Esther Dyson Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Cyberspace still exists at the pleasure of the real world.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

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.

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.

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.

Always make new mistakes.