Re: How do you contribute?

Description: Postrel gives people a deeper sense of the strengths of individual freedom.

Question: What is your legacy?

Transcript: Well, I think that I actually have given a broad range of people a deeper sense of the strengths of individual freedom, and the freedom particularly to innovate and try new things, and try things and fail, and try things and succeed.

I wrote a book published in 1998 called “The Future and Its Enemies” which was about a dynamic vision of the world. Dynamic being sort of how progress can take place not from a single plan and a single goal, but from divergent goals, and divergent plans, and bottom up experimentation and feedback. And it had to do with business innovation. It had to do with technology. It had to do with social structures. And it had to do with politics, but it wasn’t narrowly political in the left, right sense. In fact it was arguing that we’d better understand the world today on many important issues. Not in the traditional left versus right, but between dynamism. This sort of bottom up process, an open ended future and various forces of stasis where they want to keep things the same or very controlled and planned in advance. So I think through that sort of . . . through that book, and also through that writing, people have come to . . . People who would not have subscribed to Reason magazine necessarily, or see themselves libertarian because this is not a libertarian book. It’s about a broader . . . sort of something that includes but is not exclusively libertarian. I think people have come to a broader appreciation of that.

Question: “The Substance of Style”

Transcript: Another area that I’ve done a lot of work in, and to me is a continuation of my interest and innovation, is I was one of the early people to realize that there was something really going on in what I call aesthetics and a lot of people call it design; but I think it’s nonfunctional areas of design are the most interesting ones. And I wrote a book called “The Substance of Style” which is very much about why it is that these sort of surfaces – the look and feel of things – are genuinely valuable. That it’s not some kind of deception or manipulation. I mean there may be sometimes deception or manipulation, but that’s not primarily what it’s about. It’s not primarily about status. That people derive genuine value from this and they are able to express who they are, and they get genuine sort of sensual pleasure from it, and that that’s valuable. So that’s another message that I think has gotten through. And this is continuing . . . I mean I do work as an intellectual, so my contribution is primarily in the world of ideas, not in the world of changing policies. I can point to particular areas where . . . particularly when I was at Reason, I had some affects on policies.

Recorded on: 7/4/07