Esther Dyson

The Short Now: What Addiction, Day Trading, and Most of Society’s Ills Have in Common

Recorded live on Jul 17, 02018

at The Interval at Long Now

Long Now board member Esther Dyson shares her ongoing work to move communities away from short-term thinking and into health. In conversation with previous Interval speaker Kara Platoni, she discusses how short-term desire is addiction, affecting not just individuals but institutions and culture. Dyson’s founded the 10-year Wellville project, now underway in five communities across the US, to tap into people’s natural resilience and build long-term desire: purpose.

Esther Dyson is a Long Now Board member, founder of Wellville, and chairman of EDventure Holdings. She is an active angel investor, best-selling author, board member and advisor concentrating on emerging markets and technologies, new space and health. She sits on the boards of 23andMe and is an investor in Crohnology, Eligible API, Keas, Omada Health, Sleepio, and StartUp Health, among others. For 6 months in 02008-02009, Esther lived outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut.

Kara Platoni is a science reporter who has traveled around the world interviewing scientists and biohackers. She is lecturer and assistant dean for students at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She has spoken twice at The Interval: once about her book We Have the Technology and also as part of our Scurvy Salon event.

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bio

Esther Dyson has devoted her life to discovering the inevitable and promoting the possible. As an investor/commentator, she focuses on emerging technologies and business models, emerging markets and emerging companies. In 1994, she was one of the first to explore the impact of the Net on intellectual property in her own (paid-subscription) newsletter Release 1.0 and in Wired. In 1997, she wrote a book on the impact of the Net on individuals' lives, Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age.

Dyson does business as chairman of EDventure Holdings, the reclaimed name of the company she sold to CNET in 2004. She spends most of her time interfering with the companies listed below, most of them start-ups.

In addition, she donates time and money as a trustee to emerging organizations (the Santa Fe Institute, the Sunlight Foundation, StopBadware.org and the Eurasia Foundation). From 1998 to 2000, she was founding chairman of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international agency charged with setting policy for the Internet's core infrastructure (technical standards and the Domain Name System) independent of government control. She also sits on the Russian government's commission to establish a Russian Silicon Valley, to which she contributes both enthusiasm and skepticism.

After graduating from Harvard in economics, Dyson began her serious education in 1974 as a fact-checker for Forbes and quickly rose to reporter. In 1977 she joined New Court Securities as "the research department", following Federal Express and other start-ups. After a stint at Oppenheimer covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research and in 1983 bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, and renamed it EDventure Holdings.

The daughter of an English physicist and a Swiss mathematician, Dyson started traveling in Eastern Europe in 1989 and eventually helped to fill the small but vital vacuum at the intersection of Eastern Europe, high-tech and venture capital...and space travel. From October 2008 to March 2009, she lived in Russia's Star City training as a cosmonaut.

Esther's portfolio of active investments (board seats on the ones starred) includes:

Talks

Esther Dyson

The Short Now: What Addiction, Day Trading, and Most of Society’s Ills Have in Common

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bio