Dyson, Esther

1951–

Computer Industry Analyst, Entrepreneur

Esther Dyson was referred to in a 1993 Wired magazine article as the most powerful female in the computer industry, even though she does not own and is not an executive at any of the major computer or Internet companies. Instead, her influence has stemmed largely (though not entirely) from her powerful intelligence and her writings, which date back to a four-year stint as a fact-checker and reporter at Forbes magazine beginning in 1974. She has continued writing in her monthly newsletter, Release 1.0, an industry forecast that has at times had the ear of virtually every important Silicon Valley industry executive. Her uncanny ability to detect trends—she foresaw the emergence of the personal digital assistant (PDA) a decade in advance, for example—led “Digerati” author John Brockman to label Dyson “the pattern recognizer.”

In the 1990s, Dyson shifted her interests from her one-time obsession, the software industry, to focus on the Internet. She exerted considerable influence on the medium's development, both as a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and as a founding board member and one-time president of the powerful Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international agency charged with setting policy for the Internet's core infrastructure—and which serves, as some observe, as a kind of de facto government over the Internet. Today, she is president of her own firm, EDventures, an information-services company that also is involved in venture funding. But she has continued, through her newsletter, articles, and her 1997 book Release 2.0 (and its 1998 sequel, Release 2.1) to use her writing skills to help shape the public discourse on the Internet, commenting on such Internet-related topics as online communities, intellectual property, governance, and privacy. “If anyone's been in charge of the Internet, it's Esther Dyson,” Crain's New York Business once said. “She acts as the moderator of (the) global conversation about technology and the future.”

Although Dyson grew up in a home with no TV set, her origins are anything but humble. Her father, Freeman Dyson, was a well-known scientist and writer whose interests ranged from space travel to global diplomacy. Her mother, Verena, held a Ph.D. in mathematics, earned from the same Swiss institution where Albert Einstein once studied. Esther's brother, George B. Dyson, is among the world's foremost authorities on kayak building, and is author of the 1997 bestseller Darwin Among the Machines.

By age 16, Esther Dyson was a student at Harvard University. However, she wrote in Release 2.1, she spent much less time attending classes than hanging out in the offices of the school newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. She tried out as a reporter, got the job, and wrote for the paper all through school. In fact, she had started writing at age eight, compiling her own Dyson Gazette using ballpoint pens and carbon paper. She liked to write so much, she said, that she assumed she would grow up to be a novelist.

Instead, after leaving Harvard, Dyson went to work at Forbes magazine. There, direct exposure to the business world began to modify her Harvard liberalism, reshaping it into a firm free-market ethos. Meanwhile, her ability to scope out the future began to form. She wrote a seminal article for Forbes that predicted—ten years before anyone else—that Japan would pose an immense threat to the U.S. computer industry, and that the main threat would be hardware, [Page 158]not software. This article, Wired magazine said, “presaged her future as the self-propelled prophet of the computer industry.”

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