T and I: Founders

Of late T has taken to expressing a new kind of ambition.

She says she wants to be a founder.

I has never thought of becoming a founder, but she likes the idea, in the abstract at least.

Both T and I look up people's biographies online--you know, those catchy little bios that tell the world in a nutshell what she/he is about? T calls this self-branding.

T loves to stroll through web pages and her personal hot spot is "About Me." Large number of bios on an "About Me" page have the word "founder" in it.

"X, Y, Z is a horticulturalist, mother, writer, star-gazer, amateur boxer and the founder and CEO of boxmein.com..."

T and I have concluded that not all selves can be worthy of being branded. In an Orwellian mode, all selves are equally brandable, but some selves are more equally brandable than others because they are founders.

Slipping into  a Bronx lingo (which both T and I love, and which T can reproduce with accuracy), T asks, upon reading a bio online: "Who be she?"

I chimes in, "She be a founder!"

"We be founders!" T and I resolve (this is where the lingo degenerates into a Tarzan-speak). It means that before they can dare to brand themselves in the universe, they first have to found something.

What does one have to do to be a founder? Discover something? Nope. It was so in the old world. In the old world--the world that T and I grasped better than the emergent one--a founding had to be unprecedented and in some cases a bit socially useful. One of I's uncles had, for instance, founded the formula for smokeless coal, and went on to patent it. And oh my, that thing did momentarily revolutionalize the world of domestic cooking in Eastern India!

But in the emergent world, a founder is somebody who starts something, like a web-something that specializes in curating transcripts of half-finished chats conducted in virtual space. Or, a founder could be a person who be one that has a tumblr that collects images of things that are in the color yellow/shades of yellow.


Interestingly much of the founding is done on virtual space, according to T's findings. The goal, T says, is to attach one's name to something, anything, to show those who are prowling the virtual world in search of branded-selves, that the person behind these names are doers--they do and like ants they do a hell of a lot outside of their mere professions.

T and I are working their way toward being founders...