The tech community doesn't get as excited about tech as we used to, as enthusiasm about startups and embracing new things has been replaced by cynicism
WHO WOULD'VE THOUGHT GOOGLE WAVE WOULD BECOME THE GOOD OL' DAYS? — Today marks 10 years since Google stoked great excitement … Tweets: @carnage4life , @cate_lawrence , @robinwauters , @dan_rowinski , and @martinsfp Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The tech industry reminds me of the automobile industry. There was a time they built these machines we romanticized & loved but now we realize 30K die & 3 million injured per year in accidents & they pollute the air. Now we see costs more than promise.https://thenextweb.com/ ... Cate Lawrence / @cate_lawrence : This is so true “I remember the buzz of discovering an interesting new startup and writing about it before my rivals. Nowadays, journalists often prefer to wait for a startup to prove itself by gaining traction or funding from a notable investor.” https://thenextweb.com/... Robin Wauters / @robinwauters : Definitely true for me, and I often lament it, but I've come to terms with the fact that it has more to do with tech companies than me/the media in general. https://twitter.com/... @dan_rowinski : I might note, this is a positive development. The ra ra cheerleading of the beginning of the decade, where we minimized the bad actors and ignored some of the under-the-surface abuses and neglect has led us to the current quagmire we find ourselves in. https://twitter.com/... Martin Bryant / @martinsfp : Today it's 10 years since Google Wave launched in a blaze of hype, and I wrote my first post as a tech journalist. I've written this nostalgic piece about how I miss blind, dumb enthusiasm for tech. https://thenextweb.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece runs on a decade-old anniversary: ten years since Google launched Wave, once the emblem of breathless Web 2.0 anticipation. The timing lets commentators measure how far the mood has traveled — Dare Obasanjo compares the industry to the automobile business, romanticized at first and now reckoned by its costs, while Cate Lawrence and other veterans echo the same loss of wonder.
The arc was already visible in earlier coverage: Square's communications chief had described the cyclical nature of tech media coverage back in 2015, the same year Techmeme marked its own tenth birthday. What followed — the Reader team's retrospective on what Google killed, books arguing big tech grew powerful by ducking regulation rather than disruption, and software fading into the background like electricity — reads today as the cynicism this article spotted arriving.
First-order effects
- Google's Wave anniversary becomes the occasion for founders, journalists, and early adopters to publicly reframe their own history — Obasanjo's auto-industry analogy and Lawrence's agreement circulate as a shared admission that promise-first framing no longer holds.
Second-order effects
- Publications and commentators lean into nostalgia-and-reckoning formats — retrospectives on killed products and critiques of platform power — because disillusionment narratives now draw the engagement that launch-day hype used to.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's center of gravity shifts from consumer-web enthusiasm to the serious, capital-heavy mood later captured in Silicon Valley's turn toward an AI-dominated hard tech era with fewer perks — and toward scrutiny of how incumbents actually got powerful, as the critical books on big tech argued.
The trend: Tech culture is moving from launch-cycle romanticism to cost-accounting realism, with product anniversaries doubling as audits of what the enthusiasm era delivered.