Rafael Alvarado on 2009-03-26
My definition is better: http://transducer.ontoligent.com/archives/8
This link has been bookmarked by 41 people . It was first bookmarked on 01 Mar 2009, by Alex Ambrose.
What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09
By Bruce Sterling EmailMarch 01, 2009 | 4:33:42 AM
*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
So, thanks for having me cross half the planet to be here.
So, just before I left Italy, I was reading an art book. About 1902, because we futurists do that. And it had this comment in it by Walter Pater that reminded me of your problems.
Walter Pater was a critic and an artist of Art Nouveau. There was a burst of Art Nouveau in Turin in 1902 -- because what Arts and Crafts always needed was some rich industrialists. Rich factory owners were the guys who bought those elaborate handmade homes and the romantic paintings of the Lady of Shalott. Fantastic anti-industrial structures were financed by heavy industry.
I know that sounds ironic or even sarcastic, but it isn't. Creative energies are liberated by oxymorons, by breakdowns in definitions. The Muse comes out when you look sidelong, over your shoulder.
So Walter Pater was a critic, like me, so of course he's complaining. The Italians in 1902 don't understand the original doctrines of the PreRaphaelites and Ruskin and William Morris! That's his beef. The Italians just think that Art Nouveau has a lot of curvy lines in it, and it's got something to do with nude women and vegetables! They're just seizing on the superficial appearances! In Italy they call that stuff "Flower Style."
And that's your problem, too, here in New Zealand. Far from the action here at the antipodes, you people, you just don't get it about the original principles of Web 2.0! Too often, you've got no architecture of participation, sometimes you don't have an open API! Out here at the end of the earth, you think it's all about drop shadows and the gradients and a tag cloud, and a startup name with a Capital R in the middle of it!
And that's absolute
This reminds me of the early 1980s, when punk and new wave had become so thoroughly mainstreamed, that rich Argentine women were getting their hair down in spikes, and wore tight, leopard skin patterned skirts. I made me think of something I called the torus of culture, a cycling donut where the margins cycle into the center and then change again.

Rafael Alvarado on 2009-03-26
My definition is better: http://transducer.ontoligent.com/archives/8
The Information Superhighway is long dead -- it was killed by Web 1.0. And web 2.0 kills web 1.0.
Actually, you don't simply kill those earlier paradigms. What you do is turn them into components, then make the components into platforms, then place more
Web 2.0 guys: they've got their laptops with whimsical stickers, the tattoos, the startup T-shirts, the brainy-glasses -- you can tell them from the general population at a glance. They're a true creative subculture, not a counterculture exactly -- but in their number, their relationship to the population, quite like the Arts and Crafts people from a hundred years ago.
Arts and Crafts people, they had a lot of bad ideas -- much worse ideas than Tim O'Reilly's ideas. It wouldn't bother me any if Tim O'Reilly was Governor of California -- he couldn't be any weirder than that guy they've got already. Arts and Crafts people gave it their best shot, they were in earnest -- but everything they thought they knew about reality was blown to pieces by the First World War.
After that misfortune, there were still plenty of creative people surviving. Futurists, Surrealists, Dadaists -- and man, they all despised Arts and Crafts. Everything about Art Nouveau that was sexy and sensual and liberating and flower-like, man, that stank in their nostrils. They thought that Art Nouveau people were like moronic children.
what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.
The web has to stop being a meringue frosting on the top of business, this make-do melange of mashups and abstraction layers.
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.
That showed more maturity than Web 1.0. It was visionary, it was inspiring, but there were fewer moon rockets flying out of its head.
"Gosh, we're really sorry that we accidentally ruined the NASDAQ." We're Internet business people, but maybe we should spend less of our time stock-kiting. The Web's a communications medium -- how 'bout working on the computer interface, so that people can really communicate?
That effort was time well spent. Really.
Not every Internet address was a dotcom. In fact, dotcoms showed up pretty late in the day, and they were not exactly welcome. There were dot-orgs, dot edus, dot nets, dot govs, and dot localities.
Once upon a time there were lots of social enterprises that lived outside the market; social movements, political parties, mutual aid societies, philanthropies. Churches, criminal organizations -- you're bound to see plenty of both of those in a transition... Labor unions... not little ones, but big ones like Solidarity in Poland; dissident organizations, not hobby activists, big dissent, like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.
Armies, national guards. Rescue operations. Global non-governmental organizations. Davos Forums, Bilderberg guys.
Retired people. The old people can't hold down jobs in the market. Man, there's a lot of 'em. Billions. What are our old people supposed to do with themselves? Websurf, I'm thinking. They're wise, they're knowledgeable, they're generous by nature; the 21st century is destined to be an old people's century. Even the Chinese, Mexicans, Brazilians will be old. Can't the web make some use of them, all that wisdom and talent, outside the market?
I've never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I'm bored with the deceit. I'm tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I'm disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I'm up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.
The cure for panic is action. Coherent action is great; for a scatterbrained web society, that may be a bit much to ask. Well, any action is better than whining. We can do better.
hat's the key Web 2.0 insight: "the web as a platform."
Okay, "webs" are not "platforms." I know you're used to that idea after five years, but consider taking the word "web" out, and using the newer sexy term, "cloud." "The cloud as platform." That is insanely great. Right? You can't build a "platform" on a "cloud!" That is a wildly mixed metaphor! A cloud is insubstantial, while a platform is a solid foundation! The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!
But what is AJAX, exactly? It's not an acronym. It doesn't really stand for "Asynchronous Java and XTML." XTML itself is an acronym -- you can't make an acronym out of an acronym! You peel that label off and AJAX is revealed as a whole web of stuff.
AJAX is standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS.
AJAX is also dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model.
AJAX is also data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
AJASX is also asynchronous data retrieval using XML-http request.
With JavaScript binding everything
a great and funny and lengthy description of why web 2.0 is the future, or something like it.
This has just been elevated to my Pantheon of 'must read' pieces. :)
web2.0 internet socialmedia technology trends future history culture wired ajax change brucesterling business delicious
"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an 'architecture of participation,' and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences."
And that's your problem, too, here in New Zealand. Far from the action here at the antipodes, you people, you just don't get it about the original principles of Web 2.0! Too often, you've got no architecture of participation, sometimes you don't have an open API! Out here at the end of the earth, you think it's all about drop shadows and the gradients and a tag cloud, and a startup name with a Capital R in the middle of it!
Now, I wouldn't want to claim that Web 2.0 is as frail as the financial system -- the financial system that supported it and made it possible! But Web 2.0 is directly built on top of finance. Web 2.0 is supposed to be business.
So I think what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.
In Web 2.0, if you were monetizable, it meant you got bought out by the majors. "We stole back our revolution and we sold ourselves to Yahoo."
In the Transition Web, if you're monetizable, it means that you get attacked.
AJAX is standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS.
AJAX is also dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model.
AJAX is also data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
AJASX is also asynchronous data retrieval using XML-http request.
With JavaScript binding everything.
"The cloud as platform." That is insanely great.... Nobody could have tried that before, because that sounds like a magic Ponzi scheme. But luckily, we have computers in banking now. That means Moore's law is gonna save us! Instead of it being really obvi
*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
So, thanks for having me cross half the planet to be here.
So, just before I left Italy, I was reading an art book. About 1902, because we futurists do that. And it had this comment in it by Walter Pater that reminded me of your problems.
Walter Pater was a critic and an artist of Art Nouveau. There was a burst of Art Nouveau in Turin in 1902 -- because what Arts and Crafts always needed was some rich industrialists. Rich factory owners were the guys who bought those elaborate handmade homes and the romantic paintings of the Lady of Shalott. Fantastic anti-industrial structures were financed by heavy industry.
I know that sounds ironic or even sarcastic, but it isn't. Creative energies are liberated by oxymorons, by breakdowns in definitions. The Muse comes out when you look sidelong, over your shoulder.
So Walter Pater was a critic, like me, so of course he's complaining. The Italians in 1902 don't understand the original doctrines of the PreRaphaelites and Ruskin and William Morris! That's his beef. The Italians just think that Art Nouveau has a lot of curvy lines in it, and it's got something to do with nude women and vegetables! They're just seizing on the superficial appearances! In Italy they call that stuff "Flower Style."
And that's your problem, too, here in New Zealand. Far from the action here at the antipodes, you people, you just don't get it about the original principles of Web 2.0! Too often, you've got no architecture of participation, sometimes you don't have an open API! Out here at the end of the earth, you think it's all about drop shadows and the gradients and a tag cloud, and a startup name with a Capital R in the middle of it!
And that's absolutely the way of the world... nothing any critic can do about it. People do make mistakes, they interpret things wron
AJAX is standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS.
AJAX is also dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model.
AJAX is also data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
AJASX is also asynchronous data retrieval using XML-http request.
With JavaScript binding everything
*By the garbled reportage, I'd be guessing some of those kiwis were having trouble with my accent. Here are the verbatim remarks.
The title says it all. Brilliant, hilarious, intense and long. Read it.
Bruce Sterling did his best to rip the concept of Web 2.0 to shreds
Public Stiky Notes
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.