If Silicon Valley has domesticated failure, it has done so as part of a self-help ethos. It is interested in the way failure can make a better you, and the language it borrows frames failure as a route to an eventual redemption.

Disruption is newness for people who are scared of genuine newness. Revolution for people who don't stand to gain anything from revolution.

Disruption tells a story of how things that work hard to appear eternal nevertheless come to be short-lived. Disruption looks for the foreshocks within stability. At the same time, we probably shouldn't discount that sense of stability altogether. Is it purely illusory? Or does it get at something important about these gestures, actions, and objects that are reiterated in and integrated into the fabric of our everyday life? On the one hand, you may be unable to remember the last visit you made to a Blockbuster. On the other, you probably remember the pervading sense of shitty permanence that Blockbuster stores projected. At least when it comes to the ordering of our experience of capitalism, it would seem, stability and impermanence are equally valid: nothing lasts forever, but everything lives by pretending it will.

In other words, there is a weird (and acknowledged) tendency here to treat an effort like architecture, which by definition requires a group and—dare I say it—collectives, as though it were the art that an individual makes in the solitude of a studio or a favorite writing nook. This is what historians of ideas call a "genius aesthetic": it describes our tendency to think that the meaning of a work of art comes out of the specific mind of its creator, not out of the preexisting rules that creator worked within nor the broader spirit of the society and time. When you're talking about a novel, that makes a certain amount of sense. But Rand extended this sense of individual brilliance to some of humanity's most communal undertakings. Have you ever looked at a rail line and thought, I wonder what the one genius who decided to build a bridge over this valley was thinking? Rand has. And notice that, thanks to Elon Musk, we actually finally do have a billionaire whose weird tunnel-boring projects are basically a form of performance art—a pure emanation of individual genius, and sort of useless to anyone else.

Again and again, Pixar indulges the tropes of flip-flop-wearing Northern California but ends up with something that sounds a lot like Ayn Rand. For a big-budget Disney production, Wall-E gets pretty brutal in its takedown of consumer capitalism. Thanks to the efforts of a giant corporation, Buy n Large, humanity has been reduced to large indolent blobs, driving around in jazzy chairs in a Carnival Cruise-style spaceship, waited on by subservient robots. But you get the sense that the film doesn't direct its anger toward the big, bad corporation behind it all—instead, it spends most of its time lampooning the consumers who allowed themselves to be brainwashed by it. The cultural critic and blogger Mark Fisher has called this the film's "gestural anti-capitalism." and it is characteristic of Silicon Valley Randians: they are disgusted not so much by the manipulators as by the manipulated. This is how tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel manage to be both vocal opponents of elites and hugely elitist: if youre dumb enough to buy what I'mn selling, he seems to think, you really shouldn’t be voting.