/** * @article Telemachus Sneezed, revisited * * @since May 7, 2010 * @package Cultural Thoughts * * @tags makers, * nerdliness, * tech culture * */
I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers, and I was really impressed. I think I want to do a review, drawing out a couple themes by comparing it to what I think was its closest equivalent from the last century, Atlas Shrugged.
Not that Makers, or anything Cory Doctorow writes, is anything like the knee-jerk ideology that Ayn Rand put out… but then, that was always just something embarrassing I was willing to overlook in her writing. I always saw her as someone whose instincts were pretty good, and if she hadn’t had a disastrous family experience with Stalinist Russia that gave her such a harsh anti-commie bias, she probably would have come up with a coherent philosophy on her own. As it stands, the description of a creative worker’s paradise in Atlas Shrugged, of creative productive citizens being held back by the mediocrity of statism—and then fighting back—is pretty cool, and if you read it alongside, say, the Communist Manifesto or The Ego And Its Own, it can really illuminate a lot.