When Ayn Rand first published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, she was keenly aware of the impact it would have on future generations. Her ideas permeated into the catalogue of experience, and in her mind, the protagonist of her epic novel, the heroine, Dagny Taggert would be a Vice-President.
Fifty-five years later, we are still reconciling this notion. The woman is delegated to the position of the VP in corporations and in politics. Dagny Taggert, despite being the VP, actually runs the company Taggert International and obsessed with building America's railroads and reinventing them. However, instead of "railroad," let's carefully replace that with the "internet." The internet is a kind of railroad that traverses through all pinpointed locations on an atlas. And instead of "Taggert International," let's call it "Google."
And instead of Dagny Taggert, let's call her Marissa Mayer.
Marissa Mayer announced that she would leave her VP position at Google to become the CEO of Yahoo on July 16, 2012. However, two weeks before the public announcement, the Yahoo stock showed unusual activity two weeks before on June 26:
Perhaps these turn of events caused Larry Page to mysteriously lose his voice. Most commentators on Wall Street were more interested in her $100 million pay package than how her role will affect Yahoo, a once iconic company that was slowly fading into obscurity. Journalists who have been taken in with Mayer's physical attractiveness were more interested in her clothes, hairstyle and the fact that she was pregnant rather than what her new role at Yahoo would entail. Surely, the ruling King of Google had been aware of this developing information. Would Google let one of their own, jump rank into a competing company? In the epic novel, Dagny, like Marissa, leaves Taggart International to become the head of her own company. But she does so for a specific purpose: to avoid government control of her former company. It is no secret that Google has been plagued by US anti-trust laws, and in the last year set aside $500 million to settle in a US investigation of its practices.
The heroine in the Rand novel, Dagny, does not want government control over her company, so she comes up with an idea to affront another company to avoid its rigid laws, and she calls this company: John Galt, which becomes in effect, an adjunct to the original company.
So the question is: now that Marissa is the CEO of Yahoo, will Yahoo be an adjunct of Google? Can both Google and Yahoo avoid government probe of their companies if they remain separated, but as one of "the original Google 20," Marissa is said to be forever part of the Google family?
This idea of placing executives within different organisations for collective cohesion is something that happens quite often in politics. How many times does the United States replace a nation's leader with one of our Ivy League educated leaders who is amenable to our foreign policy?
What is more intriguing however, is that all the ideals of Atlas Shrugged come clearly in focus today;
We are finally living in the era that Rand had written about:
Atlas Shrugged is set in an alternative dystopian United States at an unspecified time, in which the United States has a "National Legislature" instead of Congress and a "Head of State" instead of President. (source: Wikipedia)
What does it mean for our tech companies however? Do we want more or less government intervention? The online railroad that is our internet is rapidly changing. Will our brightest and most innovative creators become invisible to our society due to government regulation? Will our discoveries and artifacts of our time only be known when all those secret files are finally released to the public 100 years into the future? And what exactly goes on in the Google X-labs?
