service to Ayn Rand, or do they actually follow through on her beliefs?
Charlie Jane: [00:05:35] A little of both. I mean, a lot of people seem to embrace Ayn Rand purely because she justifies getting rid of government regulation, but then they skip all of the parts that they don't like, such as her hatred of crony capitalism and her distrust of nationalism and racial identity.
[00:05:52] She was very strident in her hatred of racism. And I just read a recent book about Ayn Rand called Mean Girl by NYU professor Lisa Dugan, which is, it's a super quick read, I read it on one plane flight, and it's a really good crash course on Randianism. And Lisa Dugan has a section where she talks a lot about Rand's influence on the tech industry, and she quotes extensively from Douglas Rushkoff, who at the time had written an essay about how he spoke to hedge fund billionaires who wanted to retreat from society. And that essay eventually became the core of Rushkoff's latest book, Survival of the Richest, which a lot of people have mentioned that this feels very Randian.
Annalee: [00:06:33] Yeah, and I mean, I think Rushkoff is an interesting figure in Silicon Valley because for his whole career, which goes back to the 1990s, he's been this voice in the wilderness basically saying, “Hey, you know, these capitalists who don't believe in rules and don't believe in regulations are actually kind of a problem,” and he'll give us these really interesting inside looks like in Survival of the Richest, which is kind of almost like a tour through the boardrooms and the playrooms of Silicon Valley. And he'll talk to these guys, most of whom are men, and find out what drives them. And a lot of it comes back to these Randian ideas of winner take all, but also an obsession with eugenics, basically, and this, this notion that certain people are just inherently superior due to their genes and that there needs to be like breeding programs to produce more people like that.
[00:07:33] And so, there's just a lot of obsession with both her ideas and kind of stuff that people have pulled out of her ideas that might not have been there in the first place.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:44] But, but tell us about the shock collars, Annalee.
Annalee: [00:07:48] Right. So, in that initial essay that Rushkoff published he talks about being at a meeting with a bunch of billionaires who are worried about what's gonna happen after the inevitable dystopia arrives. And they're trying to think about, well, I'm in my castle with like 12-foot cement walls. How do I prevent the servants who are caring for me from rising up and rebelling? And so, they're talking very seriously about, well, people who work for me will have shock collars so I can hurt them anytime they try to rebel or disobey me.
[00:08:24] And Rushkoff is just sitting there like, I can't believe these guys are seriously talking about building bunkers like in an Ayn Rand story and using shock collars to control the masses.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:36] Or keeping the food under lock and key so that only you have access to the food. Because the idea is that once this dystopia happens, money will be worthless so you have to keep your armed guards under control some other way.
[00:08:48] And yeah, that bunker where they're going to hole up with their armed guards, who they're electrocuting whenever they step out of line, a lot of people have compared that to Galt’s Gulch. Which is the place in Atlas Shrugged where all of the geniuses and hyper-capitalist leaders of society retreat to when they decide to just like go on strike and leave behind the rest of society.
[00:09:12] And you know, whenever I think that dystopian fiction is too simplistic and farfetched, as we're gonna discuss in next week's audio extra mini episode, I think about this notion of like billionaires holding up and like putting electric collars on their henchmen. And then I'm like, well, maybe not.
Annalee: [00:09:31] It’s funny because when I first came out to San Francisco and was writing about it as a tech journalist, in the early 21st century. People called this area of San Francisco where people were engaging in making websites and stuff, they called it Multimedia Gulch.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:46] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:09:46] And I wonder if they were referring to Galt's Gulch at that time.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:51] Probably, but yeah, so I mean, Lisa Dugan kind of talks about how the difference between Galt's Gulch and this survival bunker where Rushkoff's billionaires want to hide out is that there's a lack of optimism in the survival bunker.
[00:10:05] John Galt and his followers, they're responding to this highly regulated over-controlled society where the welfare state has gotten out of control and they're gonna retreat to their private paradise so that they could eventually return to the world and rebuild once everything has fallen apart without them.
[00:10:23] But Rushkoff’s billionaires, they're just gonna hide away forever. And, of course, the world is gonna be ruined permanently due to things like climate change, which could have been averted through due to collective action but the billionaires just wanna run and hide.
Annalee: [00:10:37] So what does Dugan think is the appeal of Rand to Silicon Valley leaders?
Charlie Jane: [00:10:43] So, Lisa Dugan describes the, the core of Rand's philosophy as optimistic cruelty, which I love that. But she talks a lot about how lustful Ayn Rand’s writing is where everything is highly erotic and sexy, including very square jawed, like, manly men who dominate and ravish the brilliant women that they desire.
[00:11:05] And it's like everything is very heightened and emotional and kind of romantic in her books. And Lisa Dugan describes Rand’s novels, which, another phrase I love, as “Conversion machines that run on lust.” And she says about, Ayn Rand's ideal man, “His sexual magnetism is tied to his surly casual cruelty.” And Lisa Dugan appeared on the Spectators Book Club podcast in 2021, and this is what she had to say about like how Silicon Valley understands Rand.
Lisa: [00:11:33] I mean, she's anti-nationalist, really, overwhelmingly anti-nationalist. She was militantly ferociously, fiercely anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian. Right? And then leave aside the fact that she was an atheist and an anti-fascist.
Annalee: [00:11:51] So basically, these people are cherry picking a lot of the sort of lone genius ideas from her work, and then ignoring the core of her teachings.
[00:12:03] And it seems like a lot of her biggest fans are authoritarians, whereas her work was really anti-authoritarian.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:10] Yeah. And in that same podcast interview, Dugan makes a really important point, which is that one of Rand's great strengths as a writer is that she's excellent at making the most mainstream, dominant ideologies appear as though they're a marginalized, oppressed position that people are gonna be persecuted for holding.
Annalee: [00:12:25] Huh, interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:25] And that is a big motif of today's right-wing policies. It's like, the people who are in charge, the people who dominate everything, the billionaires, see themselves as victimized, oppressed, and marginalized. And Rand is an author who provides a lot of fuel for that. She turns somebody who is basically king of the world into the poor, repressed outsider.
[00:12:48] So we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about who Ayn Rand was and also hear from Matt Zwolinski about what she actually believed in.
[00:12:57]OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:13:03] Okay, so back to the beginning. What's the deal with Ayn Rand? Who was she?
Charlie Jane: [00:13:07] So, Lisa Dugan's book is pretty fascinating and I learned a lot about her. Ayn Rand was born to a Jewish family in Russia in 1905. Her original name was Elisa Rosenbaum, and she was traumatized by the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution. When she finally made it to the United States, she immediately made a beeline to Hollywood where she tracked down legendary movie director Cecil B. DeMille, who she was obsessed with. She worked for DeMille for a while, eventually becoming a screenwriter, but she was disillusioned with DeMille because she felt like he was chasing box office success or trying to win the approval of the masses instead of just following his own unique, brilliant vision.
[00:13:49] And that kind of set the tone for the rest of her life. Like she, even though DeMille could have been seen as like an archetype of an Ayn Rand hero, because he's obsessed with trying to please the masses, he’s kind of compromised. Also, apparently her earliest attempts at creative writing included real person fanfic about William Hickman, a real life serial killer who kidnapped and disemboweled a young girl.
Annalee: [00:14:15] Whoa. Okay. I don't even wanna know what was going on there. Probably he was exercising his will over this girl.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:24] I don’t know… it’s uh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:14:28] So, she became a novelist after the serial killer fanfic?
Charlie Jane: [00:14:33] Yeah. And her first published book was We: The Living, A Realist Novel set in the Soviet Union about individuals struggling against communism.
[00:14:43] Then she turned around and published Anthem, a dystopian novel about a world where individuality is crushed. Her most famous novels were The Fountainhead about a brilliant architect who struggles against society's mediocrity and eventually blows up a public housing project because his creative vision has been compromised.
Annalee: [00:15:02] Oh, what?
Charlie Jane: [00:15:02] Which I feel like actually they did a riff on that in Tuca & Bertie.
Annalee: [00:15:07] Yeah, I was, I just thinking that.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:10] I feel like Tuca & Bertie was like… I wonder if that was intentional. I need to find out if…
Annalee: [00:15:13] Yeah, there's an episode where Bertie’s boyfriend Speckle, who's an architect, is working on a public housing project. And it's kind of the opposite of an Ayn Rand thing because he really wants to do something that's good for people, but then he keeps running up against all these fat cat investors and bureaucrats who keep changing his vision. And finally it's just this horrible condo building.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:36] I'm really wondering if that episode, we should try to find out… anyway. If we do find out, we'll talk about it in the Discord.
Annalee: [00:15:43] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:43] And then her most famous novel is Atlas Shrugged, which we already talked about a little bit, where there's this sort of, overregulated welfare state that crushes the spirits of the most innovative and brilliant individuals by putting pointless rules onto them. Until finally, the genius elite, as we said earlier, go on strike and go form their own separate ideal society in a hidden place called Galt’s Gulch.
AS Trailer Clip: [00:16:11] To protect the security of our fellow citizens, all copyrights shall be transferred to the federal government. All wages and other forms of income are hereby frozen. A device harvesting limitless energy without fossil fuels. You don't understand the power they have. The government takes what they want and taxes what they leave behind. One of these days, you're gonna have to decide.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:40] Part of what I loved about Atlas Shrugged is that the regulations that the people in charge are pushing are kind of like a funhouse mirror version of liberalism.
[00:16:51] Like at one point they pass a law called the anti-Dog Eat Dog Bill, which basically requires successful companies to become less successful and less competitive so that they don't drive unsuccessful companies out of business. And why would anybody want that? I mean, I don't understand why progressives would want that. I think that progressives might wanna nationalize some industries, but the idea of like, no, we're gonna keep private industry, but we're gonna regulate it so that no company can be more successful than any other company. That's just weird.
Annalee: [00:17:24] It feels like she is sort of talking about the woke mind virus or something.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:27] A little bit. And one of the things I like about Ayn Rand’s fiction is that it's a world with where like people are kind of poly and there's no sexual jealousy. Women like Dagny Taggart, who's one of the heroes of Atlas Shrugged, can just hook up with whoever they want and nobody ever gets jealous. Also, nobody ever gets pregnant except for like one person who we briefly meet.
Annalee: [00:17:47] Awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:47] And I reviewed all three Atlas Shrugged movies and we can link to those in the show notes.
Annalee: [00:17:54] Yeah, I like that vision too. I mean, I hope that we don't have to get into like a world of authoritarian individualism for ladies to just fuck around and not get pregnant.
[00:18:05] So, okay. Did Ayn Rand write any novels after Atlas Shrugged.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:10] No, she didn't and she just switched to writing nothing but nonfiction for the rest of her life and she kind of pivoted to become a lecturer and kind of like a public intellectual thanks to this giant circle of admirers that she gathered around her who included future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and her disciple / lover, Nathaniel Branden, and also Branden's wife and her cousin. And she basically stopped writing fiction, even though as Dugan points out, pretty much nobody reads Ayn Rand's non-fiction except for her most devoted admirers.
[00:18:45] And according to Dugan, at least, Ayn Rand fell into a deep depression after she finished Atlas Shrugged in part because she had been allegedly taking benzedrine to fuel her writing.
Annalee: [00:18:56] Oh.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:57] And she ended up going through a long withdrawal period. And then it all kind of fell apart for her in the late 60s where kind of her inner circle fractured and the end of her life was actually pretty sad.
[00:19:09] And so, I was curious to learn more about Rand's thought and why so many people find it compelling.
[00:19:14] So, I talked to philosopher Matt Zwolinski with University of San Diego.
[00:19:18] So I'm so lucky now to be joined by Professor Matt Zwolinsky, philosophy professor at University of San Diego, and the co-author of a brand-new book about the history of libertarianism called The Individualists. Thanks for joining us, Matt.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:19:31] Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:34] Yeah. So you know, I’ve been reading your book, your awesome book, the The Individualists, which kind of talks about how the history of libertarianism is actually more diverse than people realize and includes anarcho-communists. It includes people who came to libertarianism through fighting against enslavement in the 19th century.
[00:19:54] And you know that the notion of property rights can take on many different meetings depending on who you're talking to and what you consider property. So, do you think that people unfairly boil libertarianism down to just this one idea of, “I'm in it for me and everybody else can just suck on a whatever.”
Matt Zwolinski: [00:20:14] Yeah. I think that's true of libertarianism. I think that's true of Rand's ideas in particular. Every once in a while you know, the media gets in its head to write some piece about Rand and her influence on whoever's in power at the moment, whether it's Donald Trump or Paul Ryan or whatever. And so I was reading this piece in prep for the interview that The Guardian published on Ayn Rand a few years back, talking about her influence on Trump and a lot of Silicon Valley elite. And the way they summarized their philosophy was like, basically greed is good. It's okay to be a sociopath. Right? Don't worry about the sheep out there. You know, trample on them if you can. And that's just not Rand's view. Again, her view was about individualism, but it was about individualism with integrity. And for her, individualism meant standing on your own two feet and not trying to live off others as a parasite.
[00:21:08] And that doesn't just mean like, you know, being on welfare, which you know, Rand probably thought it did, but it also means like defrauding other people or trying to get by and make money in a dishonest way. Making money was not the highest goal for Rand.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:25] I mean, she says money is the root of all good. She actually says that at one point.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:21:28] It’s a symbol of good, right? Because if it's properly earned, the way you earn money in a capitalist society is by offering somebody something of value, right? If I make my fortune by creating some new product that makes everybody’s life better, then that money is, in a sense, it's a symbol of my virtue. It’s an effect of my virtue.
[00:21:53] But if I make my money by defrauding you, by lying you, by cheating you, or even just by slavishly catering to the lowest common denominator in the marketplace, that, for Rand is nothing to be proud of. And in fact, if you read The Fountainhead, which I think is her best novel by far, much better than Atlas Shrugged. But if you read The Fountainhead, right, it's a story about these architects and the hero of the story, Howard Roark, is this guy who has a vision of what architecture should be. And he sticks to that vision even when it means that he passes up on a lot of very lucrative deals.
[00:22:30] Meanwhile, his colleague, Peter Keating, is just this weasel, right, who has no vision, who has no integrity, but who wants to do whatever he can to advance his career. And that person, Rand thinks, that’s the anti-hero. That's exactly who you should not try to emulate.
[00:22:56] So it’s not at all about just making money. It's about, in a sense, I think, being true to yourself. Having an idea and carrying through with that idea, even if it's, even if it's not popular, even if it's not the way to financial success.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:08] Do you think that these Silicon Valley billionaires understand Rand.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:23:11] I doubt they understand her in any kind of deep level, right? Like there's a lot of Silicon Valley folks who've talked about Rand, who've mentioned her as an influence, right? Like, so Steve Jobs is supposed to have regarded Rand as one of the guides of his life and Peter Thiel and the you know, Travis, what's his name—
Charlie Jane: [00:23:34] Kalanick.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:23:35] Yeah, from Uber. I'm sure they probably read a book by Rand and liked it and maybe felt a little inspired by it. But I doubt they've kind of delved deeply into the philosophical conundrums that Rand raises. Like, algorithms. What does Rand have to say about algorithms? Or what does consistent Randian about the use of algorithms.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:01] She hated Cecil B. DeMille. She worked with him and then she decided that he was pandering to the masses. And so I sort of wonder what she would've made of social media.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:24:08] Yeah, I mean… and how much of that is Rand's personality her own idiosyncratic personality, and how much of it is her philosophy, right?
[00:24:21] And how much should [Unclear] who think that Rand was onto something, try to take on from her? And how much should we discard? I don't think there's any really easy answers to those questions. I think, again, what, what a lot of these Silicon Valley people are responding to, in Rand's work, is this individualism, this glorification of entrepreneurship, of forging your own path in the world, of creating something new. That, I think, is inspiring and distinctively Randian. You don't see a lot of that elsewhere in philosophy. Even still today, we don't see a lot of that. It's, you know, political philosophers, I'm trained as a political philosopher, we talk a lot about political systems and economic systems, and how well they do at distributing wealth, right? Is it fair that capitalism creates this inequality, or some people have more wealth than others? Should we have a more socialist system where wealth is more equally distributed? And there's all these debates about distributive justice? How should we take this pie of wealth that's out there and slice it up so that everybody gets their fair share. And Rand, I think, directs our attention to what is a really important and neglected question, which is where does that pie come from in the first place?
Charlie Jane: [00:25:39] Right?
Matt Zwolinski: [00:25:40] How does that pie get created, and what do we owe to the people who baked that pie, in a sense. Right? Where is that in our moral and political philosophy?
Charlie Jane: [00:25:53] Yeah. I mean—
Matt Zwolinski: [00:25:54] That, by itself, is such an important point that she deserves a place in the canon just for that, if nothing else.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:02] Yeah. Well, and of course a lot of workers, a lot of unappreciated workers, did a lot to build, bake that pie. It's never just one guy just sitting in an office who's like, I came up with an idea for a pie, and now it exists.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:26:15] Yeah, of course. Of course, that's right. But there's something… there are people who offer something special and distinctive, right? That are maybe not completely irreplaceable, but that have a skill or a talent or an idea. That, without them, we might have had to wait another 10, 20, 30 years before that kind of thing came along. And society owes a lot to those people for a lot of the comforts that we take for granted sometimes, right?
[00:26:46] That's not to say that the people who are doing simpler jobs don't deserve credit in their own right, too. But Rand was not egalitarian in the sense of holding that everybody's contribution is the same or of equal value. Rand thought that some people bring more to the table than others and that rubs certain modern sensibilities the wrong way. We don't like to feel like anybody's better than anybody else. But I don't know. I think she probably had a point there.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:26] Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Just in my own personal experience, whenever we're told there's a lone genius who came up with something on their own, it always turns out that they got that idea from a bunch of people or that, you know, They happened to be at the right place at the right time, or that there were, there was, there was more than one person involved in that. And often one person takes the credit and everybody else gets, you know, kicked to the curb.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:27:50] For sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:50] It happens a lot in Silicon Valley, in fact.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:27:52] There's just a tremendous amount of luck in success. But I think, and I think most people kind of underestimate the role of luck in their own success. But I think if you look at people who are at the top of their game, whatever that game is, whether it's they're an Olympic swimmer or they're CEO of a tremendously successful company, right? What you find is that they've got everything. So, they've got hard work, they've got natural talent, and they've got luck.
[00:28:26] Like everything sort of came together and that's why they're in the top 0.001% of whatever endeavor it is that they're involved with. So there's luck there, to be sure, but there's also a lot of skill, a lot of determination, a lot of hard work. And those things should be honored and cultivate the extent that we can.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:47] Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. Could you tell me where people can find you on the internet?
Matt Zwolinski: [00:28:52] Yeah, sure. So, I'm on Twitter, mostly, in terms of social media, so you can find me at Matt Zwolinski and you can find my webpage, too, there, with links to my books. I've got another book coming out next month on the idea of a universal basic income guarantee, which maybe sits a little bit uneasily with my other book on libertarianism. But I think there's some interesting overlap there for people.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:18] I mean, you actually say in your book that some people, some early libertarians really endorsed universal basic income. I feel like it's mentioned in there. But anyway, so yeah. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Take care.
Matt Zwolinski: [00:29:28] Absolutely. It was a pleasure.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:32] Okay, so we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna be joined by Matt Ruff, author of Lovecraft Country, but also of Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which features Ayn Rand. And we're gonna talk about Ayn Rand in science fiction.
[00:29:43] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:48] So now we're incredibly lucky to be joined by Matt Ruff, author of some of my favorite books, including The Mirage and Lovecraft Country. Matt's most recent book is The Destroyer of Worlds, a sequel to Lovecraft Country. Welcome Matt. Thanks for joining us.
Matt Ruff: [00:30:03] Well, thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:07] Yeah. So your novel Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which I read when it first came out, features Ayn Rand as a pretty major character in a gonzo absurdist world where Black people have been replaced by androids. What was it about Ayn Rand that seemed like it fit in with this nightmarish dystopia?
Matt Ruff: [00:30:23] Basically, I read Atlas Shrugged in college and I was fascinated by it and wanted to satirize it. I didn't love it, but I… I mean, I kind of loved it in a nutty way. I like I appreciated what Rand was doing and I thought in terms of what she was trying to do, it's actually quite a brilliant book, but at the same time there's just stuff about it that's just really, really goofy.
[00:30:50] Like I thought her critique of communism was pretty spot on, but when it comes to capitalism, she's just so very credulous and part of the problem is her heroes, they don't act like real people. They act like embodiments of reasoned principle like her philosophy of objectivism. It's basically rational self-interest raised to a moral absolute, and reason is the religion of these people. So, they act more like Vulcans than human beings. And in fact, there's a rumor that Gene Roddenberry, who was a fan, based the character of Mr. Spock on John Galt.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:23] Oh, that's interesting.
Matt Ruff: [00:31:26] So the characters act like Vulcans. They are incorruptible, they're very smart, but they're also self-aware, so they are exactly as talented and competent as they think they are. They don't overestimate their abilities. They don't lie. They don't cheat to get advantage, and they have an unnatural degree of agreement with one another since everything is rational and can be understood through reason.
[00:31:48] One of the things, they all agree which of them is the smartest and most talented. John Galt is the top of the heap and there's no debate about that. And so, it's like, imagine if you got Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos all in a room together and you asked them, “Hey guys, which of the five of you is the smartest?” And they all without hesitation said, oh, it's Bill. Bill is the smartest.
[00:32:12] It's brilliant. It’s nutty. It's goofy. And I thought it was ripe for satire and I was kind of surprised that no one had ever done that. But part of the problem was I think that a lot of people, if you don't like Ayn Rand, it just makes them so crazy that they lose their sense of humor.
[00:32:28] So, I wanted to write a satire, but at the same time I was really also fascinated with the story behind the story. It's like, who is this person and what moved her to write this book? And it was a good time to be asking this question because she had died not long before, and members of her inner circle were starting to publish, tell all memoirs. So I was able to get my answer.
[00:32:45] Her family were members of the bourgeoisie. They were a Jewish family. Her father owned a drug store in the building they lived in, so they were pretty well off, but then they lost everything in the Russian Revolution and they actually fled Russia for a while, while the Civil War was going on. They went to Ukraine and stayed in the Crimea hoping to avoid the fighting, which didn't work out.
[00:33:10] And there's this particularly horrible story. While they were there, Rand was attending high school in Crimea and the Red Army took the city and they declared what they called a day of poverty, which was the soldiers would go around everybody's house and if they thought you had too many possessions, they would take the excess to be distributed to people who didn't have enough.
[00:33:29] So basically, drunk soldiers with guns looting door to door, and one of Rand's classmates, this girl, the soldiers broke into her house, stole all of her clothing, and shot her father to death in the street. And God knows what they did to this girl herself. So, a couple days go by and the distribution of the loot starts happening. And so they send one of this girl’s stolen dresses to the school. It ends up in their classroom with instruction that it's to be given to a needy girl. And you can just imagine how horrifying this is. Poor girl, her dad's dead. One of her stolen dresses shows up, the other kids know what's going on, and none of them want it, except the one asshole pro-communist student who puts up her hand is like, well, I'm in need. I’ll take that.
[00:34:14] So, this was sort of Rand's introduction to communism and this was her life for many years. And of course, the Red Army won. Eventually the family goes back to Russia and Rand just gets ready to spend the rest of her life living under this horrible regime. And then they get a letter from a branch of the family. They had some cousins who had made it out to America and were living in Chicago and they write to them and say, “Hey, haven't heard from you since the Civil War started. Hope you're okay.” And Rand just turned to her mother and said, mom, you've gotta get me outta here. You write back and tell them I wanna come visit. So that's what they did. They, over many months, they arranged for Rand to leave the country and go visit the relatives in Chicago, obviously with the idea that she would never come back. And so, she made it out and she was the only member of her immediate family who did. She never saw her parents again. They later starved to death during the siege of Leningrad in World War II. But Rand escapes, she comes to America, determined to become a famous novelist.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:18] In Sewer, Gas, and Electric, Ayn Rand is brought back as a kind of hologram inside of a lantern that the main character carries around and is sort of a Jiminy Cricket figure. I remember Ayn Rand in that novel as being very kind of hectoring and like this very strident little person inside a lantern yelling about selfishness. While the main character is trying to navigate this really confusing situation. How do you feel like that's satirizing Ayn Rand? And how do you feel like that brings the absurdity of her worldview to the surface?
Matt Ruff: [00:35:47] I find her a fascinating character, and I'm actually quite sympathetic to her and what she was trying to do. I still think the characterizations in the book are jokey and easy to make fun of, but right away I decided, okay, I wanna satirize this, but I wanna play fair and I wanna find a way to bring Rand herself into my novel so that she can speak for herself. So that she can sort of say her piece. But also force her to engage with people who see things differently, which is something she didn't often do in real life. Like, she'd argue with anyone, but she didn't like formal debate because she assumed. I'm right. And anyone who's smart enough should see that. So why should I debate these human rights issues in public? It doesn't make sense. So read my novels and you'll understand that I'm right unless there's something wrong with you.
[00:36:29] So that was what I was trying to do. I was trying to play fair with her, and I wanted to get her side of the story. I didn't just want to dunk on her for her beliefs, but at the same time, you know, yeah I don't have a problem making fun of people I disagree with, even if I like them personally. So that was the motivation behind all of that.
Annalee: [00:36:47] Yeah. I wanted to follow up and ask you about Ayn Rand's influence because she is one of the best-selling sci-fi writers ever, and I'm wondering if you think her influence on science fiction or speculative literary fiction can be compared to like, Asimov or Heinlein or some of these sort of great white men of the 20th century.
Matt Ruff: [00:37:11] It’s funny, I don't actually… I mean, I think you can classify some of her works as science fiction, like Atlas Shrugged kind of fits because of the dystopian intro. Obviously there's a lot of science fiction aspects to it. And Anthem…
Charlie Jane: [00:37:22] Anthem is very clearly science fiction.
Matt Ruff: [00:37:25] Yeah. It's like 1984 if the thought police were totally incompetent. Yeah. It's… But I think Rand really saw herself as a romantic, and I think she would describe Atlas Shrugged as more of a philosophical romance. The core of it is really this conflict between heroic individualism and evil collectivism. And I think that's really the core of all of her novels.
[00:37:46] But at the same time, she wasn't afraid of getting genre cooties. So she would happily use genre tropes, you know, science fiction tropes, but also action adventure tropes. I mean, Dagny Taggart literally wears a cape, like a superhero. And you know, there's a pirate in the story. And so, she's not afraid to do that. But I think at her core, she doesn't see herself as being restricted to any one genre. She's just writing these philosophical romances about… so I don't know.
[00:38:17] I think for that reason, probably she's not seen as part of the genre by a lot of people. And so, within the genre, I think she would have, she might have impact on the more libertarian writers. But I think outside the genre, in a societal level, I think she had a much wider effect than even Heinlein, just because she had effect on a lot of politicians and a lot of real captains of industry found her work very flattering. So, within the genre, I'm not so sure. I don't think so. And I think particularly, you know, during the ‘60s and ‘70s where things were much more liberal within science fiction, I think a lot of people just reviled her for politics and didn't really think about that, weren't really interested in getting to understand her. So, yeah. I don't know that she's had that much impact within the genre itself.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:03] So, do you see Ayn Rand as fundamentally a tragic figure? Like, she had this early trauma with the Russian Revolution that she was never really able to get past, and her works are full of all this stuff about how sexual jealousy is bad, but at least according to the biography of her that I read, her inner circle fell apart because she was so jealous of her lover's new girlfriend, Nathaniel Branden. Do you see her as a tragic figure, or do you see her as just someone who has a very different way of thinking than you?
Matt Ruff: [00:39:31] I mean, in some ways, yeah. I certainly… she lacked the self-awareness, I think, that her characters had, or that she projected into her characters. And I think she would've been a lot happier if she just understood that it's not all perfectly rational and she just couldn't understand raw emotions, even her own. She was very repressed, I think, about some of what her real motivations were. There always had to be a logical explanation for it, like she didn't believe in an obligation of charity, but she could be generous to people. But she would justify it by saying, well, I'm just, you know, I'm doing it because you know, I'm doing this for myself because it makes me happy to see this person doing better, or it makes me happy to donate to this person. It can't be that somebody needs something from me, and I have a certain obligation as a fellow human being to try to help them. Because she couldn't understand that you could have that feeling and not carry it to the crazy extreme where you have to give up everything, or you have to hurt yourself to help others.
[00:40:31] And I think she would've been a happier person if she had been able to. But you can understand coming from her background why she just didn't even want to go there. So, I think in that sense, yes, she is a tragic figure. But the tragedy is balanced by the fact that she also succeeded quite a bit. She had great success. She had a very good life in some ways.
Annalee: [00:40:53] And I feel like her work is coming back into vogue much more now, like in the last like five years or so than it was before. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that, like why she's so perfect for this moment in the tech industry. As opposed to, say in the ‘70s or ‘80s. What’s going on now that's making Ayn Rand seem so vital?
Matt Ruff: [00:41:16] I wonder about that too. It's funny, my wife and I were talking about this yesterday because one of the things, as you get older, you realize people who were household names when you were young completely drop off the cultural radar. And I was kind of wondering, is this gonna happen to Rand eventually? But she's still selling, like, God, more copies of her books a year than I've probably sold during my entire career. So, but I think that, yeah, she's always going to be popular among… Especially if you're young and you think you understand the world better than the people who've been living in it twice as long as you and you don't understand why we have these high bound traditions and regulations, Rand will flatter that point of view and tell you, yeah, go out and disrupt and smash the system. You know what you're doing.
[00:42:02] So, that's always going to be very appealing and it's probably just cyclical that you go through moments where that reckless attitude really screws up the economy and everything crashes. And then a couple years go by and cultural memory sets in and a new generation comes up and it's like, oh well, but we really understand how to disrupt the world. So, it's probably just times come round for that again, and it’s like, oh yeah, you know, crypto's gonna be great. We don't need banking regulations. That's silly. Why would we want that? And yeah, so, I think that's just it.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:40] Oh my gosh, yeah.
Matt Ruff: [00:42:41] She's the perfect justifier for that kind of attitude.
Annalee: [00:42:45] Do you have a theory about who John Galt is in the current Silicon Valley pantheon? Who, who would be your pick?
Matt Ruff: [00:42:52] There isn't one. Everybody thinks they're John Galt. That's the whole appeal of the character. He's the smartest of all, he's the top of the heap. So, anybody, any of those guys in that room trying to decide who the smartest guy is, they're gonna think it’s them.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:07] Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Matt. This was so awesome. Could you just tell folks where to find you on the internet?
Matt Ruff: [00:43:13] Yes, the website is www.ByMattRuff.com. It's B-Y-M-A-T-T-R-U-F-F.com. And yeah, you can read all about my books. The latest one is The Destroyer of Worlds, a return to Lovecraft Country. And yeah, and Sewer, Gas, Electric, is there, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:31] Awesome. Thank you so much.
Annalee: [00:43:32] Yeah, thanks so much for joining us.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:34] Yay. Have a great rest of your day.
Matt Ruff: [00:43:36] Thanks for having me on, guys.
[00:43:37] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:43:40] Wow, that was so interesting to hear Matt Ruff's relationship with Ayn Rand. He's really developed a kind of empathy for her that I would not have expected.
[00:43:51] So, are there other authors whose work about Ayn Rand really jumps out at you as being similar to Matt Ruff in the way that it's engaging with her ideas?
Charlie Jane: [00:44:02] Yeah, I mean, so there have been other creators who did riffs on or responses to Ayn Rand. Famously, Rush had an album called 2112, where the first side of the album is basically a 20 minute kind of science fiction suite. That kinda deals with like a version of Ayn Rand’s Anthem where it's sort of like about escaping from an oppressive dystopia.
Annalee: [00:44:26] And I'll say like, as a kid who grew up in the suburbs listening to Rush that's something that shows up in a lot of their work. It's not just in 2112, like they have a lot of science fictional songs that are about the glory of the individual and how terrible and conformist life is in the suburbs, and how great it is to have…
[00:44:47] There's like one song they have that's called “Red Barchetta.” That's all about how cars have been made illegal by like evil, eco-minded people and how great it is that the character has a car that he's hidden away and drives around. And I'm like, wait, what? Like, I thought we liked ecology. I'm so confused.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:07] Yeah. And I know we talked about that song in the automobile episode a while back.
Annalee: [00:45:10] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:11] But for my money, like apart from Sewer, Gas, and Electric, the most compelling kind of response to Ayn Rand in science fiction is the story “Emergency Skin” by N. K. Jemisin, which came out in 2019 as part of a series on Amazon, and you could listen to it on Audible. I actually really like the Audible version. The voice cast is really good.
Annalee: [00:45:34] Yeah, it's really terrific.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:36] And basically “Emergency Skin” kind of turns Atlas Shrugged on its head. In “Emergency Skin,” he kind of genius super rich innovators that kind of, the people who flee to Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged, have left Earth and gone, I think a thousand light years away to a new planet that's tidally locked. And they're basically, they've created their ideal society on this other planet, but they need to send someone back to Earth to collect HeLa cells, which are basically cells from Henrietta Lacks. So it's kind of about this person returning to Earth, expecting earth to be just a desolate wasteland because when the founders of this new ideal world left, Earth was sort of falling apart and everything was like a dystopia, but this person surprise, surprise, returns to Earth and finds that actually the environment has been repaired. Humanity is thriving, everybody's happy. And it's because as soon as this billionaire class left, and as soon as these kind of hyper capitalist people left, everybody else got their shit together and realized that they actually needed to cooperate and take care of each other, that was the only way humanity was going to survive.
Annalee: [00:46:48] Yeah, and there’s all these really great details in the story, which are almost verbatim taken from Ayn Rand ideas where, we're hearing the story, especially if you listen to it as an audiobook, you're hearing it from the point of view of an AI that represents the great founders of this Galt’s Gulch type place.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:12] Yes.
Annalee: [00:47:12] And so this voice, which is a male British accent voice—
Charlie Jane: [00:47:16] I know.
Annalee: [00:47:16] Is explaining to our main character what the meaning is of Earth and why it's so important to not be kind of dirtied by the people of Earth. And so what we learn is that the Galt’s Gulch people have eliminated women from their society. They only have white men who they manufacture using this small amount of cellular material that they have. And they are living by this like ruthless capitalist ideal where only a tiny group of people are allowed to have skin, and of course it has to be white skin, but everybody else lives inside these bags and they can't…
Charlie Jane: [00:47:57] It’s fucking weird.
Annalee: [00:47:57] Have a body unless they're kind of given a higher status. So the main character has gone to earth to get these cells in order to get a skin because he wants to be, you know, part of the elite. But when he gets to Earth and he sees all these like happy people who are like all different colors and different ages, and some of them are old, some are disabled, they're all different from each other. He's like, wow. These people are really beautiful. Like, wait, why is it that we only wanna have white men and like female robots whose job is just to provide pleasure? And there's all these really funny bits where basically this AI is explaining like, we do not need women. We simply need robots that will keep our penises in working order, so.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:46] I know, there's a lot of really weird stuff about penises in that story. It's kind of delightful.
Annalee: [00:48:50] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:50] And like part of what I love about that story is how sly N. K. Jemisin is in terms of introducing all of these creepy little details about like, we never get to really see the kind of ideal society on the tidally locked planet, but we hear a lot about it and it just, it sounds… it’s heavily stratified. Most people are living in really horrible circumstances and there's just like this tiny elite who are, through their merit because they're the genius founders. They get to kind of have all this. They get to actually experience life in a proper way, and it's a commentary on our society now, but it's also a really, really strong rejoinder to Ayn Rand because it just shows that, yeah, if we start taking care of each other, if we actually abandoned selfishness and think of ourselves as interdependent, we could all thrive.
[00:49:43] Like they say at one point, turned out there actually was enough food, there was enough resources for everybody if we just stopped hoarding and once the hoarders left… What I love about it is that the main character who arrives on earth, everybody's just super nice to him. Like he's expecting to be captured. He's expecting to be attacked. He tries to take a hostage. They're all like, oh, you're really scared. Oh no. It's okay. We won't hurt you. Oh, you came here to get these cells. Here you go. Here they are. You know you can leave now or you can stay. We don't care.
Annalee: [00:50:13] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:50:13] Like they're just like, they're not threatened by him. They don't respond as if he's in any way a problem. He's just, oh, it's one of these guys.
Annalee: [00:50:22] Yeah, it's one of those bag people again.
[00:50:24] Also, there's this sort of sly reference to the HeLa cells, which are actual cell culture in our real world. That are cancer cells that have been used for experiments for decades now, and as the book, the very popular book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks points out is that these, these were cells that were taken without permission from a Black woman who was dying of cancer.
[00:50:50] So, this entire separatist white male civilization only exists because they're using the cells from a Black woman, which is pretty on the nose, but also it's a great… She never says that overtly, she just mentions the HeLa cells and it's like, if, you know, you know.
Charlie Jane: [00:51:10] Yeah, I liked how that was just this, like, I missed it at first until you pointed that out to me.
[00:51:16] It's funny because “Emergency Skin” is a very kind of bold allegory. It feels very much like an inverse of Atlas Shrugged. There's not a lot of ambiguity in it, but I think that's part of what I love about it is that it's just, it's a very kind of turning Atlas Shrugged on its head in a very elegant way.
Annalee: [00:51:38] Yeah, it’s a kind of fairy tale. And it's an imagining of a utopian world, you know, instead of imagining a dystopia, it's like, actually no. The Galt’s Gulch people, they're the dystopia. They're not fleeing from a dystopia. They're actually fleeing from a better world and they've gone and set up their own weird thing.
[00:51:59] And what I also love is that in this sort of utopian future, they say, hey man, go for it. You guys wanna go have your weird separatist white male culture. Go ahead. We don't mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:12] You do you.
Annalee: [00:52:13] Yeah. You do you. And they actually, I think, say that. One of them is just like, hey man, you do you. Have fun, enjoy the cells. See you later.
Charlie Jane: [00:52:21] Yeah, definitely everybody should hunt down “Emergency Skin” by N. K. Jemisin if you want like an antidote to Ayn Rand.
[00:52:29] So, thanks so much for joining us. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just randomly stumbled on us, please do subscribe. You can subscribe to us anywhere that you get your podcasts.
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Annalee: [00:53:02] Yeah, there’s… I don't think there's any other social platforms out there. I haven't heard of any.
Charlie Jane: [00:53:07] No, that's, that's all there is. Yeah.
[00:53:09] Thanks so much to our incredible, just brilliant, audio producer, Veronica Simonetti. Thanks so much to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the wonderful new music that we've got. And thanks again to you for listening. And we'll be back in two weeks with another episode. But if you're a patron, we'll be seeing you in Discord.
Together: [00:53:28] Bye.
[00:53:28] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]