Women in the news
"Esther Dyson: Digital Diva" by Elizabeth Bausch and Marcia Stepanek
Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder, which probably explains why most
journalists strive to portray Esther Dyson as more than a little weird.
She is "small, stridently companion-less, waifish and windswept," in the words of Financial Times journalist Michael Thompson-Noel. "She is to public speaking what Leonard Nimoy is to singing," USA Today wrote last October. "She is the cyberspace guru of the age," says the New York Times, a force of brainpower, not of the physical.
The prophet of a paperless society of on-line communication, Dyson's Manhattan office is a scattered, chaotic riot of paper clutter. According to the Boston Globe, she has never learned to drive a car, and there is neither a TV nor a telephone in the small Manhattan apartment where she has lived alone for 24 years. But Dyson is a globally powerful, ubiquitous and hyper-connected voice in cyberspace.
Bruce Sterling, the original cyberpunk, once wrote of her ability to influence things: "Dyson is a catalyst; she herself doesn't seem to change, but given time and heat, everything around her changes utterly." In the past three or four months, Dyson has very nearly become a household word, zapped by mainstream media into the still largely techno-illiterate world, partly to promote her recently published book, Release 2.0: A Design for Living In the Digital Age.
Washington viewers could have seen her on Charlie Rose, then in Vanity Fair, then testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee and then again, talking to a small group of elderly women at the Democratic Club off DuPont Circle via C-Span, then again getting interviewed on National Public Radio, and on and on, talking about how she thinks the Net "is handing us the responsibility to govern ourselves, think for ourselves, educate our children, do business honestly and work with each other to design the rules by which we want to live."
Journalists—in recent profiles from Vanity Fair to Computer World—have been unable to resist portraying Dyson in glowing, practically cyber-kinetic accolades more typically reserved for religious icons and royalty. The words "cyber-prophet" and "exotic" appear often before her name in articles around the globe. More than once, she's been called "the madonna of the cyberset" and the "Queen of the Digerati."
Yet outwardly, Dyson has displayed no hint of her emerging celebrity. She still shows no great regard for the efficacies of make-up or the thrill of expensive clothes. Usually, she wears jeans and sneakers: During a recent visit to Washington, she put on a skirt. She told the trade journal, New Media Age, that her one real vice is collecting computer company promotional giveaways.
Dyson is quite clearly not a creature of Washington. Known for her ideas rather than her Q-rating, this doyenne of cyberspace is one of the world's most perceptive computer theorists and intellectuals. She doesn't write software. Nothing so mundane. Instead, she thinks a lot about how computers will change our lives, and how the cyber-age will affect governments, societies, democracy and capitalism. (Senior computer industry executives pay $3,000 a day to attend one of the conferences she organizes.) And, she thinks about gender on-line. Dyson, 46, probably is the most prevalent and persistent female voice in cyberspace.
For AWC-DC (in a special luncheon program at the National Press Club on March 11, 1998) she'll ponder, for the price of a sandwich, how the Internet will change the nature of what we, as communicators, do for a living. And she'll talk to us about women on-line and what's out there for them, and what should be.
"I'd rather be respected by the people I respect than to walk down the street and be recognized," says Dyson, a woman who is never still: She seldom spends more than three nights in one place and told one journalist that she has clocked six million airline miles, the life of a flying nun. The source of her frenetic schedule is her work: She is president and owner of New York City-based EDventure Holdings, which focuses on emerging information technology worldwide and publishes Release 1.0, an insider's newsletter that identifies computer industry trends and comments trenchantly on cyber-age issues. "What she writes is what I care about," Bill Gates has said.
"There is a moment when most people can talk and they say something that nobody else can say," Smith says. "They didn't hear it on the news or read it in the paper, and it's gorgeous."
In addition to the newsletter, Dyson's company sponsors two annual conferences: PC Forum, now in its 20th year, which attracts (by invitation only) 600 cyber-hot-shots from the computer and communications businesses-from Gates down. She also sponsors another conference in Europe, the High-Tech Forum.
Dyson is also a venture capitalist, both in the U.S. and in eastern and central Europe. Last December, she helped put together a new round of financing from an eclectic group of new-media heavyweights to enable New York's FEED, http://www.feedmag.com, to remain independent while continuing its editorial expansion. (FEED is the world's leading independent on-line magazine of culture, politics and technology.)
Dyson is also chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lobby for freedom of expression on the Internet, and she's fluent in Russian and German.
Given the caliber of her contacts, the skill of her networking and the tips whispered to her via e-mail, in board meetings or at countless seminars and conferences around the globe, it's easy to see why Dyson, who has been awarded Hungary's von Neumann medal for distinction in the dissemination of computer culture, is so respected for her forecasts of the way the information age will affect individuals.
"I wouldn't mind becoming the Dr. Spock of the Internet," she told a reporter for the Boston Globe. "My vision of Dr. Spock is that he gave you a whole lot of information about what to do when you had a baby-a sense of what a baby is like, how it works, how it operates. So he gave a lot of information and insight but he also said there's no one way to do it. Don't be scared. Don't lose your common sense. Use your best instincts. And be responsible for yourself. That's what I want to tell people. I want to say: 'Go to it. Don't be scared. But be responsible.'"
Dyson was reared in an intellectual hothouse. Born on Bastille Day, 1951, in Zurich, she is the daughter of Freeman Dyson, the famous astrophysicist and science writer and of mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. She grew up in Princeton, N.J. H-bomb architect Edward Teller was a family friend, as were numerous Nobel Prize winners. One of her childhood toys, she says, was the remains of one of the first computers.
At the age of 16, she went to Harvard and graduated with a degree in economics. While at Harvard, instead of going to classes, Dyson spent much of her time working on The Harvard Crimson, Harvard's daily newspaper. It was at Harvard that Dyson picked up her habit of swimming for an hour every morning, a habit she continues today.
After college, she spent three years as a reporter for Forbes magazine, then bored with journalism, began a career as a securities analyst, where she learned the dynamics of the computer and software businesses, along with a little bit of finance.
Then, in 1982, she joined Ben Rosen, now chairman of Compaq Computer Corp., as editor of his hi-tech newsletter. In 1983, she bought the newsletter from him, along with PC Forum, and renamed it Release 1.0. "For me," Dyson told Newsweek, "the great hope of the Net is that it will lead people first to get involved on the Net and then to change their overall experience of life."
No question it has already done that for Dyson. Join us March 11, 1998 to see how the Net is changing us.
Related links
Biography
Release 2.0: A Design for Living In the Digital Age
EDventure Holdings
http://www.feedmag.com
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Release 1.0
