domains

My dream is ...

I have to think about this very carefully ...

I do dream of ... I'll call it this ... being an industrialist.

I dream of being influential.

Being an industrialist is a kind of influence.


So, let me define my terms, or attempt to do so.

People want the world to be a certain way. Everyone has ideas about what they want the world to be like. Influence is a person's ability to cause the world to conform to their ideas about what they want the world to be like.

Clearly, this is a delicate subject.

Arguably, the best people seek to be almost not influential at all. They graciously accept a condition in which they have very limited influence.

This is not to say that the best people accept a condition in which they have no influence at all.

It is desirable, or, to use another word, good, that the world have some shape. In the sense in which I am speaking this is a shape it is given by people's actions, or, at any rate, by people. We could say by people exerting influence.

To be good, it follows, people must exert influence. By this means they can shape the world so that the world is good. But it is also possible to shape the world so that it is bad.

How can we distinguish between a good and a bad world?

It is in the mind of every individual person that good and bad is defined, as regards the shape of the world.

Thus, if we shape the world in a way that is bad according to someone else's definition, we are bad, or our influence is bad.

This is why many of the best among us deliberately limit their influence, or the influence they seek.

It is not that these people necessarily have little influence. If we investigate their influence, we are likely to find that it is considerable or even immense. The kind of person I am speaking of limits their influence to a narrow domain. Well, a set of narrow domains, actually.

A large subset of the kinds of people I am speaking of can be described as having jobs, and doing them, and taking care of their homes and their families, and perhaps some other people who seem to want attention, where it is reasonable to do so. They engage in commerce, as consumers, too, as customers, and that is actually a way of being influential, and they socialize, and they enjoy. Finally, they are in modest ways political.

Now politics is a kind of activity people engage in, but the word is related to another word, politic, which in turn is related to the word polite.


We interrupt this broadcast to bring you an important bulletin.

Providing its members with the means to communicate is in fact a core function of society. Thus: "The United States Postal Service, also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service, often abbreviated as USPS, is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution."

Of course, we do not rely exclusively on the post office for access to tools for communication. The whole question of how to communicate by speaking is, well, almost the subject of the essay you have been reading. Communicating via the post office can itself, in fact, be called a form of speech. Though we can all, loosely speaking, speak, using speech effectively, it could be asserted, requires, let us say, some level of expertise in speech, or communication, which could be called arts. Without question, and I say that deliberately, a form of influence would be, and, indeed, is, helping people develop expertise in these arts. Why does that sound so improper? Without answering the question, except mentally, we might be able to improve on the assertion. A core function of society is developing agreeableness in communication. There is a place for disagreeableness in communication also, but, if that is a necessity for anything to be accomplished by means of communication - and, by implication, for anything to get done at all (in society, at least, but probably more generally as well) - then developing agreeableness in communication is a core function in society.

That is, however, all we will say at the moment about the question of the content of speech. It is rather our purpose here to discuss some physical means that are employed to speak, or to communicate.

Let us hasten to note that content and media are both design problems, and that it is, indeed, a combination of effective design in both domains which produces what we call, perhaps a bit cynically, communication. Now we would like to focus attention on the problem of design as applied to the latter part of that equation, media.

In the broadcast you were enjoying when we interrupted with this important bulletin, reference was made to the problem of industrialization. Industrialization, more generally, industry, is the process of making available to people generally the benefits of design. Developing media, and this applies to both divisions of the enterprise, is an industrial process. Close analysis will confirm this assertion, but it will also be controversial. We include personal individual communication under the rubric "industrial," but our purpose here is to speak of industry as a form of commerce, and of designing a medium as a commercial undertaking, culminating in provision of effective and aesthetic tools for communication to people generally, as many as will buy the product (and in some measure without prejudice regarding who they are), in exchange for, especially, if not (and it is not, not not not) exclusively, one good, money.

Now, a great many are already engaged in this kind of media enterprise, including the post office, but let us speak of new media. They have very rapidly risen to the height of prominence, for one thing. For another, they are uniquely pure communication, or give that appearance, and that has, on the one hand, great advantages, and is very compelling, but, at the same time, it presents a problem when designing a new media product.

As a result, new media possess a disorganized quality. They resemble, their product resembles, a blizzard, really. It's a wonderful thing, but measures must be taken in blizzard conditions. It is perhaps domain that we (here at Beadle Glitter) feel most able to occupy. We will return you shortly to your broadcast on the topic of occupying domains.

First, however, a very few considerations. A blizzard is a wonderfully abundant environment - trillions of beautiful crystals wink at us from within it - but characterized by a kind of complete abstraction. Shaping the blizzard into necessary forms is a kind of industry. And, since this industry is - we can at least say this - young, it is still true that certain necessary forms have yet to be developed. This is a wilderness in which we can still freely carve out gardens. It produces, as its fruit, as wilderness does, resources which we can freely avail ourselves of. Of course, we are not completely free to use these resources. This is the definition of freedom: it can never be complete. Rather, it comes in degrees; noting, though, that there is an out. Without discussing that last point at all, we can still say it has a name: Subtlety.

At any rate, our plan is to provide, as industrial products, that is, making available to essentially everyone, solutions to some problems which have been passed over - this is what has happened - in the transition into new media.

The measure of availability of a media product is ease of use. In new media there are are giants by this measure, particularly (from something of a provincial perspective) Facebook and Google. Certainly there are many others, even, which ought to be counted as giants, too. But naming those two illustrates my point. Perhaps by this measure Microsoft and Apple ought to be included, and this hints at the possibility, no, likelihood, that there are other giants in the field we are much less aware of ... or giants we would not normally think of first ... let us say, Xerox.

Here we are accidentally hinting at the nature of one of those passed over media forms: the posted letter. We find ourselves so hard put to post a letter, these days, and this is in part because new media is so instantaneous - and also, as a form of letter writing, so complete. We find ourselves wanting to create such letters, and send them through the post, just as effortlessly, even, and we find ourselves unwilling to send anything but such letters. It even goes beyond saying "at times." This has become, for us, a kind of psychic necessity.

It comes down to this: you sit in your office, somewhere (on a rock, in a garden?), and compose letters which are in fact works of art, just as letters have always been, and these are transmitted, to our offices - the instructions for making them - somewhere, in shops, where we make those works of art for you (being careful, when you request it, not to look at them - and this is the default; if you want us to look at them, you have to tell us ... but that option presents itself to me as interesting). What makes our product art? To define aesthetics we refer you to some aesthetic media, new and old ones, the photographic print, the post card, the laser print, the art print, the typewritten page.

For mailing, a very aesthetic envelope is required, and the addresses must be printed on them in a very aesthetic way, and, similarly, a stamp must be affixed, and then the letter, the art work, must be placed in the envelope, and the envelope must be sealed and taken to the post office for mailing.

We can also send you a kit: the pages, the printed (and we can be more artful about that) envelop, the stamp, for you to assemble and mail yourself.

This is our product, but to make it a product we will need to navigate some other challenging questions. At all stages, aesthetics come into play, not because we have superior taste, but because the product would be useless to you if it were not completely aesthetic. In the spirit of aesthetics, then, we propose that you can request a one page letter or a ten page letter, and nothing in between. (You can also request a twenty page letter, a forty page letter, and a 120 page letter, how about that? I suppose we could offer more intermediate counts where the page count is larger. Experimentation is a definition of aesthetics.) We will begin with one small shop, and make it as aesthetic as possible, make it completely aesthetic, while, at the same time, we will position ourselves to rapidly expand by creating new highly aesthetic shops at a rapid rate.