Unlike the strange alliance objectivist thinking forged with young people who look and behave like old people, these hippie admixtures are not strategic. They have to do with how Ayn Rand arrived in Silicon Valley, namely via the sixties counterculture. While Rand had nothing but disdain for the young radicals of the counterculture (“savages” seems to have been her favorite put-down for them), some parts of the counterculture embraced Rand’s books. This is probably because they encountered Rand as a novelist. Rand the political thinker was either largely unavailable or largely uninteresting to them. When the generation that coined the slogan “Trust no one over thirty” read Atlas Shrugged, the objectivist writer Jeff Riggenbach points out, “they found nothing in it to dissuade them from this prejudice.”
The communication scholar Jonathan Taplin has suggested that tech started out as a project of sweet countercultural hippies, only to later be hijacked by a “libertarian counterinsurgency.” The counterculture as we like to remember it (and as its contemporaries perhaps liked to imagine it) was certainly opposed to a me-first faith in markets and corporations. But the counterculture also always had its other side. In The Conquest of Cool (1997), the journalist Thomas Frank has outlined the many ways in which we go wrong when we assume that the counterculture had a period of authenticity and was subsequently co-opted by the suits, the culture industry, and corporate America. In truth, much of the counterculture was dependent on big business. Sure, it could warn against people who bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, but it did so on an LP released by Columbia Records and later in a film that cost Embassy Pictures the equivalent of twenty million present-day dollars.
A lot of the counterculture also led to the formation of big business. Especially in California, distrust of the government and disgust with COINTELPRO and the war in Vietnam frequently translated into a conviction that perhaps business was the more natural, spontaneous form of human self-organization, and was actually less prone to abuse and tyranny than government. And while the hippies fully understood they couldn’t run the government in faraway Washington, the world of business seemed more decentralized and more porous. The signifiers of the counterculture, and often its protagonists themselves, took over entire industries, generating massive profits in the process.
And a lot of communes either functioned as, or transitioned into, highly profitable businesses. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a quirky countercultural compendium marketing DIY solutions, which Steve Jobs once credited as a forerunner to Google, was modeled on the L.L.Bean catalog. The vision was self-renewal and self-reliance through the magic of the right tool. Doesn’t all of this sound fairly simpatico with what Rand was selling? So, however much Rand hated the counterculture, Riggenbach is probably right that at least certain parts of it were anything but allergic to her ideas. This was particularly true when Rand’s novels treated capitalist enterprise as a form of free self-expression.
The Fountainhead, for instance, is at its heart an artist novel, even though the artistry in question expresses itself in cranes, concrete mixers, and steel girders. The artists in it paint on a canvas normally reserved for large corporations, and they seem to do so without the distortion a collective enterprise like a corporation usually introduces. Conversely, the wealthy industrialists portrayed in the novel are treated like either failed, frustrated, or fulfilled artists of commerce.
There’s Guy Francon, whose business ventures follow the whims of society and who projects no values of his own. There’s Hopton Stoddard, who is beset by guilt over his own success, which the villainous Toohey exploits to talk him into various contributions to charitable causes. Similarly, the publisher Gail Wynand is a typical Randian nihilist—he makes money even with things he knows to be trash, and completely comes apart when he realizes that he could have made his fortune following his own instincts rather than those of the masses. In other words, these businesses do not function in the way businesses tend to function in the real world—they exist as aesthetic creations and as methods of self-realization. In Rand, corporations are self-portraiture.
There are few novels that weave as effortlessly between the founding and failure of architectural companies and interpersonal melodrama as The Fountainhead, and indeed the book seems at times incapable of distinguishing one from the other. There are few novels with this many devious building commissions and Machiavellian architectural critics. Buildings are built and torn down with such swiftness that it’s easy to get the sense that architecture is a kind of bizarre stand-in for far less communal efforts. But the novel acknowledges as much in its climactic confrontation between the brilliant individualist Roark and the talentless follower Peter Keating: Keating comes to Roark with a commission he cannot himself make good on, and Roark agrees to design the building using his frequently attested-to brilliance and let Keating take the credit. But, he demands, Keating must build the building exactly as Roark designs it.
In other words, there is a weird (and acknowledged) tendency here to treat an effort like architecture, which by definition requires a group and—dare I say it—collectives, as though it were the art that an individual makes in the solitude of a studio or a favorite writing nook. This is what historians of ideas call a “genius aesthetic”: it describes our tendency to think that the meaning of a work
