A hero’s work is never done. I’ve been recapping Atlas Shrugged, including the movies, for over two years, and the end was finally drawing into sight. But now I’ve found out that yet another adaptation is being planned, this time a TV series. The new producer, Albert S. Ruddy, plans on taking some liberties with the source material:
The main thing, Mr. Ruddy said, is to honor Ms. Rand’s insistence on making a film for the future. That means redrawing its capitalists and creators, who go on strike against creeping collectivism, as figures more familiar than the railroad heiress and industrial titans who figured in a book that was first published in 1957.
“When you look at guys like Jeff Bezos, he’s not only doing Amazon, he wants to colonize Mars,” Mr. Ruddy said. He spoke by telephone last week of his plan for a mini-series in which an Internet blackout led by Bezos-like figures might shut down cellphones, banks and almost everything else.
I have to tip my hat to Mr. Ruddy for realizing how dated and anachronistic Atlas Shrugged is. In the modern era, it makes no sense to have railroads or steel mills be the critical industries upon which society hinges. And the concept of having John Galt and the rest be Internet start-up founders and private space colonizers, rather than archaic industrialists, opens up a whole world of narrative possibilities! Just imagine:
INT. BOARDROOM – DAY
The lavishly decorated boardroom of TAGGART TRANSCONTINENTAL, the high-tech telecommunications firm that provides Internet routing across the entire U.S.
EDDIE WILLERS: Jim, Taggart Transcontinental’s tubes are clogged beyond capacity. We’ve had three fatal server crashes in just the past week.
JIM TAGGART: I’m pouring all our company’s resources into laying new fiber-optic cable to Mexico, so that your wastrel playboy friend Francisco d’Anconia can launch his new startup SanSebastian.com, which will connect poor Mexican children with wealthy families who need to hire gardeners and housekeepers. It’s our duty to help the underprivileged people who never had a chance.
DAGNY TAGGART: I don’t care what you say, Jim. Ellis Wyatt and his firm of high-frequency stock traders need the bandwidth more. That’s why I’m building the John Galt Line to shave 0.2 milliseconds off their round-trip signal time to New York. And what’s more, I’m going to use Rearden MetalTM, the revolutionary new computer chips from Hank Rearden’s company that are half the size, three times faster and ten times cheaper.
JIM TAGGART: Gasp! But Rearden MetalTM is new and untested! How can you know his technology is any good?
DAGNY TAGGART: I looked at his circuit diagram. Sure, it may have had four billion logic gates and I only glanced at it for a few seconds, but I took computer engineering in college. When I see things, I see them.
JIM TAGGART: Curse your fearless willingness to make risky decisions that implausibly always work out!
INT. ABANDONED FACTORY
The ruins of a long-abandoned DARPA facility. DAGNY TAGGART and HANK REARDEN wander among the drifts of yellowing paper and rusting machinery.
DAGNY: Hank, look at this!
HANK: Why, these are blueprints for a router with infinite bandwidth and zero transmission delay!
DAGNY: Just think of the possibilities! Every Web site could be festooned with auto-play video ads and unblockable tracking cookies. Financial transactions could become an ever-greater share of the economy. We could create erratic, no-benefits sharing-economy jobs to disrupt every existing industry that pays a living wage! Personal privacy would become a thing of the past! But these plans are incomplete. Whatever it takes, we must find the man who created them!
HANK: By the way, Dagny, wasn’t the Internet originally developed by government-funded academics who never dreamed of commercial applications?
DAGNY: Shut up.
EXT. MARS
The arid red desert of the Martian surface, broken by the spires and pressure domes of GALT’S GULCH. DAGNY crawls out of the smoldering wreckage of her rocket ship.
JOHN GALT: I am John Galt. I am the man who feels no pain, fear or guilt.
DAGNY: So it was you I’ve been chasing all along!
JOHN GALT: Correct. I was the one who invented the Internet, in that abandoned DARPA lab you found. I created it to increase the wealth of the most productive and valuable people: hedge fund managers, Silicon Valley tech-bros, libertarians who argue endlessly on bulletin boards. But when I realized that my invention could occasionally benefit the poor and the disempowered, I went on strike. I came here, to Mars, where I built a self-sufficient utopian community of the greatest and most brilliant businessmen from the outside world.
DAGNY: Amazing! How did you create enough food, water, and air for everyone?
JOHN GALT: Through the power of our minds. With so many venture capitalists, app developers, intellectual-property lawyers, movie stars and social-media influencers, it was easy to tame the unforgiving Martian desert and build a society unconstrained by primitive notions of scarcity.
DAGNY: Despite my being a wealthy and successful businesswoman in my own right, your mere presence reduces me to a state of childlike passivity. Tell me more!
JOHN GALT: I’ve withdrawn the men that you were counting on. All the greats are here: the founders of Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Uber, Tinder, Amazon, Snapchat, Airbnb, Zynga, and Peeple. They, like me, were no longer willing to work for a society that doesn’t reward their efforts.
DAGNY: I don’t mean to quibble, but weren’t most of those men already billionaires?
JOHN GALT: Yes, but the ordinary folk didn’t kiss their feet in abject gratitude often enough. And without our productive genius, looter society will soon collapse. The accumulated filth of all their regulations and taxes will foam up about their waists and they’ll look up and shout “Save us!”, and I’ll whisper, “No.” And when the world has regressed to feudal squalor and anarchy, we’ll return and rule as kings, as is our birthright.
DAGNY: I find your callous unconcern for the death of millions unbearably sexy. Take me now!
JOHN GALT: Sorry. We all turned gay long ago. It was kind of a necessary adaptation to a society that’s 99% male.
DAGNY: What the f—
[CREDITS]
Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
