Young enthusiasts were joining older libertarian warhorses to create new organizations, publications, and institutions. Their plans differ from Galt’s intention to return to save the world the contemporary billionaires are only hoping to escape and survive the ruin-in high-tech style.Īyn Rand bitterly rejected libertarians as right-wing “hippies” in the 1970s, but her views and those of her Objectivist followers melded substantially with the emerging libertarian movement. By the 2018 meeting with Rushkoff, however, the billionaires could no longer be called optimistic. Rand’s influence floats over all of them as a guiding spirit for the sense of energized aspiration and the advocacy of inequality and cruelty that shaped their worldviews. The rise of neoliberalism has a parallel history, and much overlap with libertarianism-but these formations nonetheless have distinct trajectories. Her anti-statist, pro–“free market” stances went on to shape the politics of what came to be called libertarianism, or sometimes anarcho-capitalism, during a period of rapid expansion in the 1970s. Rand’s philosophy had its roots in nineteenth-century classical liberalism and in her impassioned rejection of socialism and the welfare state in the twentieth century. By 2018 Ayn Rand and her novels had become widespread cultural reference points among wealthy bankers, CEOs, tech moguls, and right-wing politicians. These unnamed hedge fund honchos may have read Atlas Shrugged, but even those who hadn’t would likely have been familiar with John Galt and the producers’ utopia he created far from the collapsing world. insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. . .Īsking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. They were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the future a better place than it did with. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers-if that technology could be developed in time. . . Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. Robot hack that takes everything down. . . was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Writing in Medium, Rushkoff described their questions about future apocalypse: But they were actually most interested in enlisting his help in filling in the details for their vision of the dystopian future-or rather, for their own high-tech vision of a Galt’s Gulch–style escape from it. In 2018, tech writer Douglas Rushkoff met with a handful of hedge fund billionaires to talk about the future of technology. Yet he praises The Fountainhead: “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. Trump is in most ways a Rand villain-a businessman who relies on cronyism and manipulation of government.
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