Will Bruce Sterling be able to harness the waste heat generated by all of SxSWi’s “monetizing our customers” discussions and drive the conference to a successful conclusion?

5 minutes from now I should begin to know.

[UPDATE: Podcast of Sterling’s speech.]

Web 2.0, the most important Internet innovation since the browser.

Welcome to the Web 2.0 bubble…

[SxSWi] a celebration of commons-based web production…

Web sites that throw open APIs and become platforms – how do you explain that?

Why do towns have to deploy wifi? It’s a sign of Federal incompetence!

My shoes are in Slovavakia but I live out of my laptop, an increasing number of us do…

Nobody notices I’ve left Austin? I see America as %94 of the rest of the world does…

America appears like the last reels of Gone with the Wind…

Americans even look different now – I see them in Europe now – it’s like they’ve been poisoned – they’re swollen – they look like they’re going to pop…

I now understand our conflict – it isn’t a war – there’s no ranks – it’s the “Disorder” – there’s no pride in serving in war against “Disorder” because the war on disorder is a war on pride…

Gibson said “the Street finds its own uses for things – uses the manufacturers never imagined.” but we’re in a day when we need to understand how “the Street” uses things, what uses they’ve imagined.

The unthinkable and unimaginable don’t mean the end. If you put Mao in today’s China [he’d] find it unthinkable – how did it get this way?

Spime – a word I created a couple years ago, but now I realize it’s not a word, it’s a tag…

Spime – an object that has a chip that describes itself, a gps that locates it precisely, a search engine,parts that can be deconstructed – its bits tagged, reusable, reconstructable. It’s 3d modelled before it’s built – it’s initial reality is virtual reality. Spimes begin and end as data.

Why spimes? Because spimes makeup an Internet of Things. Why spimes? Because I no longer have to inventory my objects – if I need to find my shoes in the morning I just google them….

The Semantic Web is turning into a syntactic wetlands…words are turned into memes [via collaborative tags]

The cure for terror stampede today is a historic perspective…

[WillR – With passion and trembling voice, Sterling speaks: ]

Historical perspective from 1937 – carl sandburg – “the people yes, the people will live, the learning and blundering people…will live on…they will be tricked… you can’t laugh off their capacity to take it….”

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
"I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time."

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and sell me...it's a game...sometime I'll
break loose..."

..... Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:

“Where to? what next?”

More of the Sandburg excerpt.