So I suspect Virginia is misunderstanding and/or misrepresenting Sterling's comments and may not be quoting the original source.

Her version doesn't fit the summaries of his speech on various blogs (in which his dislike of twitter seemed to be more about how it affected audiences and his Austin house party) nor does it fit the character of his previously expressed opinions. Here is a quote from his speech to Webstock 09

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2009/03/what-bru...

quote: A lot of issues that Web 1.0 was sweating blood about, they went away for good. The “digital divide,” for instance. Man, I hated that. All the planet's poor kids had to have desktop machines. With fiber optic. Sure! You go to Bombay, Shanghai, Lagos even, you're like “hey kid, how about this OLPC so you can level the playing field with the South Bronx and East Los Angeles?” And he's like “Do I have to? I've already got three Nokias.” The teacher is slapping the cellphone out of his hand because he's acing the tests by sneaking in SMS traffic.

“Half the planet has never made a phone call.” Boy, that's a shame — especially when pirates in Somalia are making satellite calls off stolen supertankers. The poorest people in the world love cellphones. They're spreading so fast they make PCs look like turtles. *endquote*

So, I suspect Virginia is, in fact, selectively paraphrasing a paraphrase of Sterling's speech from some blog or tweet – which is little better than making shit up out of whole cloth.