Category: Culture

The Christian Science Monitor just published a full-length article on finding love around a shared interest in Ayn Rand’s writings. The Atlasphere figures prominently in the article, as you might expect, together with many quotes from members of our dating service.
Some excerpts:

Ayn Rand might seem an unlikely matchmaker. In a 1964 Playboy interview, she famously said that a man who places friends and family above “productive work” is immoral, an “emotional parasite.”
Yet as Atlas Shrugged turns 50 this week, Rand’s iconic intellect presides over The Atlasphere (www.theatlasphere.com) — a dating, networking, and news website that has connected her admirers since 2003.
…For Joshua Zader, The Atlasphere’s founder, the notion of Rand-inspired love makes perfect sense. “At a certain point in my 20s,” he says, “I realized I had met all my closest friends through Rand club meetings, conferences, or book signings.” He later met his wife that way, too.
…Rand saw the essence of femininity as a longing to look up to men — and went so far as to say that to be president would be “psychological torture” for a woman, and any woman who would covet the job must be too irrational to deserve it.
Yet in perusing The Atlasphere profiles, the confidence these women show — and seek — stands out. “We probably have more women than normal who say things like, ‘I need a man who won’t be intimidated,’ ” says Zader.
That gender equality certainly appeals to Annie Gilman, a graduate student at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. She sees relationships, in their simplest form, as “business transactions.” “You have to have something to offer to somebody in a free market,” she says.
Maybe Internet dating is courtship’s free market. Villalobos suspects that Rand would delight in its entrepreneurialism: “In effect, she has spawned a virtual Galt’s Gulch.”
Galt’s Gulch, the valley retreat of the chosen few in Atlas Shrugged, is an Objectivist’s utopia — full of industrious, virtuous people, working happily (and tax free). “She is very good at evoking the feeling that ‘This is an exciting world and if you agree with my vision, you’re a wonderful person and let’s do work together,’ ” says Zader.
Let’s do work together. It might be an epigraph for The Atlasphere, where productivity is integral to love. Rand and her characters “take love, romance, and sex seriously,” says Onkar Ghate, a senior fellow at The Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. “Love is selfish and it is to be pursued selfishly.”

See the full article for more.
Christina McCarroll was a picture of professionalism during her research for the article — and I think it shows in the final product. I am grateful.

I was just alerted by a new Atlasphere member that the October issue of Inc. Magazine contains an article regarding the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged.
The new issue is not yet available in local newsstands and the October issue hasn’t yet been posted on their web site — so unfortunately I haven’t read it. But apparently the Atlasphere gets a brief mention.
The author, Leigh Buchanan, contacted me in June while conducting research for the article. She said she was planning to write about how Ayn Rand’s novels had influenced entrepreneurs.
Should be worth checking out.
UPDATE (10/1/07): I was able to pick up a copy of this issue today at the local newsstand.
The article is titled “Happy Anniversary, Masters of the Universe” and, despite being only two pages long, was touted in a round, red call-out right on the cover of the October issue.
The article itself is highly favorable to Ayn Rand. After a three-paragraph introduction by Buchanan, the rest of the article consists of quotes from entrepreneurs inspired by Ayn Rand, including yours truly.
Here is the quote they included from me:

“I created The Atlasphere, a social networking and dating site for Ayn Rand fans, after I was approached by a gentleman who said ‘When I go to a new city and I need to find a lawyer or a realtor, I’d like to have a directory of people who love Ayn Rand’s ideas.’ People like to do business with others who share their philosophy. Rand is a starting place for trust.”
–Joshua Zader, [co-] founder of Zoom Strategies, a Web-development business in Albuquerque, and the [owner] of The Atlasphere

The gentleman I refer to is, of course, the late and well-loved Charles Tomlinson.

Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak, partners in the marketing firm Reason Inc., have penned a wonderful new article about Ayn Rand at Forbes.com, titled “Atlas Shrugs Again.” It begins:

Remember the big question in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “Who’s John Galt?” In the novel, more and more people ask the question, but no one knows the answer, or even where the question came from. Ironically, the same thing now seems to be happening to Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism. Even leading objectivists don’t know the whole answer, but one thing is sure: A quarter century after her death, and half a century after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand is back.
The autobiography of former Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, in which he credits her for his development, just got published with big fanfare. In recent weeks, both The New York Times and The L.A. Times have run articles about her work. Atlas Shrugged has been featured prominently in a recent episode of AMC’s hit series Mad Men. A movie version of the book, starring Angelina Jolie in the main role, is slated for release next year.
Meanwhile, sales of Ayn Rand titles have tripled since the early 1990s–in fact, more are being sold now than at any time in history. Atlas Shrugged sales on Amazon in the first nine months of this year are already almost double the total for 2006. As of this writing, Atlas ranks 124th on Amazon’s sales charts. Compare that to The Da Vinci Code at 2,587.

After reviewing several possible reasons for Rand’s revival, they conclude their article with these interesting and constructive suggestions for marketing “something as amorphous as [an Objectivist] movement”:

–Choose a fertile target. For objectivists, this means conservatives who aren’t comfortable with the religious right and feel alienated and orphaned. Objectivists can attract this audience with a moral argument for capitalism and individual rights by showing that free markets and individual choice aren’t just smart and practical, but also moral.
–Activate your natural supporters. Objectivism is a natural fit for businessmen because it not only tolerates, but extols them. Fortune 500 CEOs can become to objectivism what movie stars are to Scientology and Kabalah.
–Go Hollywood anyway. Like it or not, we live in a celebrity culture, and there’s no publicity like celebrity publicity. Would Kabalah, PETA, Scientology or RED have become household words without the likes of Madonna, Tom Cruise and Bono?
–Accentuate the positive. It’s easy to be a naysayer. It’s harder, but much more rewarding, to offer hope. To win hearts and minds, objectivists need to show not only why they’re right, but how to get from here to there.
–Pick your controversies selectively, and don’t be afraid to court the controversies you pick. Conservative Republicans have dominated presidential politics for over half a century by deftly capitalizing on wedge issues –the latest example being same-sex marriage. Objectivists would do well to steal a page from that playbook by picking a battle on a specific issue in the area of individual rights.
–Get linked. From blogs to Facebook to Wikipedia, the Internet is the ideal medium for movements to build communities of supporters. Links, in particular, are the key to success–between sites of supporters of a movement, and from these sites to others.

How often do you see something like that in the mainstream media? Very good stuff.
Kudos to Forbes.com for being willing to publish such an open and kind review of the current Ayn Rand revival.
See the full article for more.