Esther Dyson: Release 2.1
A design for living in the digital age

Reviewed by A Book Reading Prophet of Hugi

As a means of communication that has started to become established among the masses, the Internet has become ubiquitous in the media and various other parts of everyday life. This has also inspired many people from various fields, be it computer scientists, businessmen or journalists, to write books about the Net age, hoping that these books would become best-sellers and promote their authors. One of these persons is Bill Gates. He published the revised edition of The Road Ahead, which focused entirely on the Internet, in 1996. A year later, Esther Dyson presented her point of view in Release 2.0, which also became a "national best-seller" in the United States. This review deals with Release 2.1, the second edition of Release 2.0, from 1998.

The Author

According to the New York Times Magazine, Esther Dyson, a daughter of the scientist Freeman Dyson, is "the most powerful woman in the Net-erati". She has been active in the Information Technology (IT) business since it started. Her main activities are editing the IT-related newsletter Release 1.0 and organising annual forums for people active in the industry. In addition, she runs her own company, EDventure Holdings, and has invested in several others. Also, she advises the U.S. government about the Internet.

The Book

"With the advent of the Internet, we all have both the opportunity and the obligation to shape the new rules we want to live by."

This quotation pretty much summarises the topic of this book. Like Gates in The Road Ahead, Dyson also wants to excite its readers about the possibilities of the Net. But in contrast to Gates, she also points out that you must not only consume the contents of the Net, but also contribute to it for a working digital society.

Dyson's worst fear is that a single institution - a government or a company - could gain too much control over the Net. That is why she is opposed to any kind of regulation, unless a user explicitly decides that an agency of his/her choice should regulate the contents of the Net for him/her, and fervours the model of decentralisation. As described in chapter 5, she perceives three layers of jurisdiction. The first layer is physical space, ruled by national governments and parliaments; in her opinion, these institutions should only provide the fundamental laws that allow the operation of the Internet and not interfere in its content much more. The second layer is the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), companies and accommodations that provide their users with Net access. They are "the first line of governance". It is their duty to sanction their users in case of massive complaints by others, for example if these users disturb many other people with junk mail (spam). ISPs that do not follow their duties can themselves be sanctioned by other ISPs.

The third layer is domains - names like hugi.de or hornet.org, described as "the basic entities of cyberspace" - and online communities, which operate across both physical and ISP borders. Agencies that operate across communities/domains also belong to this third layer. In the author's opinion, the most important of these concepts is online communities. It is myriads of such communities that, loosely connected, form the actual Net society. "The Net is not a global village, but an environment in which many different villages will flourish."

Dyson supposes that most online communities are and will be based on shared interest rather than geographic or ethnic criterions. However, there are communities for which these and similar factors are relevant, too. She also differentiates between non-profit and for-profit communities, as well as communities that have been founded on the Net and those that also exist in real life. Most Internet users are part of several communities, every one of which defines its rules for itself. These rules concern, for example, who can join, what kinds of contributions are welcome, what is regarded as 'spam', and how copyrighted material is handled.

In other words, Dyson wants to give as little power as possible to higher institutions and empower the individuals to decide what is good for themselves. She calls this "bottom-up governance". Of course this requires a lot of responsibility and knowledge about the medium. This and a few principles one should follow in the Net world, like disclosure and honesty, Dyson tries to convey in eleven chapters in a casual, humorous writing style, spiced with personal anecdotes, supplemental newspaper articles and feedback to Release 2.0 she received via e-mail. What she wants to offer is, as the subtitle says, "a design for living in the digital age".

After the preface and the introduction, Esther Dyson first talks about her own life story as related to Information Technology before getting to the actual subject. First she introduces her concept of communities, then, in chapters 3 and 4, she shows what the Net offers as regards to work and education. Dyson predicts that freelance work will become more common than today. By means of several examples, including a journalist and a biologist, she shows how easy it could be to find work via the Net in a few years. But she also points out that due to the "friction-free" (in imitation of Bill Gates, who described "friction-free capitalism" in The Road Ahead) nature of the Net, it will be easier for future employers to track your whereabouts. For example, using a search engine a company could easily find a five-year-old posting in some public discussion forum, which could have either a positive or a negative effect on the applyer's chance to get the job. On the other hand, the applyer can search for a community of former employees at this company and find out if it is really worth working for it or if there are better alternatives. This also applies to education: Using the Net, you can get information on particular schools from various sources, both teachers and students. In this way you can choose what school to enter better. There are also sites in the Net which provide ratings of schools and universities. Like the Net's job agencies, they help their users when they have to make important decisions.

The topics that are important for everybody who are really serious about using the Internet extensively are covered in the next chapters. Chapter 5, "Governance", introduces the layer system explained above. Furthermore, it elaborates on the protection of both investor and consumer rights by means of rating agencies that can be trusted. The topic of chapter 6 is intellectual property. Here Dyson explains that copyright can hardly be protected on the Net. In order to make money from Net content, you have to make access to it restricted to paying members. Alternatively, you can make it available for free but make money from companies whose advertisements you enforce to be shown together with your content. Other business models, however, such as offering intellectual services, performances, product support or fostering transactions, work on the Net just as well as off-line.

In chapter 7, "Content Control", the problem of regulation is addressed once again. The author stresses the point that she does not support attempts by the government to control the content the Net users can view. She wants everybody to have the possibility to freely decide if he/she wants to use a filtering tool for himself/herself or his/her children. Several label bureaus are introduced which rate sites depending on whether they contain things like violence or nudism on the one hand or educational content on the other.

The next three chapters have similar, but not indentical, topics: privacy, anonymity and security. While the chapter on privacy is focused on methods to determine how particular web-sites handle confidential data, the term security is used for methods to prohibit malfunction of computers and encrypting electronic mail in order to prohibit unauthorised authorities from reading it. The author approves of anonymity only when it comes to hiding one's identity in order to avoid conflicts or not to be embarrassed. For instance, if a raped woman wants to talk about personal problems anonymously, this is a positive application of anonymity. But if someone insults other people in a community anonymously, the atmosphere in this community can be seriously damaged because everyone will suspect each other of having written the insults. This is one argument for the importance of disclosure in the Net age. Besides, Dyson points out that real anonymity can never be guaranteed. Although some anonymous re-mailer services promise strict confidentiality, higher authorities can force them to reveal a particular user's identity. For example, secret material of a religious group was once published using a Finnish re-mailer. The maintainers of the re-mailer first rejected the police's request to reveal this user's identity. For this, they ended up in court, where they were finally forced to hand out the data.

In the last chapter, called "A design for a living", Esther Dyson summarises her ideas and lists a few tips how to behave on the Net.

Assessment

Both books, Release 2.1 and the second edition of The Road Ahead, deal with one topic: the Internet. Both books are not only aimed at computer maniacs but as many people as possible. Both books explain the opportunities of the Internet and its consequences for society rather than how the Internet works. For these reasons, it would be interesting to compare The Road Ahead and Release 2.1. What is different?

At first Release 2.1 seems to be a pure clone of Bill Gates' book: The format of its paperback edition is almost identical, and it seems to have about the same number of pages. But after a closer examination, it turns out that the pages in Release 2.1 do not only have a slightly larger area but there are also 38 more of them.

In fact Esther Dyson may have been inspired by The Road Ahead, but she also presents plenty of new ideas that could not be found in Bill Gates' work. While the structure of the first few chapters resembles The Road Ahead - first some accounts of the author's life story, then some praise of the benefits of the Internet age in order to arouse the reader's interest and keep up his/her attention -, Dyson soon goes over to important issues for people who want to start using the Internet seriously. In contrast to Gates, for whom "critical issues" are not worth any more than one chapter, she always reflects on the drawbacks and possible dangers, and tries to present solutions for the foreseeable problems. In the course of this, she introduces several services, both such of commercial and such of non-profit nature. This distinguishes her from Gates, who mainly promoted his own company. Although Dyson also runs several businesses and wants to direct her readers' attention to them, she uses less space to advertise for them.

I think there is a slight difference in the targeted audience of the two books. Whereas Gates introduces his readers to the Internet and can be understood by a broad group of people, the readers of Release 2.1 are supposed to know at least the essential features of the Net. Instead of just encouraging people to use the Net, Dyson tries to predict what the Net could be like in a few years, and how this is possible to achieve. The book is also valuable for people who already use the Internet but have not yet been aware of its full potential.

My Point of View

The style of this book is too long-winded for my taste. Too many pages are used for personal anecdotes and spacious introductions which are just remotely related to the actual matters. Some things, about the internet itself for instance, she only vaguely describes before discussing pros and cons and giving advice how to handle them best. The additional articles that occasionally appear throughout the book summarise the information much better than the actual book. To my mind, a few real definitions here and there would have made Dyson's explanations easier to follow for everyone - and more scientific. I suppose that if all the vague and superfluous information was removed and if a more compact writing style was used, the book could have been reduced to half of its size. But as this book is not supposed to be a scientific document, the anecdotes and long-winded explanations are justified. They introduce some variety into the fairly serious and austere topics of the last few chapters, which is necessary to sustain the average reader's interest to continue reading.

If the author thinks that every Internet user will read her book and prepare his Net life according to the rules presented in it, then she is perhaps a bit naïve. Like in most parts of our life, the masses will just consume; they do not want to work more than what is necessary for living. But the ambitious, serious Internet user, or future Internet user, will probably find some interesting thoughts, advice or at least addresses. Perhaps it will encourage him to start thinking, too, and actively participating in the future of our Net.

Personally, I already "lived" on the Net according to the rules Dyson describes in Release 2.1 when I did not even know this book. As the editor of a magazine on the Net, I also provide content for a large audience myself and am actively involved in several "communities".

For people seriously interested in the topic "How could the Internet affect our future lives", this book is equally worth reading as Bill Gates' Road Ahead.

Adok/Hugi