Esther Dyson
Exceptions Become the Rule
NEW YORK – Long ago, I worked as an analyst on Wall Street. The first company that I analyzed was Federal Express, which at the time had not…
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Esther Dyson
Why Work at Work?
PHUKET – Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo!, recently created a fuss by issuing an edict that forbids anyone at the company to work from h…
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Esther Dyson
Caveat Sender!
NEW YORK – How many e-mails do you have in your inbox? In general, each one represents a task – something to read, a query to answer, a meet…
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Esther Dyson
The Healthy Crowd
BERLIN – I recently attended the JP Morgan health-care conference, the Davos of the medical world. And, like the World Economic Forum’s annu…
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Esther Dyson
The Rise of the Attention Economy
MOSCOW – I was recently posed the following question: “The most important way in which the Internet and online social media are changing our…
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Esther Dyson
The Challenge of Medical Empowerment
ABU DHABI – If people can make themselves healthy, should we blame them for getting sick? That is the stark question raised not only by broa…
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Esther Dyson
Orderly Email
PHOENIX – You may have heard of the “quantified self” movement – the idea that you monitor your own vital signs such as weight or blood suga…
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Esther Dyson
India’s Feet and Minds
NEW DELHI – Last month, I visited the Jaipur Foot clinic in New Delhi. You may have heard of the Jaipur Foot. It is both an invention – a pr…
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Esther Dyson
Technology’s Mental Frontier
NEW DELHI – Starting with the opening ceremony at the London Olympics, I have spent the last few weeks considering history and spending time…
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Esther Dyson
The Quantified Community
NEW YORK – I have written previously about the Quantified Self movement – individuals equipped with the tools (monitoring devices and softwa…
Esther Dyson: Net World
How has the Internet changed the nature of government? Does increased connectivity expand individual freedom, or merely expose us to greater official and commercial surveillance? How will intellectual property evolve in an age of costless copying and peer-to-peer file sharing? Can online social networking become anti-social?
Today’s information technologies deal with the essence of human society: communication between people. They are now as ubiquitous as electricity, driving social and economic change at a faster pace than at any time in history. But, as with all technology, how they are used – productively or wastefully, to tyrannize or to liberate, to enrich or to exploit – remains a matter of human choice. As we head toward a densely networked world in which people, companies, and governments everywhere can, for good or ill, interact and be acted upon instantly, it is not too soon to ask: what do we really want information technology to do?
Esther Dyson was one of the first people to confront and analyze the implications of our digital age – its impact on privacy, security, creativity, and politics – and remains one of its boldest and most prescient voices. As a writer, advocate, and investor in successful Internet start-ups, she has been called "the high priestess of high tech." Her firm EDventure analyzed the impact of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies, and her monthly newsletter Release 1.0 and her PC Forum meetings shaped not only discussions about the rising power of the World Wide Web, but the Web itself.
The revolution is not over. Each month in Net World, written exclusively for Project Syndicate, Esther Dyson examines the cutting-edge technologies that we may soon take for granted, whether they are breakthroughs in computing, new opportunities for private aviation and commercial space travel, advances in health care, or the emergence of consumer genetics. More importantly, Esther Dyson also illuminates the difficult – and sometimes divisive – choices that we must inevitably make in using them.
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Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson, an entrepreneur and angel investor concentrating on emerging markets and technologies, is principal of EDventure Holdings. She is a board member of numerous companies, including 23andMe, Eventful, Meetup, NewspaperDirect, Voxiva, WPP Group, XCOR Aerospace, and Yandex, and was an early investor in such notable start-ups as Evernote, Flickr, Mashery, Medstory, Omada Health, and Square.
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