Hype: The most exciting, positive, empowering innovation ever made in human communication!
A prelude to tomorrow's Podcast episode: Why does it seem like hype is eating the world? Because in many ways, it is.
Just what the hell is “dermal remodeling”?
It’s a fancy way of saying something, but God only knows what. At the local fitness center in our little town in NY’s Hudson Valley, there is a small aesthetics clinic, complete with frosted windows for privacy, and banners in front of the door announcing their miraculous services.
“Dermal remodeling” is clearly some kind of skin treatment for wrinkles, based on the photos on the banners. But the inflated language is meant to do something other than communicate the specifics of what they offer.
It’s just a little example hype of the hype we’re surrounded by, everyday, everywhere.
In part, hype is the use of inflated language and exaggeration to make the thing sound bigger and more sophisticated than they are. “Dermal remodeling” evokes, if not directly implies, some kind of scientific process that offers a structural and permanent fix for age related flaws.
Hence, the language of “remodeling” that calls to mind what one does to a house: permanently fixing old flaws with structural changes: substantive rather than merely cosmetic fixes.
You can bet a year’s worth of reformer Pilates that “dermal remodeling” is a heck of a lot more expensive than “wrinkle treatment” or “shrinking your jowls.”
Hype-ification is reshaping our world – and us
Hype-ified language is one type of hype: a kind of euphemistic speech that’s not very hard to find in consumer marketing, like “micro beads” in skin cleansers (bits of polyethylene plastic that poison the environment).
Business jargon (especially in management consulting) is hype-ified: inflated prose with fuzzy meaning but a super-important, resonant tone. As in “catalyzing change” and “optimizing outcomes” and “maximizing strategic synergies.”
It’s dreck, but expensive dreck for which they can charge $1000/hour.
We’re also bombarded by hype-ification of message: the best, the biggest, the most important, the most exclusive, the most cutting-edge, the most iconic, the most revolutionary… the current U.S. president is a nearly unequaled purveyor of such hype… basically a dog whistle of superlatives to appeal to your status-conscious lizard brain.
All this hype, no matter the type, is built through a combination of exclusivity (limited availability), excitement (wow look at that!), and urgency (better get it before it’s too late). If you put it into an equation it might look like this:
Exclusivity + Excitement + Urgency = FOMO(envy)
Now, consider that the digital world has pretty much become a non-stop, fully immersive hype machine. All social media runs on hype, with people and businesses making their lives and products look enviably wonderful to maximize their social and monetary currency.
Leveling yourself ever upward, up to meet this hype-ified world on its own terms is a lot of work. If you need help, a Dubai-based start-up called Hype Society claims that their registered influencers (all humans they assure you) can reach 325 million Instagram followers (they don’t say whether those are unique followers or just cumulative).
In his book, “The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health — And How We Must Adapt,” MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral summarizes the impacts of ever-present hype this way:
[A] cacophony of digital signals… [is] hypersocializing our society, scaling mass persuasion, and creating a tyranny of trends. They do this by injecting the influence of our peers into our daily decisions, curating population-scale behavior change, and enforcing an attention economy. I call this trifecta of hypersocialization, personalized mass persuasion, and the tyranny of trends the New Social Age.
The Hype Machine has created a radical interdependence among us, shaping our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. This interdependence is enabled by digital networks, like Facebook and Twitter [X and xAI], and guided by machine intelligence, like newsfeed and friend-suggestion algorithms. Together they are remaking the evolution of the human social network and the flow of information through it. These digital networks expose the controls of the Hype Machine to nation-states, businesses, and individuals eager to steer the global conversation toward their ends, to mold public opinion, and ultimately to change what we do. The design of this machine, and how we use it, are reshaping our organizations and our lives.
Fine. True enough, but here’s where LiteralMayhem parts ways with Professor Aral. In assigning responsibility for ameliorating the negative effects of hype, he barely distinguishes between users of social media and operators of social media. He says:
In the end, each of us must take responsibility for the part we are playing in the Hype Machine’s current direction. Not only are we all partly to blame, but we are all partly responsible for what happens next.
Achieving the promise of the New Social Age, while avoiding its peril, will require all of us—social media executives, lawmakers, and ordinary citizens—to think carefully about how we approach our new social order.As a society, we will need to utilize the four levers available to us: the money (or financial incentives) created by their business models, the code that governs social platforms, the norms we develop in using these systems, and the laws we write to regulate their market failures. [emphasis added]
We don’t control the levers of hype — “they” do.
In Aral’s list of who needs to “think carefully” about the new hype-ified social order, he includes “ordinary citizens.” But then he unironically lists the levers “available to us” to regulate that new social order as: money, [computer] code, norms, and laws.
What we have seen in the past few years, with the rise of the broligarchy, is that control of those levers is absolutely NOT something accessible to the ordinary citizen. The money, computer code, and laws/regulations that drive tech accelerationism are very much in the control of centi-billionaires and the politicians they’ve bought.
As for “norms,” we ordinary citizens live within the boundaries of the enshittified services we’re being served. The tech tools themselves – as we saw with the degradation of the Twitter platform, and the abandonment of moderation on other platforms – create boundaries within which we establish and maintain social “norms.”
Sure, we can do our best to create positive social norms within those boundaries, but we’re making choices and taking action within a specific universe that’s not designed or delivered by us. In fact, it’s one that’s designed pretty much exclusively for economic extraction and disdainful of the “norms” of ordinary citizenship.
What we’ll hear in tomorrow’s podcast is that hype is an inherent feature, and enabler, of tech accelerationism, which billionaire and budding authoritarian Mark Andreesen frames this way:
We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever. [Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (2024)]
Jacob Metcalf, data science researcher and AI ethicist observes about tech accelerationism:
What all techno-accelerationists share is the notion that technology, which they control, will fix what is wrong with politics by rapidly overturning traditional political divisions that seem to stall or block movement in their preferred direction. Adherents to the various strains of technoaccelerationism, including Dark Enlightenment, NRx, and e/acc, likely understand that none of this would be possible without AI because the ideas motivating them are untested, unpopular, and prima facie unworkable in a democracy that values individual human rights.
Hype is a key tool in tech acceleration because it drives the accumulation of sufficient money and power necessary to implement a specific vision of the future – crafted by and for the benefit of tech companies and leaders, under the guise of advancing all of humanity.
In fact, it’s that hype-ified “advancing humanity” myth that lies at the heart of a lot of tech boondoggles. An article in American Affairs Journal a few years back pointed out that investment in hype-ified (but ultimately useless) “innovation” like the metaverse and Web3 relied heavily on
“a widespread faith that technological progress will improve human well-being, including via economic growth.”
A Few Key Attributes of Tech Hype
Gary Marcus points out that the current hype around AGI—which is supposedly the biggest human evolutionary jump ever—is intentionally deployed to misinform and distract from AI’s inherent weaknesses.
The misinformation that current AI models are a sound basis for developing AGI, and that we just need more computing power, is most likely aimed at raking in piles of cash:
The message that we can simply scale our way to AGI is incredibly attractive to investors because it puts money as the central (and sufficient) force needed to advance.
Marcus often cites tech lords’ tendency toward “overclaiming” as a feature of their hype, and a reason for their lack of transparency because it would burst the hype bubble. As was the case recently when claims of AI’s coding prowess were punctured by independent research, which determined that not only didn’t it help engineers work faster, it actually slowed them down.
There’s also a “black box” element to hype. As Eryk Salvaggio, a fellow at TechPolicy.press wrote recently:
Myth-making is a crucial aspect of the AI industry, and black boxes are woven into the stories they tell… The shared myth-making around the black box of AI cultivates useful confusion about what can and cannot be known. It helps to cultivate the systems as more mysterious, even sublime, than they really are.
“Inevitability” is another feature of hype—one explored in the context of AGI in another insightful article on TechPolcy.press, as part of the series Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis.
Alex Hanna and Emily Bender, in their article The Myth of AGI, open with a quote from SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son that:
“AGI is coming very, very soon. And then after that, that's not the goal. After that, artificial superintelligence. We'll come to solve the issues that mankind would never ever have thought that we could solve. Well, this is the beginning of our golden age."
From there, the seeming inevitability of the tech is meant to carry us away; according to Hanna and Bender:
Tech CEOs, futurists, and venture capitalists describe artificial general intelligence (AGI) as if it were an inevitable and ultimate goal for technology development. In reality, the term is a vague signifier for a technology that will somehow lead to endless abundance for humankind — and conveniently also a means to avoid accountability as tech moguls make off with billions in capital investment and, more alarmingly, public spending.
… the term is meant to evoke something with awesome power, much like the term “AI” used to, before it became overexposed in marketing.
When we give credence to the idea of AGI, it does multiple things in the real world. First, it signals that a computer program that is proficient at one thing — like predicting words from other words, which is what ChatGPT and other chatbots are doing — can do important social and economic work, such as addressing gaps in major social services, doing science autonomously, and “solving” climate change.
The second issue is closely related to the first: claims of “AGI” are a cover for abandoning the current social contract. Instead of focusing on the here and now, many people who focus on AGI think we ought to abandon all other scientific and socially beneficial pursuits and focus entirely on issues related to developing (and protecting against) AGI.
If you think this sounds weird, mystical, and god-like, you’d be correct.
Another element of hype, complementing its sense of inevitability, is the notion of “inescapability.”
Tech writer and researcher Luiza Jaorvsky recently skewered not just the AGI worship of Sam Altman not just for its bloated language that substitutes “superintelligence” for all things AI, but also for trying to sell the idea that AGI is inescapable.
Altman posted, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.” To which Jarovsky responded:
My first comment is that in recent months, the term “AI” seems to have become dusty, and major AI-related initiatives are now called “superintelligence”…
Even if we don't want to talk to AI all day, tech executives will use all their marketing, PR, economic, social, and technological apparatus to normalize this behavior and make it a prerequisite to fully enjoy the digital environment and belong in the modern society. [emphasis original]
MIT professor Aral would do well to note these observations. Ordinary citizens are being wholesale opted-in, into a world not designed, controlled, or regulated by us. We cannot even rely on independent new media to help us,
One of my favorite hyper-intelligent and informed cranks, Ed Zitron, railed against lazy media here:
Look at how willingly reporters will accept narratives not based on practical experience or what the technology can do, but what the powerful (and the popular) are suddenly interested in. Every single tech bubble followed the same path, and that path was paved with flawed, deferential and specious journalism, from small blogs to the biggest mastheads.
And here:
We do not have to buy into every narrative, nor do we have to report it as if we do so. We do not have to accept anything based on the fact someone says it emphatically, or because they throw a number at us to make it sound respectable.
It is “guy said thing,” and “guy” happens to be “billionaire behind multi-billion-dollar Large Language Model company,” and said company has made exactly jack shit as far as software that can actually replace workers.
These scare tactics exist to do one thing: increase the value of companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Salesforce, and anybody else outright lying about how “agents” will do our jobs, and to make it easier for the startups making these models to raise funds…
It’s all so deeply insincere, and all so deeply ugly — a view from nowhere, one that seeks not to tell anyone anything other than that whatever the rich or powerful is worried or excited about is true, and that the evidence, no matter how flimsy, always points in the way they want it to.
Hype is self-interested stagecraft, aiming to reshape the world
As our podcast guest, Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves, notes, hype is endemic to scientific communications because, to get funding and the attention that attracts funding, science has to connect the present to an as-yet unrealized future, in which something that does not yet exist becomes a reality. By its very nature, much of science communication is speculative.
It’s a type of communication that easily lends itself to hype, and may have a built-in bias toward hype, and as discussed in this paper on the dangers of hype in scientific communications, in which the authors observe:
“Walking the line between ‘selling’ a story and ‘hyping’ it far beyond the evidence is no easy task.”
A report from the Rand Corporation cautions that:
When a new technology emerges, it is often met with a wave of eager anticipation and optimism. However, this optimism may be detached from actual utility and practical implications, potentially signifying a state of unfettered hype.
For R&D portfolio planning, the hype around emergent technologies can lead organizations to allocate excessive resources and investments without fully considering the technologies’ long-term viability or potential risks.
And yet, we see no such restraint, particularly around AI implementation, as corporations and governments swallow the hype, and news media unplug their internal BS meters. We see, especially in AI debates, the kind of dangerous storytelling that the Rand report cautions against:
>the influence of highly trafficked stories and narratives
>lack of diversity in discourse, with a predominance of hopeful sentiment and fictional outcomes with the ability to shape actual outcomes
>specific sentiments emerging in public discourse about the technology, influenced by the coalescing hype that mediates societal expectations
The fine line between “selling” and “hyping” has been all but obliterated by today’s techno-finance establishment as it overclaims capabilities, teases with “black box” mysteries, trumpets its own inevitability, and threatens inescapability – creating an oh-wow, can’t miss it, FOMO urge to get on board.
We fall for this ruse because we already live in a hype-ified world where hype is endemic to nearly every kind of social discourse from the pedestrian to the most sophisticated and profound. We’re used to it. It’s familiar. We reflexively respond to its vernacular and habits of thought.
It is also a hype environment designed and facilitated by the very tech companies seeking to consolidate capital and political power behind their agenda – strong-arming the public and public policy establishment into knuckling under, yielding to their endless demands to be free of regulation and oversight.
Hype isn’t dangerous just for its misrepresentation of reality, but for its real-world consequences of financial and political consolidation around ideas – a specific set of ideas that’s great for them. Maybe not so great for the rest of us.