A review in the current issue of the New York Observer >From a New Media Prophetess, A Staid Old Media Product by Laura Miller Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, by Esther Dyson. Broadway Books, 307 pages, $25. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ If living in the digital future is anything like reading Esther Dyson's book about it, I don't think I'll be able to stay awake for the experience. Ms. Dyson owns a company, Edventure Holdings Inc., that publishes a newsletter (Release 1.0) about technology trends and puts on conferences for high-tech movers and shakers, including the exclusive PC Forum. She's part of a relatively new breed of pundit promising to give nervous businessmen a handle on the unpredictable, swiftly evolving, mandarin world of high technology. The less people understand about a powerful force, the more likely they are to manufacture cults of personality around those who seem to have an inside line, which is how Nicholas Negroponte managed to sell so many copies of his pompous and silly book, Being Digital, and why Ms. Dyson got an advance of more than a million dollars for this soporific Design for Living in the Digital Age. In her introduction to Release 2.0, Ms. Dyson writes that the intent of her book is "to help us think about the Internet and our roles as citizens, rule-makers and community members." The Net, she explains, "is a potential home for all of us ... a place where people meet, talk, do business, find out things, form committees, and pass on rumors." For the rest of the book's 307 pages, Ms. Dyson continues, in this bland and measured tone, to weigh in on various Internet quandaries--pornography, spam (junk e-mail), intellectual property rights and, especially, electronic commerce. She's a moderate libertarian who believes that "markets will do a lot of the design if we let them, but we need a foundation of both traditional, or terrestrial, and Net-based rules to make the markets work properly." Few of her positions seem likely to provoke the kind of flaming debate for which the Net is notorious, and when she does prescribe something drastic--like the death of copyright--she does it in the mild, reasonable voice of technocrat managers everywhere. In a way, Ms. Dyson is an example of the curse inherent in getting what you wished for. The first prophets of the digital future were early adapters, mostly former hippies, and were prone to the grandiosity and "revolutionary" junk rhetoric of the 60's counterculture. They talked a lot of nonsense about the death of literature, the hive-mind and screenagers, got brain-trust jobs at Wired magazine and discovered that the more outlandish their predictions and pontifications, the more easily they could scare corporate managers into paying them hefty consulting fees for their goofy pronouncements. To be fair, they did foster one industry--a minor boom of inner-Luddite authors who wrote long, earnest, hand-wringing treatises on how the Internet spells the end of civilization as we know it. Another former hippie, Kirkpatrick Sale, even took his Cassandra act on the road, smashing computers with a baseball bat during public appearances and reaffirming that his is the Generation That Knows No Shame when it comes to the pursuit of media attention. Meanwhile, the press went wild with horror stories about the child molesters, hackers, sexual harassers and other sociopaths supposedly lurking in every dark recess of the Net. In short, it's been a three-ring circus, and I remember how most of the people who early on had found the Net interesting, fun and useful would yearn for a less inflammatory public discussion of its potential. Now comes Esther Dyson to make us rue the day we did. The bonanza mentality that once prevailed in the corporate world's attitude toward the Net has been tempered with skepticism, and their tolerance for wild-eyed visionaries has been exhausted. They prefer now to hear about the future from one of their own (Ms. Dyson was once a securities analyst and used to work at Forbes), in the language and terms that make them comfortable, a soothing vocabulary--composed of words like "innovation," "productivity" and "outsourcing"--that can cloak the most ruthless strategies and appalling events in a mantle of placid euphemism. Compared to the Net's early champions and critics, Ms. Dyson sounds like the voice of reason, but she's also depressingly lacking in passion. Release 2.0 has all the pizzazz and sense of adventure of an in-flight magazine. The book offers a series of scenarios--entitled "Communities," "Work," "Education," "Governance" and so on--illustrating how Ms. Dyson expects the Net will reshape various areas of our lives. It's a vision of the world common in libertarians, in which all students are industrious, all employers judicious, all consumers well informed and every citizen exercises his or her freedom of choice and speech with the rationality of a Vulcan--as long as the noxious forces of centralized government and excessive regulation are kept at bay. Well, actually, there may still be a few hate groups and con men and slanderers and unsocialized wackos out there, but a complex, grass-roots system of social and commercial shunning will, Ms. Dyson assures us, keep them from running amok. Individuals and companies will thrive or fail on the basis of reputation. "Better communications, Net versions of best-10 lists, consumer ratings and overall visibility will cause investors, managers, employees, and customers to gravitate to good companies; they will flee from bad or ineffective ones." How simple--unless you're one of the unfortunate pioneers who discovers first-hand that an unregulated meatpacking plant or automobile manufacturer has been cutting corners, in which case I suppose you could take comfort in knowing that your personal loss will eventually become the free market's gain. Release 2.0 suffers from such idiocies because Ms. Dyson, like many of the so-called "digerati," is too deeply embedded in the high-tech sub-economy to understand that much of the rest of the world doesn't work that way and never will. "Just as the pace at which you live your individual work life will speed up," she chirps blithely, "so will the pace at which companies are created, grow, and disappear The good news is that this 'Darwinism' applies more to companies than to people. Bad companies die or get absorbed, but with luck their employees learn something and move on to better companies." So far, that's been true in Silicon Valley, where the workers in question are highly skilled, well paid and still fairly young. It's an acceptable way for the software industry to run, but try translating Ms. Dyson's model to agriculture, or mining, or the manufacturing of durable goods. It just doesn't compute. Her editors (no doubt thinking of the kind of sales needed to recoup that advance) probably urged her to make Release 2.0 accessible. As a result, people in the technology industry will find the book too elementary to be of any real use, while the unwired will wind up bewildered by it. But, while Broadway Books may wind up stung in this deal, Ms. Dyson probably won't. A recent Vanity Fair profile of her quotes her father, the physicist Freeman Dyson, dismissing her monthly newsletter thus: "I'm always surprised that people pay so much for so little." Beyond displaying the kind of parenting that helped make his daughter the automatonlike workaholic depicted in the profile, Mr. Dyson misses the point. A $695-per-year subscription to Release 1.0 provides access to PC Forum, an event where talent connects with money and vice versa. Ms. Dyson's real skill lies in hooking people up, not in her ideas, so don't expect anyone in the industry to publicly confess to the widespread opinion that Release 2.0 is stale and vague. Chances are they're indebted to Ms. Dyson for a past introduction, or hoping for an advantageous one in the future. back to top This column ran on page 35 in the 11/24/97 edition of The New York Observer.

I read an article by Dyson in a UK newspaper (The Independent, I think), where she rubbished the idea of community being initiated on the net - she seems to think that the internet-community is only useful when applied to existing, real-life communities. I e-mailed her pointing out this was perhaps not the case. Dyson does not answer her e-mail.

Perhaps in would gain some relevance if tied to a r/l community. The Spring is pursuing building some real flesh based communties and hot wiring each home with high speed need access and "surround video". Perhaps these folks will join our virtual community, maybe not, I find the folks here interesting and stimulating and many of these interactions may lead to actual physical meetings or "netmeetings" of some sort.

Here's one for the "give me a break" department. The Slantsman's Jeffrey Kallenberg writes: "...the best job I've seen in breaking down the Internet, the cybercommunity, and the high tech world into well-thought tidy bites. A definite buy . . ." By the way, that should be bytes, Jeff. And what were you on when you wrote this?

Re: the article above. Nail. Head. Bang. Right on.

Hmm...seems I must now eat my words. Dyson replied to my e-mail after my last posting, and said that she basically agreed with what I had said. Which begs the question why she seemed to put another viewpoint across in her newspaper article. Fickle fickle fickle.

Can you quote some of the things she said in her reply and elaborate on this a bit?

She only said one thing in her reply, which was: "I basically agree with what you said" :) Below which was quoted my entire e-mail, and then a huge signature advertising her latest book (Release 2.0) - Dyson has much to learn about e-mail etiquette, methinks... However, I shall post my original message to her in a moment.

Hi Esther, I have just read with interest you article in the Guardian newspaper (06 November 97). I feel that you have - or appear to have - limited your investigation of online community to so-called "chat rooms", which you mention; you have neglected to mention the vast numbers of other online communities - both real-time and asynchronous - which exist around the net. I would challenge the idea that you put forward the net is a *community support*, not actually a community itself. You mention that the community tends to be built offline, and then transferred online in some manner - that online communities tend to have real-life meets etc. This is both true and false, and I have examples for both. Firstly, there is the (now infamous) WELL, about which I'm sure you know. Howard Rheingold wrote about it in his book "The Virtual Community", a seminal tome about which, again, I'm sure you know. As a former UK-based WELLite, I can definitely say that the sense of community on the WELL was lower for me than it appeared to be for most San Francisco members. That was a principal reason for me deciding to cancel my account. However, in the same "conferencing" vein as the WELL, there is Cafe Utne (http://www.utne.com/) which functions as an international net-based community, but which has (to my knowledge) only a minimal amount of face-to-face meeting, yet still seems to create the kind of "community feeling" found in the WELL. Also prevalent in this country, are a version of the Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), which we know as "talkers". These are real-time, telnet-based communications which are like MUDs,but with the hack-and-slash removed - people are simply there to chat to each other. They differ from IRC in the fact that everyone has a fixed id or nickname - there's no nickname stealing and identity-ambiguity as is found in IRC. These communities, for they definitely are, do not rely on face-to-face meets to establish community - the vast majority of the users are simply university undergraduates. We do have meets, but these are infrequent enough to encourage the community online. I hope I haven't bored you too much, and I look forward to any comments you have to make on the above, or indeed on any aspect of online communities. Yours, ~Mike

To which Esther replied: Thanks for writing. What you said is fine and I basically agree with it. Esther Dyson [..snipped .sig...]

So, Mike, is this dialogue of yours with Esther going to continue? I got an email from Gregory Kallenberg saying that his little piece was definitely altered beyond recognition (the one he wrote about Esther's book in the Statesman).

I don't know - I invited her to reply (as you can read) on vcs in general, but she didn't. I guess she's too busy plugging her new book to worry about a little undergrad like me.

She is traveling all over the place. She did do a quick reply to my e-mail where I invited her to a conference with my students. said would perhaps take a question or two via e-mail.

Wow, I should pop her an email and see what happens.