 My name is Esther Dyson. I first got started editing and writing when I was eight years old with the Dyson family Gazette later on became a proofreader and Editor for the Harvard Crimson then for Forbes magazine then for 25 years. I had my own tech newsletter and now I'm most active as an angel investor and as the founder and active team member of Wellville, which is a 10-year non-profit project focused on health and equity in five small communities and then at the end scaling that by inspiring other people rather than becoming a big boring foundation ourselves. Great. So you are one of the early investors in our new company, our public benefit company called ANO and I wanted to ask you a few questions about your background and you know, you've had there's you've had a long career, but there's a few things that I wanted to really dive into that are kind of related to what we do. And the first question I have is just kind of how your original interest in the internet came about and kind of what was your first contact with it and then how kind of what was your experience as it grew deeper into your life? Well, it knocked on my door one day. No, just internet did not kind of magically appear. There were a whole bunch of things that came together that I was already very interested in as I was following the personal computer industry and my conference was originally called the Personal Computer Forum and then very subtly 25 years later, it was the platforms for communication forum, PC forum. So, you know, there was the internet that ARPA created and then there were the things that were being done with the internet. I first, you know, had an email account with MCI mail, but I really started using email after I came back from Russia in 1989 because that was the only way to communicate with people in Russia. The phone really didn't work. And you know, in a way, the Russians were way ahead of the West because they had so few existing, they didn't have 800 numbers, they didn't have phone books and so they were much quicker to adopt the internet for lack of anything else. So I saw how useful it was and in the US, online services were still kind of like for consumers and saving your recipes and in Russia, they were much more a business affordance and I found that very interesting. I remember when I think it was digital equipment advertised some kind of sales seminar over the internet and everybody was shocked and, you know, I kind of like seeing ads on the size of spaceships because it means there's public interest and so forth. So I pretty much was like the court jester of the industry all along. And it became a focus of my annual conference and of my newsletter and I joined the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and so forth and so on. So talk a little bit about EFF. Our first board member, as you may remember, was John Perry Barlow, who's a co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation and who passed away recently. How did you get involved with EFF? You know, it was it was one of the more interesting things going on. It was talking about policy. I knew Mitch Capor and John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore and yeah, they probably thought it would be useful to have somebody with both female and with some business experience. And it was it was great fun. I mean, in the end, it became to my mind a little too focused on copyright issues. And I don't think copyright is immoral, but, you know, basically they were focused on some of the right issues and I cared about it and so forth. You also go ahead. Yeah. Then when I became chair of ICANN, I thought it would be appropriate to step off EFF. Just too many different agendas. Got it. And so talk a little bit about, first of all, what is ICANN? So ICANN stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. And it was kind of non-immaculately conceived back in 1997, 1998. So the Internet was a creation of DARPA and then it began to be omnipresent, but it was still pretty much hosted and kind of managed by the U.S. government and that caused some unhappiness in other countries and the business people wanted just leave it alone, let business run it. The Europeans said the Americans can't run this whole thing. Some of the other countries complained about U.S. government dominance and so forth. So how shall we say, there was a lot of use of the passive voice and a certain pretence that the Internet community was gathering to create this bottom-up distributed decentralized governance mechanism. Very much like what people are talking about with DAO's today. It was the right thing to do, but I still look at it with a certain manner of cynicism. So they wanted to create a board and there was a lot of serious ill will. I mean, it wasn't like really nice. People were complaining and there were trolls and so forth. So they wanted a bunch of people who were not considered to be partisans, which meant they brought in a lot of people who really knew very little about the Internet, including I think the president of Radcliffe and so forth and so on. I had some people from the EU, some people from the U.S., and then, oh, by the way, we've got this guy from Japan, General Rye, who did know a lot about the Internet, and Vint Cerf was also on the board, but for whatever reason did not want to be chairman. He was the obvious person. And then there was me. They asked me, Iron Magazine said, would I be interested in sitting on the board of this thing if it were to happen to be created? Iron Magazine, of course, was working for Al Gore and Clinton, and I said, sure, I'd learn a lot. So it was kind of cobbled together and the patron saying of the whole thing was a guy called John Postell, who was actually running the main server that kind of kept track of all these different nodes of the Internet. And he unfortunately died of complications after heart surgery in September 1998. So the thing was, though it was created with the passive voice, the person in charge day to day was a lawyer, a corporate litigator from John's Day at the law firm. And that created some unfortunate things, including that the meetings were closed, the board meetings. And so we would announce our decisions afterwards. And then one of the board members, a Dutch guy said in public, yeah, this is so stupid. If they open our board meetings the way they ask, we'll just make the decisions at dinner the night before, which of course was entirely true. But anyway, the board meetings stayed closed for a lot longer than they should have. And our first task really was to end the monopoly of network solutions over the dot com domain, which we did. But the USG didn't want to give us a large budget because again, they didn't want it to be seen as the US government thing even though it was. And it was an interesting couple of years. The good news is we did in fact help to stand up a governance regime for the the addresses which weren't so exciting and the domain names and all the political trademark legal issues around them. And we managed to pretty much get the governments to agree to let ICANN set policy, which was wonderful. What we did not do was actually turn this into a genuinely public thing because people people have busy lives. They don't want to spend all their time working on internet governance. So it ended up being pretty much a protection racket that was run by the domain name registries and registrars and lawyers and trademark people and then marketers who had to buy hundreds and thousands of domain names to protect their trademarks. So they they did not steal our voice. But I would say they again, they created a system that basically taxes this fundamental public infrastructure way more than it needs to be. And there's an excessive number of redundant domain names and so forth. But the thing works. So I learned a lot about governance and eventually Vincere succeeded me and things moved on. It's interesting that you mentioned the DAO as a kind of an analog for this kind of aspirationally bottoms up governance structure. An autonomous organization just for the record. Yeah. And of course, the DAO is is associated with blockchain and Bitcoin and so forth. And in a lot of ways, the internet itself shares a lot of the design thinking, at least in how Bitcoin was kind of conceived as this decentralized money supply. Internet was conceived as a kind of a decentralized communication structure. Originally, maybe inspired by DARPA as a way to resist nuclear attacks and so forth. I don't know how true that is. Well, that's what DARPA is for. And of course, now we think of the internet as one of the in its design thinking as being open, which is kind of our new speak for these kinds of concepts. But how important do you think that the openness of the internet has been to its ultimate success? Well, open is good. Friction free is not necessarily good. The challenges, the people who start these things tend to be idealistic techies. And they think that's what most people are like. They don't realize most people are number one too busy to get actively involved in governance. And second, the people who are interested in being involved in governance are usually, you know, naturally enough, they have some objective. I want to get rich off this thing. I want to control part of it. I want to create my own separate space and tax it so that you end up with a silent, not necessarily by design, but the design makes them silent because it's not in their personal interest because they have only a teeny slice of what happens to get that involved. And people for whom it's their livelihood do get involved, whether it's ICANN or any organization where, let's say, there's activist shareholders and then there's half of the shareholders and employees who don't have a lot of power. And the challenge is how you deal with that. And I mean, right now, I've recently been talking with people again about email. Email is so friction free, we get huge amounts of spam and who pays for it, not the senders, but the recipients with their time or with their secretaries going through their mail or, you know, it's, you really need to align the incentives properly and they're not. So, friction free creates a huge playing field for people who want to take advantage of it, as well as people who just benefit from it slightly, but are being taxed far more than they realize. So you've been thinking a lot about where we're going for a long time. You originally ran a newsletter called Release 1.0 and then later published that as a book called Release 2.0, and I think there was a 2.1, and you got a lot of things right. And I guess a question I have is kind of looking back, what do you think you got right about where we are now? And also what are some of the surprises that you've seen along the way? Well, the big surprise was I, too, was a little too optimistic about people's own engagement in, for example, controlling their own data, understanding the dynamics of the systems around them, understanding how they're being manipulated, and instead taking the time to manipulate themselves. So, you know, I saw a lot about decentralization and network effects, but I did not quite foresee how toxic Facebook would become. I mean, the older I get, when I was younger, I thought that the world was run by grown-ups, and now I discovered it's run by the kind of people I went to high school with, and that's scary. So it's, yeah, nothing about my own high school, but just whatever. You know, the fact that it is now a business infrastructure and kind of precisely that is infrastructure. It's not in itself. It doesn't change our nature. It accelerates our nature. I think I once said that the internet is like alcohol. It can give you a great time. Or it can addict you. It can make you do stupid things. It can also give you the power to take people out to dinner and sell them stuff. You know, it sort of, it empowers you to do whatever you want to do more effectively, and there's that friction-free thing again. But what we've discovered is when you get a lot of human beings together, you need to put in some friction, whether that's taxation or rules or nudges to do the right thing or reminders to think long term rather than just grab what you can get. Human nature prevails over all kinds of technology, but the technology accentuates that nature. If you were going to put out a release 3.0 or maybe something more provocatively titled, but a next generation of a kind of a snapshot looking forward, what are some of the things you might imagine about our digital future from where we are now? Mostly, I wouldn't talk about our digital future. I would talk about how our human future depends on us thinking long term and not using all our digital infrastructure simply to maximize our present happiness, which is what we think we're doing, but we're actually again manipulating ourselves to become short-term and greedy and forget both the past and the future. I've kind of moved on to how can we use this tremendous power that's giving us better, and it's not by creating huge private metaverses with private companies taxing. Again, you can have a Dow, but ultimately the Dow is going to have to pay the people who are most engaged and active because they're going to be spending a full time on it. They're going to set the pay policies as we're seeing in private corporations right now. We just need to get better at governing rather than better at using the tech. Better at using the tech we'll do, I think just fine. To do that, coming back to Anno in a sense, we need people who are better educated, more self-aware, and who understand the world better. I've taken notice of a forward you provided for John C. Lee Brown's short article called The Social Life of Documents. This was a number of years ago. The context there is interesting because, of course, annotation is something that may contribute quite a bit to the social life of documents and content and the world around us. I'm curious what's your perspective on this capability, this potential, which can obviously, as you're pointing out, be used in positive ways and potentially otherwise. What do you think about how this kind of new paradigm might be used in a positive way to accentuate the social life of the world around us? The basic idea of the social life of documents, as I recall it, I should have re-read it, but you can edit that part out. Ultimately, I'm an editor and a proofreader, and I see documents as living things that change and that can be a form of communication, not simply by showing up and being stuck in some form, but by being a place where people edit one another. Wikipedia is a great example, or probably one of the best known examples, but a document is a way to communicate and share ideas and add, this is true, but did you read that thing or just have not an argument, but a discussion that lives on in the same place even though the contributions come at different times from different people? It just makes things richer. It puts things into context, so much of what people say is out of context. When a document is more like a Christmas tree than like a battering ram, it ends up or like a map of a discussion topic or something. It creates great value and it brings, instead of an echo chamber, it's more like a joint construction that is actually honed and shaped by multiple points of view. Again, doesn't lead so much to a truth as an exploration of a concept or idea or whatever. With this reason why we're doing this video here to talk to our investors is because we're announcing ANO as a benefit corporation to take this concept of annotation further and bring it to market. You came and opened one of our conferences a number of years ago, but also we're one of the first investors in ANO. I'm just curious, why did you invest? I invested for that same reason. I like annotation. I think it enriches documents and the best documents. I'd love to do some analysis of how many hours are spent on power points and whatever and how little they're actually used. Three pages of the power point are reused 100 times. The rest is immediately thrown away. The best documents, everything from the Bible and Plato and they persist. Certainly those were annotated too, but not as easily and not as shareably. We now have the ability to turn John Staley Brown to turn them into living things with a social life across people. That's why I invested. I was once wondering if you took something like the Magna Carta and you said, what if we were able to see the layers and layers of thinking throughout time, including the month or the year after it was published and then the layers of analysis over time as we have changed? Or the U.S. Constitution and all the Supreme Court Yes, whatever. What did those founders think, actually? And we are incorporated as a benefit corporation, which is a structure that enables both the commercial potential as well as giving the management the right to make sure that we value the social benefit that we're providing as well. This is a bit of a growing paradigm here. Why do you think that this notion of benefit corporations has emerged and why more people are choosing to use them? I think it's emerged because it's a clear way of saying to certain types of VCs, sorry, we're not going to make you rich and look for an exit. So we don't want to waste your time. And it provides a better match between mission-driven investors who might even have just donated, but they want to make the thing more sustainable. So the notion of making a reasonable profit, but also having guidelines, it appeals to the right people and turns away the wrong people.