As the political scientist Corey Robin points out, Rand grew up wanting to write screenplays and honed her craft as a writer in Hollywood. The film industry is one of those rare examples where legions of anonymous writers, set designers, sound mixers, and technicians, many of them well organized in unions, create an aesthetic object, and in the end that object says it’s, for example, “a Damien Chazelle film.” And while Rand’s cyclopean novels seem miles away from the efficient entertainments of the multiplex, their melodramatic turns are clearly inspired by Hollywood: her villains are ravishing mustachio-twirlers; her heroes are resplendent and incorruptible; there’s just one nefarious plot after the other, and then a full vindication of the hero.
Rand’s heroic individualism has become an inescapable part of how the tech industry presents itself. Through her genius aesthetic, the very unaesthetic practice of coding (if you don’t believe me, any time a TV show tries to make computer hacking look exciting, remind yourself what it would actually look like to watch someone do this) could be turned into a manly struggle. Through it, people with the good fortune of having invested in the right idea at the right time, or having been roommates with the right person freshman year, or having had cash to spread around at the right moment, become tech messiahs with followers hanging on to their every word.
Just about anyone actually working in tech will tell you that’s a massive distortion of reality. Work in tech is almost always teamwork; it often doesn’t look nearly as cool as the things it can make happen; and in the end, if you take away the colorful bikes and the free burritos, it is a job like any other. But the point is that, to both the outside world and their own employees, tech companies clearly want to present it as not just another job. The aestheticization of labor is perhaps the central distinguishing feature of the tech job, and it has turned tech into the leading indicator for what work is like today.
But something similar actually applies to the other end of the tech-employment spectrum. Because while the people writing the code are encouraged to think of themselves not so much as workers but as part of a family, the people being sent to drive for Uber, deliver Amazon products, or pick up food for DoorDash are told they are not employees. The gig economy itself is an aestheticization of labor practices. Sure, what you’re doing may look a whole lot like what a pizza delivery guy did twenty years ago, but what you’re really doing is (according to ads looking to reel in new DoorDash drivers) being your own boss, exploring new parts of the city, paying for your wedding.
Equality 7-2521, the narrator of Anthem, writes reflections in defiance of the conventions of his entirely collectivized society. The entire novel we’re reading is an act of heresy, and the heretical thrill we may feel at reading the novel’s unpopular warnings is perhaps supposed to be a distant echo of Equality 7-2521’s bravery. Toward the end of his narrative, Equality 7-2521 wonders about how the word “I,” and the concept of the self as something worth asserting and defending, first disappeared from thinking:
Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word. What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest and in warning. But men paid no heed to their warning. And they, these few, fought a hopeless battle, and they perished with their banners smeared by their own blood. And they chose to perish, for they knew.
There is an entire genre of dystopias in which things we take for granted have been banned: feelings, reading, being Dauntless and Erudite at the same time. They can feel a little bit silly, but the trope derives at least part of its effectiveness from the fact that it ennobles some of our most quotidian actions, turning them into grand gestures of rebellion and courage. This is particularly true of books that congratulate you for reading books—which Anthem fairly explicitly does. But Rand’s novel doesn’t stop there: by the time you’re done with Equality 7-2521’s chronicle, you will be inclined to applaud yourself for not surrendering the word “I,” for thinking that people are coming for it, and for refusing to let go of the tenth most frequently used word in the English language. For knowing that those who are coming for it will gore you and smear your banners with your blood.
The (famously grumpy) German cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno wrote in the 1940s that “in many people it is already an impertinence to say ‘I.’” Around the same time, Rand’s Anthem proposed that it was in fact already a revolution to say “I.” Both Adorno and Rand were profoundly worried about the rise of totalitarianism in the mid-twentieth century. But where Adorno thought this meant that resisting society’s tendency toward conformity and totalization was an extremely hard thing to do, Rand implicitly lowered the bar for what counts as resistance.
Rand’s kind of resistance doesn’t require you to change the
