All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

OWL HOOTS

When I see you alone

I see what's in your mind

You want me, yes, you do

You don't need to tell me

I know you love me most

No-one else take my place

You need me, yes, you do

Forever and ever

We are in love, baby love child

I take you so high groovy love child

Give me a kiss, baby love child

Do it again... #

Ayn Rand, 225-1, take two.

BEEPING

Who are you, Ayn Rand? When I say that,

I would like to know just a little bit.

You have an accent which is... Russian. Russian.

You were born in Russia? Yes.

Came here... Oh, about 30 years ago.

And whence did this philosophy of yours come?

Er...out of my own mind.

With the sole acknowledgement of a debt to Aristotle,

who is the only philosopher that ever influenced me.

Uh-huh. I devised the rest of my philosophy myself.

Ayn Rand had left Russia in the 1920s

and gone to live in California.

By chance, she met the film director Cecil B DeMille,

who gave her a job as an extra on his epic films.

All right now, give me everything you've got, you people!

Ready now? Speed, 957. Places, everybody, this is a take!

Clear the set! Camera!

Then DeMille gave her a screenplay to write called The Skyscraper.

Rand hated the characters and the plot,

but the idea was going to make her famous.

She started to write her own stories,

and in 1943 she published a novel called The Fountainhead.

Its hero is an architect called Howard Roark who refuses

to compromise in his vision of how to build a skyscraper in New York.

It was a bestseller, and was made into a film.

Ayn Rand used Roark to express her philosophy,

that she called objectivism.

Human beings, Rand said, were alone in the universe.

They must free themselves of all forms of political and religious control

and live their lives guided only by their selfish desires.

If they did this, they would become heroic figures.

I am primarily the creator of a new code of morality

which has so far been believed impossible,

namely a morality not based on arbitrary edict, mystical or social.

I hold that if man wants to live on earth,

his highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness,

and that he must not force other people

nor accept their right to force him,

that each must man must live as an end in himself,

and follow his own rational self-interest.

May I interrupt now? You may.

In the 1950s, Rand moved to New York.

She lived next to her favourite skyscraper, the Empire State Building.

Rand's ideas were seen as mad and dangerous.

Selfishness and greed had led to the financial chaos

and the Depression of the 1930s.

The job of politics was to manage and control

the selfish desires of the individual.

But Rand continued to write,

and a small group of followers began to form round her

who believed in her vision of another kind of world,

where everyone was free.

I was 19 when I met Ayn.

I was very idealistic,

and she appealed to everything that was idealistic in me.

We are heroic, we can know the world,

we can tame nature, we can achieve our goals.

We can do what we want.

What does it matter that we're alone? Who do we need?

Why do we need anyone?

We have ourselves.

And that was enough? And that was...for sure enough, yes.

Definitely enough.

Even at 19, I knew, "I'm not going to meet anyone else like this.

"This is once in a lifetime."

Rand had died in 1981, but by the start of the 1990s

her novels had become a phenomenon in America.

A Library of Congress survey showed that one of them, Atlas Shrugged,

was now the second most influential book in the country.

The first was the Bible.

And the group most inspired by her

were the new entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley,

including some of the most powerful, like Larry Ellison of Oracle.

Many of them named their companies and even their children after Rand and her novels.

They set up reading groups to spread her ideas.

But above all, they saw themselves as Randian heroes.

I really felt like an Ayn Rand hero!

I really did feel like an Ayn Rand hero.

I was one. I didn't just feel like one, I was one!

I was building the products.

I was thinking independently, I was...being rational.

I was taking pride in what I did.

Those are Ayn Rand heroes' characteristics - I was an Ayn Rand hero.

I wasn't in the book, but I was an Ayn Rand hero.

Just to give you an example, my...

my six-year-old boy, his middle name is Rand,

and I was talking to someone in...a classmate's dad,

and we were talking about Ayn Rand and this interview, and he said,

"Oh, I'm a huge Ayn Rand fan, in fact my girl's middle name is Ayn."

And it's funny when you see people, you see companies all the time

called Fountainhead or the Galt Group, and you see

little evidence that Ayn Rand has heavily influenced people.

Many of the people here in Silicon Valley were greatly inspired by Ayn Rand.

Entrepreneurs who were building computers,

entrepreneurs in biotech, entrepreneurs in software, in internet, networking.

Many here were...were inspired by Ayn Rand. It presented a vision.

It presented a vision of a...morally exciting enterprise,

a morally glorious project.

But the project was about more than just the entrepreneurs being Randian heroes,

because an idea was emerging in California

that said that the new computer technologies

could turn everyone into heroic individuals.

It was a vision of a society where the old forms of political control would be unnecessary

because computer networks could create order in society without central control.

This had never happened before,

because at the heart of of western political thought

had always been a fear that if you allowed individuals too much freedom, you would get anarchy.

But ever since the 1970s, computer utopians in California

believed that if human beings were linked by webs of computers,

then together they could create their own kind of order.

It was a cybernetic dream which said that the feedback of information

between all the individuals connected as nodes in the network

would work to create a self-stabilising system.

The world would be stable, yet everyone would be heroic Randian beings,

completely free to follow their desires.

Now, in the 1990s, the technologies had been built,

and in 1991 a leading computer engineer from California

gave a dramatic demonstration.

He was called Loren Carpenter.

He invited hundreds of people to a large shed.

On each seat was a small paddle,

and in front of them was a giant screen.

We told them nothing for a while. We just left the things on the seats,

and people would pick this up and look at it and say, "What's that?"

And then somebody noticed that there's little red and green dots up there on the screen,

and this is red and green, so maybe that has something to do with that.

It would be that. "OK, there I am."

And when that happened, the room erupted.

Just totally spontaneous, we didn't say anything.

Carpenter then began an experiment.

He projected the early computer game Pong.

Each half of the audience jointly controlled the bat

on their side of the screen.

If an individual held up red on their paddle,

a computer sensor picked it up and the bat on the screen went down.

If they held up green, it went up.

But they had to operate it together.

When the game is being played and the ball is going back and forth,

if it's down here and it's headed that way,

some people are going to have to show red

to keep it from going all the way to the top.

If everybody just showed green, it would slam up to the top and the ball would miss.

So something happened in that group of people,

where some decided to show green and some decided to show red

to cause it to stop in the right place.

And we had no idea what did that.

All right! Red, red, red, red, red!

Oh, baby! Oh, yeah!

Red!

Carpenter believed that what he had created was a model of a society

where there was no hierarchy,

where everyone made their own decisions without guidance.

Yet because they were linked by the machines,

out of it came a stability and an order.

So they're all acting as individuals,

because each one of them can decide what they're going to do.

They have total freedom about what to decide to do, but there's an order.

There's an order that emerges that gives them a kind of

an amoeba-like effect, where they surge and then they play.

It was kind of in the nature of an experiment.

I wanted to see, if no hierarchy existed at all, what would happen.

And what did happen?

They formed a... A kind of a... A subconscious consensus.

Out of these kinds of ideas

came what was called the Californian ideology.

It was an odd fusion of radical individualism

and utopian theories about computer systems,

and an international priesthood rose up to promote it.

What united them was was a vision

that the world was now one interconnected system,

that nation states were irrelevant

and politicians should not try and control the system,

they should let it free to create a new kind of democracy.

All the mechanisms that we are creating

are connecting everything to everything else.

They let the individual do their thing.

The internet, as it spreads, is going to

radically accelerate that process of network formation -

a different kind of global governance.

Really, the fundamental evolution of the global system

in the post-Cold War era.

And people, as consumers, have moved into the 21st century -

new citizens, networkers who'll reshape the world.

You have citizens forming networks, global, you know, the planetary consciousness.

They are absolutely liberating for the individual.