Esther Dyson Quotes
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Dyson's Law: Do ask; don't lie.
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Well, take the evolution of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It began as hackers' rights. Then it became general civil liberties of everybody - government stay away.
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The great thing is, Internet allows you to create your own job, not just look for jobs other people are going to give you. And that, combined with the American spirit, I think, is going to help us come out of the recession faster than other countries. And I think it's going to help Africa come out of, you know, a century of slump.
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I am not in favor of immortality. I believe death for humans is the way of getting rid of accumulated errors - as in trial and error. Without death, the old folks would start to gang up on the babies (the new trials). Immortality --> immortal mistakes.
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I would like to see us shake-in, instead of a shakeout, in the sense that it's true that there's a lot of junk online, and we have to filter it and so forth.
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New landscape of personal media has given us a vaster wasteland of cyberspace. But, luckily for us, there's some really wonderful stuff in it. And if history is any guide, as the media matures, the quality will continue to go up.
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I believe in markets doing what they do well, which is to develop technology, and letting citizens do what they ideally do well, which is to set policy.
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I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information.
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It looks simple to come up with a tablet that works, but it is not, ... In order to have the power and portability you need, you need power. The screen is the part of the device that uses the most power.
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The best investor is your customer.
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In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.
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I had a lot of successes, but what really made me fearless was my complete failure at Zidd-Davis. Once you've lived through that, you know you can survive, and you're not as scared... There's nothing to build confidence like real achievement, but also like real failure.
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From the business point of view—not to overstate it—intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.
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Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
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Owning the intellectual property is like owning land: You need to keep investing in it again and again to get a payoff; you can't simply sit back and collect rent.
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What's really going on here is, this is a media shift. It's comparable to what happened in the 1950s and the birth of electronic mass media back then.This is the birth of a new kind of personal media, where, instead of we're all watching one program, we're all watching each other. And the history of media makes it really clear. Whenever we have a big innovation, the first wave of stuff we do is pretty crummy. The printing press gave us pornography, cheap thrillers, and how-to books. Television gave us Newt Minow's vast wasteland.
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And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer.
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It's not that you have jobs on the Internet, but the Internet makes it possible for more people to build their own jobs. What it does is, it erodes the power of institutions. It used to be you needed an institution to have a job. But, if you look at the three of us on this show, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives.
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As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are.
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Listening to other companies' customers is the best way to gain market share, while listening to the visionaries is the best way to create new markets.
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Internet becoming accessible everywhere, whether it was Wi-Fi at work, on your cell phone as you traveled. People had it at home with broadband. There was a big change.It used to be people used the Internet primarily at work, because that's where they had a good connection. Now they're using it at home. And the second big change is, they used it not just to get information, but to communicate with one another. And, so, it became not simply an information exchange, but a personal exchange, a communication mechanism.
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Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world.
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People need to understand that the technology is for them. It's not to them. It's not over them. People still sometimes want to be led a little too much.
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Always make new mistakes.