My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Sterling shines on Web 2.0 (and the Caryatids)

tech
by Antonio on

Like Umair Haque, Bruce Sterling has always been one of those sharp commentators that is either much smarter than the rest of us or just plain batshit crazy— and maybe a bit of both. Perhaps it is because I am just about to finish his latest book, "The Caryatids" (a fantastic dystopian vision of the future of the world), but I found the transcript of his talk from Webstock 09 an amazing analysis of just what this whole "Web 2.0 thing" was all about.

Many people have tried to describe it in hindsight (usually with a fair dollop of cynicism), but having lived it, Sterling's summary strikes me as the most accurate:

Web 2.0 goes away. Its work is done. The thing I always loved best about Web 2.0 was its implicit expiration date. It really took guts to say that: well, we've got a bunch of cool initiatives here, and we know they're not gonna last very long. It's not Utopia, it's not a New World Order, it's just a brave attempt to sweep up the ashes of the burst Internet Bubble and build something big and fast with the small burnt-up bits that were loosely joined.

And as to the "next new thing," he writes:

So -- what does tomorrow's web look like? Well, the official version would be ubiquity. I've been seeing ubiquity theory for years now. I'm a notorious fan of this stuff. A zealot, even. I'm a snake-waving street-preacher about it. Finally the heavy operators are waking from their dogmatic slumbers; in the past eighteen months, 24 months, we've seen ubiquity initiatives from Nokia, Cisco, General Electric, IBM... Microsoft even, Jesus, Microsoft, the place where innovative ideas go to die.
But it's too early for that to be the next stage of the web. We got nice cellphones, which are ubiquity in practice, we got GPS, geolocativity, but too much of the hardware just isn't there yet. The batteries aren't there, the bandwidth is not there, RFID does not work well at all, and there aren't any ubiquity pure-play companies.

[Which interestingly enough, is the main technological backdrop to all that happens in The Caryatids]

I could quote many more parts of the talk— but you should go read it instead. Dense and pithy at the same time, it is worth the slog, not just because he has nailed the cultural analysis of what has happened over the past 5 years, but because he leaves us with a glimmer of optimism for what it is that we need to do now.