As this podcast episode was getting its finishing touches, TechPolicy.Press published a couple of articles that breathe life into an issue that could be seen as merely an academic analysis—of hype and its consequences in the real world.
In our discussion, Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves explained many key ideas underlying the dangers of technology hype; a few key ideas include:
“When we engage with certain forms of hype, we are engaging also with the political and ideological program of the actors who are hyping those things.”
“The technology industry needs specific doses or amounts of fiction—not only in their statements in terms of marketing, but also in their academic papers, to make intelligible and understandable things that are still forms of imagination, but that they need to be presented as if they were science.”
“When you're asserting that you are designing a god-like like entity, then there's an implicit statement here that says, we should not be stopped. And we should not be therefore regulated because there's this promise that AI or artificial general intelligence will solve everything.”
“When big tech players assert or present certain futures as unavoidable. They create normative visions of the future that are uncritically received by stakeholders, by researchers, by regulators, policy makers, funders, media. And by aligning the visions of those actors towards an allegedly unavoidable future, they end up shaping innovation trajectories, driving investment, and also, aligning expectations and therefore structuring collective behavior across entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, journalists, et cetera.”
As if on queue, TechPolicy.Press has been publishing stories about AI showing that the impact of hype in our world is both concrete and meaningful.
In a piece on the idea that AI bots could have “rights,” Eryk Salvaggio echoes Gonçalves in calling out that the “AI rights” argument contains an implicit argument against regulation:
“When we speak about corporate products as capable of some special category of experience, we are creating opportunities to justify extreme deregulation for the companies that build them.”
Salvaggio also echoes the same language of “manipulating social imagination,” and he uses the same language as Gonçalves when he charges the AI rights movement of being guilt of a kind of “novelty bias.”
In another article on TechPolicy.Press, Mila Samdub analyzes India’s new AI policy and its accompanying hype—i.e., that it will empower poor people. He also echoes the language of Gonçalves in arguing:
“We should understand the focus on use cases, then, as a particularly Indian species of technology hype, an inflated promise that makes things happen… The hype is unlikely to benefit the poor or India’s AI ambitions. It leaves dominant power structures undisturbed and does not challenge the monopolistic and extractive practices that undergird Big Tech-led AI. Instead, it is empowering a range of powerful actors.”
Hype is real. Hype has real consequences in the world. And particularly around issues related to AI, the negative potential consequences are being either ignored, downplayed, or outright dismissed in favor of feeding our social imagination about something wonderful, which so far looks like it’s only wonderful for the wealthiest most powerful companies and individuals in the world.
So, let us begin….
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Welcome to the LiteralMayhem podcast. Today our guest is Andrew Belsunces Gonçalves. He’s a lecturer in Science and Technology studies at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, where he focuses on the relationship between power, technology, and what he conceptualizes as socio-technical fictions. He’s also a co-founder of the interdisciplinary Hype Studies Group, which is holding a Hype Studies Conference in September 2025, also in Barcelona.
Our topic is, of course… HYPE. What is it? Where does it come from? And how do hype narratives affect us and our world?
Martin: Welcome Andrew. Thank you for being here.
Andreu: Thank you very much, Martin.
Martin: Maybe you could get us started here by just giving us a little bit of history of where does hype come from. If you had to give an ontology of hype, what would it be?
Andreu: There's this, super interesting paper—entitled Hype: Marker and maker of entrepreneurial culture, by Daniel Wadhwani and Christina Lubinski—that identified three moments, and three different users of hype that in a way they come together in the contemporary understanding of it.
The first one was originated in the early 20th century, and it was related to criminal subcultures like drug users and con artists—to distinguish them from respectable culture. Then it was adopted by mid 20th century countercultures to distinguish themselves from mainstream culture. And at the late 20th century, it was adopted by startup culture to distinguish itself from corporate culture.
And this paper is very useful because when we see the way technologists present themselves, even though they are, like, middle age men, like Elon Musk, you see how the very notion of how they enact this very—let's say framework of hype—as a form of authorization of revolutionary futures, their celebration of rule breaking, and embrace of social deviance as a hallmark of entrepreneurial authenticity.
Which is at the same time kind of related to some sort of teenage culture. Like this kind of rebel way of being. So, this is related to entrepreneurial cultures, which more and more they're becoming, let's say, cultural hegemony.
So yeah, I'd say that this framework, it's useful to understand how hype is not only a form of information circulation, but also comes with certain hegemonic cultural frameworks that are more and more embraced by people.
Martin: So from your point of view and what you study, what would you say would be a general definition or description of what you think is hype?
Andreu: Well, first I would like to clarify that when I talk about hype, I talk about technology hype. Because my research field is science and technology studies, and the way we tend to, like, socially understand hype, it's a form of exaggerated expectations regarding a specific product or technology.
But hype is generally understood through the model of the hype cycle, which is a model created by a consultancy aimed at explaining technological change. And this model is described as an increasing curve of attention and expectations, followed by a decrease of attention and expectation, which creates frustration, fear, and some actors removing their resources. Whether they are, money, or people researching on a specific technology. And after this decrease of attention and resources, this model asserts that technology reaches, let’s say, a long period of stability.
This model has been labeled as a folk theory because it doesn't really describe how technological change happens—because it's rarely linear. And of course there's not a single pattern that can describe how all technologies appear, are adopted, engage investors, users, and other kind of stakeholders, and how it changes [over] the time.
So yeah, the hype cycle, has been labeled as an inaccurate model, and I completely agree with this.
Also from a critical perspective, hype has been also criticized for being a kind of scientific communication failure. As if scientific communication could be devoid of the forces of the market. Hype happens because, in contemporary societies, we cannot separate technological development from the interests of investors and the media landscapes that are also highly influenced by economic forces in many different levels.
The perspective, I like to take on hype: it’s not an inherent malfunctioning of techno-scientific communication, but more as a constitutive force of technological development.
Because our culture in relationship to progress, it's so wired by the promise of rational scientific progress, the way we as modern society relate to new technologies, it's always through some sort of excitement, or at least excited emotions. Whether they are related to hope or related to fear. This is because we've been told that the way our society should progress is through science and technology.
And, logically, when a new technology appears, we tend to think that will drive progress towards a better society for everyone… we know that this is not the case.
Science as an inherent force in the contemporary socio-technical regimes, sometimes leads to breakthroughs. No?
Because hype, in science and technology studies, we usually talk in terms of performativity. Performativity means the social capacity of some institutions to create visions of the future—and related promises are also performative.
So, in this sense, hype is highly performative. It attracts attention. It attracts funding. And it mobilizes resources in universities, research centers, governments, states in general. But of course, these promises—those future visions—sometimes they manage to align different actors and different resources to make this technology happens. But sometimes, they don't.
One of the specific features of hype is that the kind of discourses that it mobilizes—it’s usually hyperbolic. And they are designed, are disseminated, in order to create confidence and persuade stakeholders.
Martin: Talk a little bit about the relationship of hype to truth. Sometimes hype is purely an exaggeration. Other times hype is simply a fabrication. So, in what you study, what is hype's relationship to the truth and how much does it stretch the truth versus how much does it invent a truth?
Andreu: That's a very good question because hype challenges the traditional conception, or the traditional duality, between truth and false. There's quite a lot of academic debate here. For example, researcher Jascha Bareis who was also one of the co-founders of the Hype Studies Group says that hypers doesn't care about if [their discussions] are true or false.
Because basically what hypers try to do is to attract attention, and with attracting attention, also attracting money. This lack of distinction of truth and falsity, it's also explored by the concept that Dani Shanley, who's also involved in the group, on the idea of bullshit. Bullshit, it can have some quantities of truth, but both hype and bullshit are not activated to pursue this. Hype, as well as bullshit, they try to involve other people, to convince other people about a statement.
In this regard, I'm finishing my PhD on the notion of socio-technical fiction, also trying to challenge this duality between fact and fiction, or true and false, in techno sciences. Because when we're talking about technological innovation, or technological discovery, we need doses of imagination. No? And both science and technology are ways of transforming reality by invoking or installing in reality things that didn't exist before. No? So there's a continuity between what exists and what doesn't exist.
And in this sense, in my thesis, I try to explain how especially, the technology industry needs, let's say, doses or amounts of fiction—not only in their statements in terms of marketing, but also in their academic papers, to make intelligible and understandable things that are still forms of imagination, but that they need to be presented as if they were science. Because if speculations are presented as pure speculation, they won't have the same power to attract funding and attention to make this not-yet-existent technology attract resources to become a reality.
So in this sense, hype [is] in between, but at the same time it goes beyond the notions of truth and falsity. And this is why, it's so important that scholars and other kinds of professionals pay attention to this particular kind of socio-technical phenomena. Because it's extremely performative.
Martin: So how do you balance the need for the performative promotion without pushing aside the moral, ethical, and logistical concerns that are legitimate? Because we see hype in consumer markets, we see hype in politics, and hype can often sweep aside reason. So, if you could just comment on that a little bit.
Andreu: It is a way of trying to dominate a discourse or at least frame the discourse regarding a specific topic. And because hype is always interested—and there are some actors that have the ability to create hype cycles and there are other actors who are more, let's say, vulnerable or have more a passive position regarding hype—hype is always a matter of interest for someone. No?
And this means that hype will overstress the positive impacts of some technologies or some products and [overlook] the negative consequences, because hype needs to be simple to be able to circulate rapidly. If you want a hype statement to circulate rapidly—and this affects a lot of politics—you need to make it easily understandable for everyone. No?
So, in the case of AI, this is my position on AI right now, is that AI is a political weapon, but also it’s a weapon not only for market dominance, but also for political dominance. And it carries a lot of political assumptions about the role of the market or the role of the government. No? Like saying, for example, that AI is almost a divine force that comes to change everything. When you're asserting that you are designing a god-like like entity, then there's an implicit statement here that says, we should not be stopped. And we should not be therefore regulated because there's this promise that AI or artificial general intelligence will solve everything.
So, in hyping AI almost as a cosmic force that will bring humanity towards its next stage of civilizational evolution, there's an imposition for, moral, ethical, and economic [oversight]. At the same time, AI actors like Sam Altman when they are talking to politicians, basically what they are doing is to frame the regulatory boundaries of the technologies they are creating, while putting themselves as the moral stewards of the evolution of those technologies.
So here hype is a way of basically framing how we socially think about artificial intelligence and its consequences. And this comes with something that I wanted to mention before, that hype is highly normative, in the sense that not everyone has the same ability to create hype dynamics.
Not everyone is vulnerable to hype in the same, way. So, when big tech players assert or present certain futures as unavoidable. They create normative visions of the future that are uncritically received by stakeholders, by researchers, by regulators, policy makers, funders, media. And by aligning the visions of those actors towards an allegedly unavoidable future, they end up shaping innovation trajectories, driving investment, and also, aligning expectations and therefore structuring collective behavior across entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, journalists, et cetera.
Martin: So, let's, talk a little bit more about that idea of the normativity of it and the idea of hype as an expression of power. Mm-hmm. Because you said not everyone has the ability or the resources to create or, power a hype cycle.
To what extent is hype an expression of economic dominance? It could be in consumer markets; it could be in financial markets; and where those intersect, FinTech and cryptocurrency.
We saw hype leading up to the Great Financial Crisis in the financial markets. Hype seems to precede or express these waves of economic and technological power, right? It takes resources to create these public hype narratives. To what extent is hype sort of tied to economic power in the expression of economic power?
Andreu: Um, that's a great question. First to give a little bit of context, to me, hype is the expression of how information circulates in a stage of capitalism dominated by [the] finance and technology industries.
In fact, almost 50% of the wealth in capital markets is created by a combination of those two industries. No? And in fact the infrastructural condition of our world today, it's the result of the collaboration, at least after the second World War, of finances that needed computation to process prices and fluctuations of markets and so on. And also, we could not understand global economy without information infrastructures that of course are created by the computation, but are needed by the finances.
And at the same time, the advance of the tech industry needs the financial industry; since in the very beginning because of the venture capital industries, when a company goes public, they need hype. So, hype is an inherent property of the techno-financial regime.
Um, you mentioned cryptocurrencies, and to me it was a decisive moment on the democratization, or the attempt of democratizing the ability of creating hype, in relationship to finances. No?
Because you could see like telegram groups or WhatsApp groups of people coming together to start promoting a new cryptocurrency, to create this hype. So, people were actively engaging in the production of hype, and during Covid, I've been in some of those groups doing research and there's like, uh, an amount of excitement and sense of belonging on hyping something new that will come with a promise of revenue and wealth for the participants. That it's super interesting and that, to me, explains a lot the relationship between power, finances, and emotions in contemporary techno-financial capitalism.
There's a lot of literature on precisely challenging the notion of truth and false in economics on how speculative finances—since they create revenue out of value that doesn't exist yet, to make this value tangible, they need to convince other people that this future value has value.
So there's, let's say, there's this proxy, this interface, between the actual economy and the potential economy of speculative finances that needs hype to make the future [happen] in the present.
Martin: So that actually, sparks an idea that I would like to expand if possible. Either through your work or maybe you could talk about, some of the work of your colleagues. You talked about the intersection of finance and technology. I'd like to add to that the idea of the attention economy. The world that we've built seems to be predisposed towards hype as a way of communicating, as a way of creating value.
Culturally speaking, seems like the world that we have created is predisposed towards hype-ification. Talk a little bit about that, if you would—just the cultural aspect of hype and how we may or may not be building a world where we can’t avoid it.
Andreu: Um, there's something in hype that is related to the creation of the illusion of a closing window of opportunity. And this is extremely related to the dynamics of fashion, for example. No? It's like, if you want to be trendy, you need to be fast. If you want to make money, you need to invest fast. It's like there's this socio-technical creation of urgency, and urgency comes with some sort of anxiety. Anxiety of not being where you should be.
Martin: Kind of FOMO in a way.
Andreu: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a way of designing FOMO. No? And making people want to be there very fast. It's super powerful. No? Because especially when it comes to a certain production of a sense of exclusivity, you need to act fast.
Hype, it's very related to the creation of desire—of desire of having something fast, with the immediacy of that is very important in consumer culture today. And as you said, a sense of belonging. You want to be similar to other people that are presented to you as desirable. Talking in terms of fashion, for example.
But also talking in terms of early adopters. There's this relationship between the early adopters and the fashionistas. You want to be the avant-garde of the future. No? Or you want to be the avant-garde in some, like, aesthetic terms, or being very exclusive in the kind of clothes you use.
But this is of course not new. And you've talked about the hype-ification. To me this is really related to the temporalities of finances. Especially in the era of algorithmic trading, they function at an alien speed that we cannot even understand, because algorithmic trading operates at sub-nanoseconds, which is a temporal measure that we cannot perceive as humans.
That affects also the way markets behave and information that markets need to circulate to, let's say, synchronize with the speed of the financial markets. There's this amazing book called Cultures of Financialization by Max Haiven, where he speaks how tropes, metaphors, and procedures of finances are bit by bit leaking into popular culture. There's this concept by Fabian Muniesa, also a Science and Technology Scholar, that explains how financial markets transform every single part of our life into assets—assets that can be traded in the digital market. Tinder, it's a very good example of this, or social media in general.
Martin: It’s the financialization of everything.
Andreu: Exactly. And through this perspective, we can understand why hype-ification becomes so pervasive. Because we are using all kinds of digital platforms to relate to everything. And because the shareholder economy puts pressure on the creators of those technologies to make them profitable, they end up forcing the users to function as competing actors in the economy of attention.
So, people end up transforming themselves into assets that circulate in this market. And because everyone is competing for attention, you need to, let's say, hype-ify yourself. Or to synchronize the way you present yourself with some trends that are hyped. So, you will become more visible to other people, which comes ironically with the consequence of the way we represent ourselves in social media becomes more homogenous.
Martin: So, you talked about people being vulnerable to hype. Is there any way to be less vulnerable to hype when we're surrounded by hype all the time? There are emotional and psychological costs to living in a hype-ified world, aren't there?
Andreu: Hmm. There are like several layers of vulnerability. The less informed a user or a consumer is the more vulnerable [they] will become to hype dynamics. Once you start understanding that the way desire is presented to you is subjected to some inherent corporate interests, or subjective control interests, you start at least to approach to the causes [of your] desire with a grain of salt. You become a little bit more wise, and therefore a little bit less vulnerable.
Martin: What buttons is hype pressing that makes people buy into hype narratives?
Andreu: Um, [Pierre] Bourdieu explained already in the nineties that, especially in the US, when capitalism managed to create, let's say, welfare or wellbeing for most of the population, the markets start to understand that when people are happy, people do not consume a lot. So, capitalism, it's a machine of producing misery.
Advertisement and marketing, of course, are ways of producing needs. But how [do] you produce needs for people who already have everything? By creating a sense of lack. You start to compare. And the reference that social media or publicity is presenting to us are unachievable for most of us. So, there's an endless frustration that [false], uh, consumerism.
And then we live in a state of constant vulnerability and a constant, let's say, sense of lacking something very important that hype instrumentalize. Because hype is about creating things that catch our attention and that are presented as desirable, not only as desirable, but also as unavoidable. And this of course, the FOMO comes with anxiety.
Martin: You did mention before about, the more literate you are, the less vulnerable you are. The problem is that our information ecosystem is so polluted and so geared towards motivating the sense of lack, right, and an inability to discern hype from truth or truth from hype. Particularly going back to the, topic of ai, you see a lot, especially on LinkedIn, you see a lot of advocacy for hype narratives around ai.
It feels like a bit of a catch 22, that to make yourself less vulnerable to hype, you have to be more aware and informed. But the information ecosystem where you would go to get yourself informed is polluted by hype. It seems we're caught somewhat in a cycle.
Andreu: There's a lot in this question, but I will try to go through it, bit by bit.
Like the AI hype, it's so pervasive. I don't know. I teach at the university and sometimes the university, it's forcing teachers to talk about AI, because AI is presented to us as something revolutionary and unavoidable. No? And it's not only in education, like in funding applications in academia, for example, if you talk about AI, there are more chances that you will get a grant fund for example. And this comes with a high vulnerability not only of the individuals, but also the institutions.
And this is why I believe that we should socially start developing some sort of tools to make hype assessment—in educational institutions, in governments, and in every kind of funders. Because when we engage with certain forms of hype, we are engaging also with the political and ideological program of the actors who are hyping those things.
It's obvious we are going through a climate crisis. Maybe buying the new Adidas Gazelle or whatever shoes are hyped, because they are hyped, is not the most responsible in social terms. If we already have a bunch of shoes. No? Like, to me, hype as a communicative dynamic, it's an [irresponsible] form of communication in general. Especially taking into account which kind of values grounds the product that you are hyping.
You know, for example, if you're hyping, let's say, degrowth, which is like living with less, insufficiency, and with stronger economical standards, then this hype might be a good thing. But usually, hype comes as a result of techno-financial capitalism and consumerist society.
LinkedIn is a very clear example of this. No? Because if people are in LinkedIn, it's because it’s a platform to make yourself, as a professional, visible. So even though you are, let's say, discussing in LinkedIn because there are no other safe, healthy social media platforms maybe besides BlueSky or Mastodon, and because it's a marketplace for job[s], then people inherently engage in hype dynamics.
So when something is hype, the people, let's say, surf the hype because it's a platform for people to hype themselves. No? And there's a kind of a paradox because when everyone is trying to hype themself, it's like people screaming to each other and then it's very, very hard to find meaningful ways of communication.
And there's this super interesting book by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou called Speculative Communities, where he explains that the broken promise of neoliberalisms throw people into very deep social precarity. Because our jobs are not stable anymore. But at the same time, we are always socially promised that we can do better. We are constantly in a state of speculation. We will use our assets today to find a secure position or a better position in the future.
And again, you know, the ideal type of neoclassical economics, it's “homo economicus” – homo economicus is supposed to be a rational subject that would go to different shops, compare prices, and buy the most cheap one. We know that we don't operate this way, that we are not rational people, that our emotions are always in the middle when we take decisions.
And populist politics, far right politics, take a lot of advantage of this. No? So, instead of homo economicus, he talks in terms of “homo speculans.” This subject who is constantly engaging in speculative dynamics. And when we are constantly engaging speculative dynamics, we need to constantly hype ourselves to market ourselves. No?
But there's also something that, it's related to, let's say, the informational context or landscape—but also to the metaphysics of our time—that is very related to uncertainty. Precarity comes with uncertainty, and speculation, financial speculation, it’s also grounded uncertainty.
So, when you are facing a lot of uncertainty, what you need to do is to speculate. In terms of projecting yourself to the future, but also to use your imagination in a speculative way. To project yourself to a different situation, to be able to assess which is the best strategy to achieve this desired future.
You need to invoke the non-existent into the existence, but present it as if it was scientific, as if it was real. And this constantly invoking in non-existent entities into the existent reality—while presenting them as if they were reality—there’ an erosion of the way we know reality, because we are constantly exposed to things that, at the end of the day, we know that they are fictional. But we make as if they were not. Because it is convenient for us to engage this fiction if we want to navigate hype.
Martin: So, there were, there are a couple of things in there that I wanna follow up on. One is you mentioned degrowth, and the idea that hyping degrowth is different because it's, I assume because it's a more pro-social kind of choice. But it's very difficult to associate hype with pro-social choices because there's no economic incentive for the hype, right?
If you’re arguing in favor of degrowth, buying less, consuming less, being less materialistic, there's no economic benefit to anyone from that. Not manufacturers, not marketers, not politicians, not even consumers, right? So, it seems like hype is in some ways inextricably tied to some economic incentive, isn't it?
Andreu: That's a very interesting question. Um, yeah, a very nuance one. Hype is related to incentive, of course. We were talking about consumerism. And why people engages in fashion hype, which kind of incentive they have? No? And this is related to a sense of exclusivity, of course. Desire. Sense of belonging.
And also, something related with novelty, because consumerism feeds on the production of novelty. Even though the Adidas Gazelle are not new at all, or the new kind of pants, like in the seventies are not new, but they create a sense of novelty.
Technology innovation does the same. Like sometimes they are just rebranding things that existed before for a long time, with a new name and a new aspect. So, they mobilize desire. Art… contemporary art… It's very good at mobilizing desire.
So, in this sense, why degrowth… I don't know. I'm from Barcelona. Barcelona is a very progressive city compared to most of the other big cities in the world. And degrowth has been kind of hyped here. It's hyped because, it's a feasible and desirable political alternative, but also because it's an interesting new way to think about the world.
And it's challenging because how can we create desire [to get rid of] the consumer use dynamics? It's a kind of twisted, super interesting question. No? And I think this is why more and more artists and designers feel attracted by post-growth, or degrowth narrative, because there's not only desire there, but a novelty. But there are like some sort of paradoxes that are interesting to explore or engage with.
And it has been because Barcelona is one of the, like, global hubs in degrowth research, for some like professional and personal reasons, I'm kind of close to it and it has been super interesting to see how during the pandemics and after, degrowth has started to be more appealing to, as I said before, artists and designers. And how bit-by-bit, it arrives to different kinds of audiences that are engaging to the narratives and frameworks of degrowth from different perspectives.
And to me, there's of course a hyped thing in degrowth, but whose incentive is challenging the business as usual.
Martin: So, is it fair to say that sometimes hype is valuable? That it can add to public discussion, or debate, in a way that's healthy as opposed to unhealthy?
Andreu: Yeah, of course. Just imagine that suddenly deliberative democracy becomes hyped. You know? And people says, “Ah, it's super cool to go into a social media platform devoted to democratic participation.” Like the Decidim, which is a software devoted to this… and “Look I've been discussing this”… and you start to talk to your neighbors, to your friends, trying to hype what you are trying to discuss with other people.
So your city council pays attention to the fact that you need a park in front of your, place. No? And you start to create images with AI or videos. So you hype your need of having a greener city.
This would be a very, let's say, desirable way of, mobilizing hype. But of course, as I said before, the capacity of producing hype is unevenly distributed. Those who have more leverage and power in the media, especially mainstream media—whose advertising system depends on the big companies who pay for the advertising and therefore they frame their agenda—they are complicit in hyping some things that are maybe not the best ones for democratic principles.
And going back to discussing hyped AI, there's a paper that explores why journalists talk about AI hype. No?
Martin: That was gonna be my next question. You mentioned media about journalism and to the extent that it should be a journalistic obligation to see through the hype and question hype, especially when hype is leading to antisocial consequences. So, in a world that is more and more hype-ified, what is the responsibility of journalism and journalists to see through the hype, call out the hype, breakthrough the hype, be skeptical of the hype? What's the impact on journalism in your view?
Andreu: I think that before talking about the responsibility that journalism have in terms of dealing with hype, we should question whether journalists are free to go through hype. Because in the clickbait economy of information, most of the journalists, they don't have the choice of questioning hype.
Let's say Steve Bannon for example was gaining a lot of traction in the media ecosystem… even though he's engaging not democratic principles, journalists might be interested in talking to him. No? And with AI it's like even like clearer. You cannot escape talking about AI if everyone is talking about AI, because it's like, if I don't talk about AI, other people will, and then I will lose readers.
And sometimes AI is just a metaphor. Of course, like, we should debate what we mean with artificial and what we mean with intelligence. And we've been debating about what is intelligence since the beginning of Western philosophy. So, it's not an easy question to answer.
And of course, if as a journalist you start talking like, “Ah, look, there's this statistic model that makes some predictions,” and so on. No you need to create a sense of re-enchantment in the reader. So, they're either kind of flies with, you know, and dreams with you.
So, in a context where, journalism is based on advertising and advertising is based on traffic, I'm not sure there's much place to fight hype.
Martin: If you had to explain what kind of storytelling hype is, it seems like it has some threads of utopian storytelling, heroic storytelling. What kind of storytelling is hype and why does it make it so successful in terms of its emotional appeal?
Andreu: That's a very interesting question. I'm not an expert, at all, on storytelling. So, maybe we can have more like a conversation to make sense together of it. But obviously, there's always a technology—talking in terms of technology hype—that comes to change everything.
And sometimes we don't even need a problem to be solved. We just need a promise that something will change. And the way media, like, claims that virtual reality will disrupt education, or will change everything, or artificial intelligence is here to stay… These kinds of claims come with a story of revolution. There's like a state of things and something new appears to change everything.
It tends to be utopian, but sometimes it's dystopian or apocalyptic. No? And apocalyptic narratives are super appealing for the audience. No? And this is why AI is also so interesting, and both Elon Musk and Sam Altman have leveraged apocalyptic narratives because it’s something that really appeals to media.
But in any case, the relationship to AI, the eschatological narrative of that's the end of a civilizational moment—because we are reaching the end of, let's say, liberal democracy or human supremacy, because AI will overcome our intelligence, for example, or this technology will suddenly outperform our capacities and we will be able to go to the stars and conquer the universe—I think that this kind of like over exaggerated technological narrative, open a deep, long future threshold that gives space for more complex narratives about what technology can do.
And, usually technology hype comes all from charismatic figures. And those charismatic figures sometimes play the hero, sometimes play the villain, or sometimes play both.
When you are hyping a technology that is projecting complex future visions, then those promises that comes with uncertainty. So, we need to use fiction to fill those uncertainties. And this is fun because we like, the stories. No? But in narrative terms, I'm not an expert on this, but I will be super happy to hear your take on this.
Martin: As far as storytelling goes, I think it is utopian. I think it is kind of heroic storytelling. It appeals to a very postmodern idea that you hear all the time, self-actualization. It's a kind of a romantic tale, where the hero triumphs in the end.
There's a positive trajectory always to hype that's gonna take us someplace better than we are today, which is what you were talking about before, about instilling a feeling of lack. Which is again that paradox where it's presenting something exaggeratedly positive, but in such a way that it makes you feel a sense of lack that makes you want to participate in the hype. So, I think from a storytelling point of view, it has some very successful aspects to it, which is why it's so hard to resist.
It seems like our world is becoming ever more hype-ified. The more immersive our technology gets, the more it pulls us away from engaging with the physical real world. It seems like hype is endemic, and it's increasing, and it's not going anywhere. And if anything, we are going to have to deal with more hype rather than less.
But in terms of your studies and what you've researched, if you had to write the next chapter of hype and its role in society, what would that look like?
Andreu: If I was the writer, what I would do is to help governments to understand which are the political agendas that comes with, in particular, technology hype. How some of the American tech leaders are really against democratic principles and how the technologies they are hyping—whether they are crypto technologies, AI, uh, space travels—they come with a program that aims at eroding democratic institutions.
So, the next chapter would be, let's say healthy forms of, hype that can help us face the consequences of climate change and the erosion of our democratic institutions.
Martin: If you're not writing the next chapter, if the hypers are writing the next chapter, where does that take us?
Andreu: I like to talk the thesis of one of the co-founders of the Hype Studies Group, Vassilis Galanos, who's now in the University of Sterling in Scotland. And there he did empirical research on how AI experts related to the very idea of AI expectations, and how the very category of AI was something that was useful at some moments, when it was a lever to attract funding.
But sometimes when AI was related to bullshit, people would discard it and talk in terms of “machine learning,” or “neural networks,” for example. Because when a category or a technology becomes too hyped, it starts becoming what they call epistemically toxic. Meaning that it becomes bullshit.
And when researchers research through or which categories that are empty, it's very hard to conduct research. No? Like for example artificial general intelligence, the idea of generality is not academically defined. So how will you research and advance towards artificial general intelligence if you don't know what generality means? No?
This undermines and intoxicates techno-scientific research.
So, in the case powerful techno-financial actors keep hyping their technologies and imposing to us their visions of the future… I would say that our way of intervening into the world in, let's say, transformative positive ways will diminish. Our capacity to have rational and meaningful discussions will diminish. And some of the, let's say, like “knowledge cathedral” that we've built through modernity, with all its problems, all its forms of exclusion, will start to break down, and then we might not have a shelter where to live.
Martin: Intellectually or physically or both?
Andreu: I would say intellectually and existentially, and taking into account the speculative dynamics with housing… physically as well. So, what happens when tech leaders start presenting technologies as engines for civilizational transformation—like artificial general intelligence or quantum computing. No? And those technologies are presented to us as if they were about to arrive very soon, but they don't arrive.
So, there's a lot of uncertainty. And again when there's a lot of uncertainty, we socially need to use fiction fill in… So they are huge stimulus for social imagination. And in particular to artificial general intelligence, compared to many other technologies, artificial general intelligence have been proposed first by philosophers and then very recently by people like Sam Altman or Mark Andreessen, who are first and foremost venture capitalists.
And venture capitals have a very specific kind of imagination. It's, as I said before, it's speculative in financial terms. They want to make profit out of things that doesn't exist yet. And they are speculative because they are future oriented. So artificial general intelligence was created as a socio-technical fiction in itself.
When OpenAI was presented, it didn't even have a business model. So with which kind of companies we're starting to deal with when not even the need for profit is necessary? In fact, OpenAI has leveraged the biggest investment rounds in history. But no one knows what the business model will be. No one knows what the technology will do. And therefore this comes with conceptual uncertainty, economic uncertainty, governance uncertainty.
Because if they are creating a technology that will operate as a god—because it will overcome our intelligence by much—how will democratically manage this? If this is created by private companies?
So, those kinds of long-term technologies are sustained by let's say a fictional universe of uncertainties, that stimulates imagination in many different layers. But not only this, they stimulate investment in ways that we haven't seen before. Because they attract the interest of very extremely wealthy investors with extremely ambitious objectives of world domination.
Martin: You have a conference coming up in September. What kinds of disciplines will be represented? Just give people an idea of the various dimensions of hype and how you and your colleagues are analyzing it.
Andreu: Well, this will depend on the participants, of course. But we are aiming at doing an extremely interdisciplinary conference. Inviting people from journalists, psychology, communication, science and technology studies, sociology, art, design… and we're also very interested not only in analytical entry points, but we would like also to see people that work with hype, and see how can we do research on hype while doing hype.
So, part of it will try to conceptualize hype. We'll also welcome like many case studies. And we also invited artist and designers to see works that play with the very idea of hype.
Martin: Sounds like it's gonna be a great conference. Andreu, can't thank you enough for being here today and talking about this really, really important subject.
If anyone wants to connect with Andreu, a link to his LinkedIn profile will be at the bottom of the transcript, and we'll also include a link to the Hype Studies Conference homepage where you can submit abstracts, get information, and register.
Thanks very much for tuning in. This has been another episode of LiteralMayhem.
[Links = Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves and the Hype Studies Conference.]
