Next week I’m heading out for Esther Dyson’s legendary PC Forum conference (March 21-23), to hear people like Google’s Eric Schmidt, Neal Stephenson, AOL’s Jonathan Miller, Steven Johnson and many more.
I interviewed Dyson back in 1997, on the threshold of Internet-investment mania. A lot of people were saying a lot of silly things in those days; a surprisingly high percentage of Dyson’s observations remain not only unembarrassing but actually relevant:
The point I’m trying to make is not that intellectual property is valueless, but that the price of copies is going down dramatically, so you need to think of other ways to exploit the content. And a creator is now in a much better position than a publisher. |
At that moment, Napster had yet to begin haunting music execs’ dreams, Salon’s first story on the MP3 revolution was still three months in the future, and blogs were a concept waiting for software to make real.
So I talked to Dyson again yesterday to preview this year’s conference. I’d just read the 70-page “documentation” — a special edition of Dyson’s “Release 1.0” newsletter in which Dyson personally interviews each of the speakers at her conference. You don’t often find that level of focus and attention at tech conferences, where routine pitches and boilerplate Powerpoint presentations are the norm.
I asked Dyson how the ebb and flow of the tech industry’s fortunes over the last half-decade have made themselves felt at PC Forums past: “There were a few years when it was all business models and eyeballs.” Then the wheel of the tech-industry cycle turned downward. “Last year, it was, ‘you gotta have faith and it’s coming back.’ This year, people are ready to get excited again.”
Does she see any signs of boom-era insanity creeping back into the conversation? Not yet, for the most part. “I think people are getting a little overexcited about Google — which is certainly deserving of love, but it’s human, too. I want people to get excited without losing their heads — rational exuberance.”
Depending on the vagaries of Wi-fi and Radio Userland, I’ll be filing from Scottsdale early next week.
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