I first read Atlas Shrugged when I was 16 years old.

I'm an avid reader. I was reading so many grand masters of science fiction at that age.

And then Ayn fucking Rand was a rock thrown at the window of my mind.

An engine that runs on magic! A miraculous metal never conceived before! Oh, all these sci-fi notes that hooked my brain!

Those sci-fi hooks hooked me but good.

It took me a good decade to finally go......oh, she was genuinely fucked up.

There's a reason I didn't come out as queer until my father died. Because I subconsciously knew that he'd disown me, shun me, kick me out of the family.

I'm happily out now, happily myself, happily radical and leftist and queer.

But I *get* why Gen X is tilting right. The best minds of my generation have been co-opted by Objectivism.

PS: The old saw that "you get more conservative as you get older" is hot bullshit. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that a well-educated, well-compensated community is a good thing.

We need to unionize. We need to have a general strike against our owners. That's the only thing that could possibly get things moving, get things changed.

@dawnatella To steal from my improv classes: *YES AND*

Yes, and we also need to recognize that the systems that make corporations possible are untenable. We need to rally to overthrow Citizens United, and force politicians into rejecting corporate donations. Unions are ultimately a good thing...*IF* we can tell the corporations to kick rocks.

Unions have had their issues, certainly. The jokes about Jimmy Hoffa tell that tale. But if we can get corporate money out of politics? The people win.

@dawnatella Okay so I see what you're saying, the power of the "free market" driving things.

Here's the problem: *PEOPLE.*

We've seen, in real time, what the free market has done to Twitter. A single person made a fake Eli Lilly account, causing the market share to tank to the tune of almost 20 billion.

People's actual real lives are more important than money. That's a plain fact.

@dawnatella Okay, let's break it down.

Let's say tomorrow, social media was a co-op. And everybody was happy and cool and on board with how everything went.

What's to stop another bro-tech billionaire going "THAT'S MINE NOW" and just trouncing every rule of the collective.

That's my point. Nobody should have the power to come into a space and do that, no matter how much money they have. That's the corruption of capital.