Release 0.9: What I Am Grateful For

I am grateful for all the usual things - health, family, enough money and access to do what I like (including weightless flights, a trip to meet election monitors in Kyrgyzstan courtesy of the National Endowment for Democracy, watching Zulu dancers shielded from the rain with a tent and heat lamps in South Africa). I get to work with exciting start-ups (most recently launched: 23andMe; and launching a new service soon: Meetup) and in this past week I am seeing both my mother and my stepmother as well as my brother...

I keep writing about the Internet and the benefits of transparency (e.g. the Sunlight Foundation) and accessible markets, even for philanthropy (ChangingThePresent.org), but sometimes when I read the news I wonder....

So the thing I want to call out that we can all be grateful for is a new trend in protest against wicked governments. In the old days, it was mostly the peasants and the intellectuals who led the revolutions. Now it's the lawyers and the monks...and in Russia, a former chess champion. How great is that?

[And of course I'm grateful - and proud - that I have to disclose that I have an investment or fiduciary relationship with every entity linked to above except for Garry Kasparov, whom I am grateful to have met a few times.... Each of them is doing its bit to make the world a better-informed, more transparent and better place. And, as I look at the list I must add: If you don't think that's true of Zero-G, ask the guy with muscular dystrophy who flew last week and experienced eight minutes free of pain, floating and standing on his own two feet. Yes, there's a lot to be grateful for!]

Comments

[raindrips]

09:49 PM on 11/25/2007

I for one would love to hear Esther Dyson discuss some of the things where I think she can contribute a unique perspective: net neutrality, broad-band left-behind, technology monopolies, the disaster that sometimes results from blindly "let the market decide", and the absurd state of global patents which end up inhibiting progress instead of advancing it. These are technology issues that ultimately can have a huge impact on us, and that Ms Dyson has way more insight about that I ever would.

I appreciate her concern for wicked governments. It's one that I and millions of other people share.

But I think I could learn something from her in the kind of topics I mentioned.

[TOOO]

10:51 AM on 11/22/2007

"So the thing I want to call out that we can all be grateful for is a new trend in protest against wicked governments. In the old days, it was mostly the peasants and the intellectuals who led the revolutions. Now it's the lawyers and the monks...and in Russia, a former chess champion. How great is that?"

Well, it WOULD be great, if it was actually EFFECTIVE.

I fully expect to see a repeat of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but this time in Washington DC.

[Joe23]

10:19 AM on 11/22/2007

OK, I'm nit picking and off topic but why does Dyson always number her postings here. It's getting old and off-putting. I'd like to hear Dyson's opinions about the Iraq war, the Bush/Cheney regime, universal health care, Medicaid, Medicare, the presidential candidates and the Valerie Plame affair.