| | My own preferred update of "Atlas Shrugged" would have to include computers and would focus upon how the misuse and perversion of intellectual property, combined with the irresponsibility inherent in the artificial person - the corporation - is leading us pell-mell into a world gamed by a gang of amoral crooks. The physical Galt's Gulch is today impossible, given geosats and Google Earth, but an intellectual Galt's Gulch might be possible, although I'm a bit vague on details just now... ;-)
Note however, the scene of the railroad workers holding lanterns to direct traffic in the main terminal because the intricate automated switching system had failed and no one alive understood it well enough to fix it. THAT is certainly plausible in a computer dominated world. Recall how Y2K almost snuck up on us?
Imagine a future in which any innovator is immediately E-served "papers" by attorneys from some corporate giant - or a front corporation, more likely - to serve as a risk barrier, demanding that they cease and desist violating some patent or copyright. This isn't new. Read Fukayama's classic "Trust," especially the section having to do with how France self-destructed in response to the perceived threat of the Magna Carta. The patent doesn't have to actually be violated, either. They just have to make enough of a case to threaten court action which will bankrupt the innovator.
From the 1920's, corporations have been gaming the intellectual property system, hiring thousands of engineers way back then to design every conceivable electrical circuit so that they could defend themselves against patent violation attacks from their competitors if nothing else, but also so that they could grab anything that some innovator cooked up in his garage, which invariably contained some circuit that could be constued as a violation of some patent.
Example: the inventor of television - Farnsworth - never made a dime on it, locked in patent battles with RCA, whose claims were completely false, but it took so long to try the case, due to RCA's gaming the court system, that the patent ran out.
And most of the patents granted today are bogus by the Patent Office's own standards - no prior art and representing an actual non-obvious innovation. The Patent Office, which is funded via legal kickbacks based on how mamy patents are issued, barely checks most software patents, and relies upon someone outside the system to mount any challenge. However, the costs of fighting a patent, the return (typically zero), and the limited legal window of opportunity, all tip the balance catastrophically toward rewarding the crooks who are mortgaging our future. The default now is that a patent will be granted to anyone who asks and pays. Patents on basic software designs that have been in use for years or decades are starting to appear.
And valuable systems or designs are completely blocked from the market. I cite the "VideoPlace," patented by Myron Krueger, which has been hanging fire for over twenty years due to fear of patent infringement.
Since the 1920's, it's gotten a LOT worse, trending toward an actual collapse, as any progress becomes an automatic attractor for legal vultures. Since intellectual property is now in reality probably much more valuable than any collection of mere physical property - I write, looking at the block of steel, silicon, plastic and trace elements called a computer - what this trend represents is the wholesale theft of the wealth of the world, just like in the original "Atlas Shrugged," just going via a slightly different route.
Attacking intellectual property may not sound like a defense of capitalism, but in fact it is, in this case. I would contend that - like someone filing a homestead type claim on all the air on the planet, just because no one else had made a claim, then waiting quietly until the time to object had passed to start charging a breathing fee - so these crooks and the crooked, self-reinforcing system they game is quietly bankrupting us all and especially targetting the best and brightest to boot.
What if ... the innovators and designers went on strike?
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