What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09
*By the garbled reportage, I'd be guessing some of those kiwis were having trouble with my accent. Here are the verbatim remarks. — THE BRIEF BUT GLORIOUS LIFE OF WEB 2.0, AND WHAT COMES AFTER — Bruce Sterling, Wellington, Feb 2009
Context & Ripple Effects
Sterling's talk lands at the end of a long hype cycle that this site has tracked since its start: Web 2.0 skepticism was already peaking back in 2005, when the Register mocked the label as brain-on-LSD nonsense. By 2007 the mood had curdled further, with Micro Persuasion declaring the Web 2.0 world skunk-drunk on its own Kool-Aid even as Zuckerberg opened that year's summit to fanfare.
The publication of the verbatim remarks matters because garbled press coverage of his accent threatened to distort what was already a provocative argument — an obituary for the term itself, delivered not by a cheerleader but by one of the movement's longest-running outside observers.
First-order effects
- Readers and attendees get the unfiltered text of Sterling's 'Brief But Glorious Life of Web 2.0' thesis directly from the author, correcting misquotes before they harden into the record.
- Sterling converts a one-off conference speech into durable, citable source material — the version journalists and bloggers will now quote instead of secondhand summaries.
Second-order effects
- A published eulogy for 'Web 2.0' gives conference organizers, VCs and commentators license to drop the branding and rebrand the next cycle, echoing the earlier naysaying wave rather than fighting it.
- Other speakers and writers face pressure to publish primary texts themselves when coverage distorts them, raising the bar for accuracy in tech-conference reportage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, industry labels follow a lifecycle — coinage, hype, backlash, obituary — with the terminology retired well before the underlying practices disappear; the shift is rhetorical, not technological.
- Primary-source publishing by public figures could become standard practice, weakening the intermediary role of press write-ups in shaping how keynote arguments are remembered.
The trend: The tech industry's habit of naming and then burying its own buzzwords means 'Web 2.0' joins a cycle where the label dies while the platform shifts it described keeps compounding.