Well, explain why Wyatt blew up his oil refinery, despite the obvious danger to the public, and why what's his name set out to wreck his copper mines. What impressed me was the protagonists' compulsion to destroy that which they could not control, what they could not turn into a source of power over other people. Actions speak louder than words. The high-minded speeches of Josef Stalin are much less important than the Great Terror. I tend to think of Rand as a kind of reverse image of Stalin, like a photographic negative, or a plaster cast. That, of course, was what the conservative writer Whitaker Chambers was picking up on, when he coined his famous description. Of course, Rand never had very much power, and was never able to do real damage.

I don't know if you've ever read William Morris, especially _News From Nowhere_. Discuss.

I'll probably shock you again, when I say that I believe Ayn Rand was a closet technophobe. Yes, she rhapsodized about technological _artifacts_, but she is profoundly hostile to the underlying philosophy of technology.

Technological secrets leak. Most fundamentally, they leak by the evidence of their use. If you start selling something, someone will obtain small quantities by black-market methods, and take it apart to find out how it works. The method by which it works will not be a bolt out of the blue, but an under-appreciated possibility: "so _that's_ how he's doing it." Beyond reverse engineering, there is industrial espionage. In wartime, captured war materiel is sent to laboratories which analyze it, not from the point of view of blind ignorance, but again, from that of under-appreciated possibility.

Let's take one example, the metallic property of stainlessness. A metallurgist thinks of stainlessness by treating an alloy as a kind of battery which puts a positive charge on some of its metallic constituents, and a negative charge on others. The respective metals have oxides which may be durable (aluminum, chromium), or non-durable (iron, copper, silver), with this understanding, a quick program of testing can systematically identify the possible stainless alloys of various different metals.

The book of nature is ultimately open to all, and given an approximate idea how something works, one can construct experiments to work out the details. Unless one thinks that one can economically exploit something within a short period of time, it is generally considered prudent to get a patent if feasible, even though that requires publishing a written description. Ayn Rand seems to think of technology as something which is inherent in the inventor's personality, a measure of his selfishness, which cannot be copied without the inventor's will. (*) One way or another, the other steel companies would have discovered what Rearden Metal was, and how to make it. Without a patent, they would have started producing Rearden Metal, and the dispute would have been whether Rearden was entitled to a patent or not, and if so, how extensive and enforceable a patent. Obviously, if you thumb your nose at society, you cannot expect much in the way of grants of legal privileges.

(*) This explains the passage in which Dagny goes searching all over the country for the mysterious inventor of the mysterious engine she had discovered in an abandoned factory.

Well, I made another effort to read _Atlas Shrugged_, and this time, managed to get seven hundred pages in, before grinding to a halt. That is enough. I still think it's a silly book. By "incredibly stupid error," incidentally, I don't mean just an error of fact, but an error expressive of hubris, the mistaken belief that one is a god. I have discovered various factual errors and technical errors, which I do not mean to enumerate at this time. Aeon Skoble would merely dismiss them as allegories, a sort of catch-all excuse. Rand's core philosophical error, however, lies in believing that work is so intrinsically degrading and worthless that a rational being cannot be rewarded by the intrinsic satisfactions of the work itself, but must commit suicide out of fear that someone might be benefiting from his labor without paying for it. In these terms, the alternative to suicide is to display pointless, all-consuming, symbolic greed. This naturally expresses itself ultimately in Rand's worship of the sex-killer William Hickman, a perfect predator.

http://www.michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm