Advice for the Net-lorn
Margie Wylie

Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM

Esther Dyson isn't the first person to make a career of high-tech hobnobbing, but there's little doubt she has taken it the farthest.

After 20 years of high-tech punditry, the enigmatic Dyson not only remains something of a force in Silicon Valley, but also has cultivated a following overseas and in Washington. In addition to running the exclusive annual industry schmooze-a-thon, PCForum, her New York-based company publishes the influential industry newsletter Release 1.0. And, since the Clinton administration took an interest in the Internet, she has been advising the president on issues such as privacy, intellectual property, and, most recently, commerce.

In fact, Dyson is such an omnipresent and forceful undercurrent in the high-tech arena that it's a little surprising to meet her face to face. The tiny, slightly frail-looking Dyson speaks hesitantly, hopping lightly from thought to thought, like a sparrow. Though her reputation for being coolly cerebral comes in part from being the daughter of a famous physicist, her own remote manner re-enforces that notion. Pecking at one thought lightly before distractedly moving on to the next, it appears her train of thought is moving faster than her lips.

But that's not unusual for Dyson, whose frantic, breakneck approach to life involves traveling much of the year, conducting business by email and phone from planes and remote hotels, and packing her schedule impossibly tight. Journalists tell of snagging interviews by offering the digital doyenne a ride to the airport and asking questions en route.

When Dyson says she "lives on email," she really means it. Phone calls may go unanswered, but an electronic message can evoke a nearly instantaneous response. Yet, for all the frantic activity, Dyson seems more diffuse than her legendary reputation for cool efficiency might allow. Though friends say she simply discards information no longer of use to her, to the casual observer her behavior can sometimes appear simply ill-organized and absent-minded.

Like the famous Bill Gates--who Dyson befriended when she wrote in her first Release 1.0 that Microsoft had to "lose some of its charm" to be successful--Dyson is impatient with questions she sees as irrelevant, repetitious, or otherwise wrong-headed.

She bristles at a question on her selection criteria for the exclusive PC Forum. "Who said that? Where does that come from?" she asks of Michael Kinsley's image of Dyson as the bouncer at Studio 54, formerly an exclusive New York dance club. The current editor of Microsoft's Slate and her former Harvard classmate and fellow hack at the Crimson, Kinsley used the image in a Vanity Fair profile she originally dismissed as funny. "They spelled my name right and the picture is flattering," she said when the interview came out. Today her assessment is different. "This one is sort of like bad burps--it keeps coming back," Dyson said.

But such is the price for fame. Having reached industry magnates and world leaders, Dyson is taking some of her personal philosophies and dreams for the Internet to the rest of the world through her recently published book: Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.

On the shelves for only a few months, the book has been panned as naive and condescending by the New York Times. But Dyson remains optimistic that its message of free markets, individual choice, and the power of the Internet to enable both will reach ordinary people who are trying to figure out the Internet from the outside. CNET's NEWS.COM talked with Dyson in our San Francisco offices last month.

A lot has changed since you cowrote "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Digital Age" for the Progress and Freedom Foundation in 1994, the famous paper that Newt Gingrich endorsed in the year of the "Republican Revolution." Have your views changed, too?
I wouldn't say my views have changed structurally, but certainly the texture is probably somewhat less libertarian and friction-free. But the basic concepts that the world is changing, that national governments have less impact,

that the market can do a lot of good--those are true.

The world is complex and the problems we have in the physical world are not going to be solved in the online world. The problem with the online world is the people on it. And the solution in the online world is the people on it.

People look at the Net and they say, "Oh, it's digital, it's electronic--it must be very sanitary." But people are not and the moment something is living it's going to have parasites, it's going to have problems. But it's also got, if we do it right, smart people, grown-ups willing to make moral judgments, people willing to assess the reputations of other people. Let's just not let it all be centralized.

Principles are never as complex as the reality they're applied to. The one principle that I've seen hold most generally true is that as things get large and powerful, they lose their humility and they start to abuse that power. And so the one rule I think is most important is to foster competition and feedback and change.

The Net isn't going to solve the world's problems.

It's not going to create them.

And I always feel defensive when people say to me, "Well, the Net isn't going to fix all this." No, it's not. If you want to solve all the world's problems, kill all the people, because then nobody is going to be unhappy, nobody is going to be on the bottom tier, and we're going to end a lot of unhappiness.

NEXT: The rule of law