Politics & Power Quote by Esther Dyson

A technologist’s confession disguised as a civics lesson: Dyson isn’t name-dropping Jefferson for historical sparkle. She’s reaching for an anchor strong enough to hold in the storm she sees coming - a world where information systems will shape power more decisively than laws do.

Her first move is telling: “more and more these days.” That’s not philosophical drift; it’s the cadence of someone watching incentives curdle in real time. In Dyson’s context - post-Internet optimism tipping into surveillance capitalism, data breaches, and algorithmic gatekeeping - “transparency” isn’t a feel-good virtue. It’s a control surface. If institutions can’t be inspected, they can’t be corrected, and if they can’t be corrected, the public becomes a user base rather than a citizenry.

The Jefferson line does rhetorical double duty. It’s deliberately extreme, almost reckless: free press over government itself. Dyson borrows that absolutism to reset the argument’s baseline. She’s not pleading for nicer disclosures or better PR; she’s implying that legitimacy now depends on radical visibility. The subtext is a warning to both state and corporate actors: in an information society, secrecy is not merely a moral failure - it’s a structural hazard that invites abuse.

There’s also a quiet self-indictment here. Dyson came of age in the culture that built the tools enabling unprecedented monitoring and narrative control. Invoking the free press is a way of insisting that the antidote to technology’s power is not more technology, but adversarial scrutiny - the messy, essential friction that keeps authority from becoming unaccountable.