Esther Dyson Quotations

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works - I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

What I'm thinking about more and more these days is simply the importance of transparency, and Jefferson's saying that he'd rather have a free press without a government than a government without a free press.

But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

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.

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.

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

Don't leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you're doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don't think about technology first.

Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.

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.

I've seen disgusting excess in business, and I've seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I've certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can't ignore it, especially when you get into telecom.

I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.

I became a real free market fanatic. I'm probably less so now than even two or three years ago.

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

Since I became chairman, I've tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.

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.

I think I have the right to know what Steve Forbes paid in taxes - I don't think there should be a law. I think there should be a presumption. I wouldn't vote for a guy who wouldn't reveal what he paid in taxes. That kind of thing.

From the business point of view - not to overstate it - intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.

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.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

We decided we needed to be something concrete rather than something nebulous you couldn't negotiate with. This is an interim board. Our job is to figure out how to create a permanent system with a permanent board.

Our job is not simply to accredit registrars. It's to make sure the test works,

Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age

That was when I decided that I was going to keep doing this as half of what I was doing - just somehow try to foster Silicon Valley in Eastern Europe.

Microsoft's competition -- most of it has been pretty inadequate. I don't see any reason to think that -- with all due respect -- a bunch of government lawyers are going to be any more clever than your average company, let alone Microsoft,

Today's announcement marks a major milestone in the joint efforts of the public and private sectors to bring Internet users the benefits of real competition in registration services in the most popular Internet domains -- .com, .net, and .org.

We're trying to reach out to users - not just from start-ups, but also the corporate types.

There are not going to be giant revelations. We're just telling the truth.

There are also computers with Windows that stick.

We will have higher prices for better services and lower prices for less quality.

You have to be a grownup. You have to decide what government should do and not do. And what's its appropriate size and what's its appropriate scale.

We try to reflect Internet opinion and not go off half-cocked.

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

The simple truth is that it will get better, but it won't go back to being what we thought was normal before, ... That was nutty.

A lot of governments fear American imperialism of all kinds, whether it is our food or our Internet. I think that the people like McDonald's hamburgers and they also like the Internet, so it's kind of the government trying to control what people do.

It's a real challenge if you want to take this on, if you want to do it well without destroying a lot of value that's being created.

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.

It's sad. The kids are growing up. They've lost youth and innocence. Now they have to start being grown-ups and playing at least to some extent by grown-up rules.

These two sessions are the part of PC Forum where the users really take charge. Our general sessions get active audience participation, but in our breakout sessions there is no audience. The breakouts this year are devoted to the edgiest areas -- content and identity -- where users really understand why they want to take charge, and want better tools and services for doing so. Many of our attendees are active developers as well as users of such tools -- but they have been so busy working they haven't had the chance to meet or check out each other's work.

The Internet has many fathers but he was one of the chief fathers.

The internet has many fathers but he's one of the main ones. He's an evangelist to the internet community and the technical community.

I had taken Russian in high school, but then I hadn't done anything with it. I'd always wanted to go to Russia but I was busy with my day job.

If the past decade was the decade of searching and finding and looking for stuff, this coming decade is going to be the decade of filtering and going to your friends for recommendations.

People have to understand that they can reject technology. They can turn off their cell phone. They can stop looking at their e-mail. It's there if they want it. It's not being forced on them.

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

The inner sort of consumer identity got the best of people. And everybody just wants things for free. And that's created this strange kind of cheapness to everything, where everything becomes throwaway. And people, I think, have started to undervalue things, maybe because there's too much, maybe because it's too easy to make, but I think mostly just because, somehow, that's the pattern that got set. And I think that's regrettable.

The best investor is your customer.

Always make new mistakes.

We invented our computers in the '80s. We networked them together in the '90s. Now we're giving them eyes, ears and sensory organs. And we're asking them to observe and manipulate the world on our behalf.

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.

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.

I think we really made a mistake in separating the Internet from capitalism in a certain way that is bad for our country.

We had made a - sort of a national decision that we wanted to be this intellectual property country, where we would have things manufactured in China, but we would do the design, we would do the creative stuff.And now what we have done is, we have forgotten that that's what we wanted, and we're making the intellectual stuff more and more free. And, so, we're sort of left with less and less.

No system in the world is so well-designed that it can't grow stale, rigid, or corrupted by those who benefit most from it.

Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

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.

Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world.

The Internet is an incredible business tool. First of all, the Internet/the cell phone - the cell phone is just another way to get at it - I think is having a huge impact in Africa most particularly, where it enables people - suddenly, they know crop prices. They can communicate. It makes their lives more efficient.

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.

The definition of the problem, rather than its solution, will be the scarce resource in the future.

When I was a young student, I thought grow-ups would come and make things work. Now I realize that grown-ups are just kids with wrinkles.

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.

As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are.

There's almost no way of doing importing honestly, because if you do you're at such a disadvantage competitively. So people spend huge amounts of effort getting around stupid laws and not paying taxes.

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.

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 people, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives.

From the business point of view—not to overstate it—intellectual property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.

The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.

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.

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

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.

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.

Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.

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.

Dyson's Law: Do ask; don't lie.

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.

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.

The Net is not a single home. Rather, it's an environment where thousands of small homes and communities can form and define and design themselves.

People still have a choice, but, if they find it all too confusing, or they just want someone else to make a choice for them, there's a default that works pretty well. That's this concept of libertarian paternalism. And it's handy.

The increasing incidence of reporting of lost private personal records poses a serious threat to consumer confidence -- and to vendor profits. Yet it is the right thing to do because it is forcing companies to clean up their acts.