The Internet is an incredible business tool. First of all, the Internet/the cell phone - the cell phone is just another way to get at it - I think is having a huge impact in Africa most particularly, where it enables people - suddenly, they know crop prices. They can communicate. It makes their lives more efficient.

Esther Dyson

Categorized in : Thinking Phones Impact

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better.

Esther Dyson

change mean people

The best investor is your customer.

Esther Dyson

investors customers

Always make new mistakes.

Esther Dyson

motivation mistake motivational

We invented our computers in the '80s. We networked them together in the '90s. Now we're giving them eyes, ears and sensory organs. And we're asking them to observe and manipulate the world on our behalf.

Esther Dyson

eye together giving

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

Esther Dyson

powerful running thinking

When I was a young student, I thought grow-ups would come and make things work. Now I realize that grown-ups are just kids with wrinkles.

Esther Dyson

wrinkles students kids

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

Esther Dyson

loner addiction alcohol

The great thing is, Internet allows you to create your own job, not just look for jobs other people are going to give you. And that, combined with the American spirit, I think, is going to help us come out of the recession faster than other countries. And I think it's going to help Africa come out of, you know, a century of slump.

Esther Dyson

jobs country thinking

The inner sort of consumer identity got the best of people. And everybody just wants things for free. And that's created this strange kind of cheapness to everything, where everything becomes throwaway. And people, I think, have started to undervalue things, maybe because there's too much, maybe because it's too easy to make, but I think mostly just because, somehow, that's the pattern that got set. And I think that's regrettable.

Esther Dyson

identity people thinking

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

Esther Dyson

technology may firsts

Dyson's Law: Do ask; don't lie.

Esther Dyson

dont-lie law lying

It's not that you have jobs on the Internet, but the Internet makes it possible for more people to build their own jobs. What it does is, it erodes the power of institutions. It used to be you needed an institution to have a job. But, if you look at the three of us on this show, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives.

Esther Dyson

running jobs thinking

I would much rather see responsibilities exercised by individuals than have them imposed by the government.

Esther Dyson

individual government responsibility

As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are.

Esther Dyson

microsoft care opportunity

And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer.

Esther Dyson

killers eyebrows nice

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

Esther Dyson

guy space talking

But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

Esther Dyson

real responsibility challenges

I joined the board of the Santa Fe Institute.

Esther Dyson

santa-fe santa boards

We had made a - sort of a national decision that we wanted to be this intellectual property country, where we would have things manufactured in China, but we would do the design, we would do the creative stuff.And now what we have done is, we have forgotten that that's what we wanted, and we're making the intellectual stuff more and more free. And, so, we're sort of left with less and less.

Esther Dyson

design creative country

Few influential people involved with the Internet claim that it is a good in and of itself. It is a powerful tool for solving social problems, just as it is a tool for making money, finding lost relatives, receiving medical advice, or, come to that, trading instructions for making bombs.

Esther Dyson

powerful advice people