Expanding Hype Literacy to Protect Democracy

There are some signs that recent enthusiasm for tech stocks driven by the promise of generative AI is beginning to wane. Looking at a longer period of development, from the dotcom bust twenty-five years ago to the current AI boom, technology hype continues to shape the global economy as well as politics and culture. Far from being a neutral byproduct of technology adoption cycles, hype is a deliberate project that steers the collective imagination for what is possible towards futures that often benefit elites. To resist hype and the ways in which it rewards the powerful and abets authoritarianism, we must recognize hype not just as an economic or a technological phenomenon, but as a political one.

21st century of hype

This century started with the bursting of a technology bubble.The popularization of the World Wide Web in the 1990s promised to revolutionize everything: business, education, communication, entertainment, and politics. As a territory to be economically exploited, the internet became the new Dorado for those who “dared” to be innovative and to embrace risk.

Between 1994 and 2000, venture capital investment rose from $1.5 billion to $90 billion, flooding the market with internet startups that had no profits, no revenue, no infrastructure, and often not even a clear business model. However, these emerging companies were opening the gate towards “the new economy,” and media outlets were on fire with heroic stories of young digital revolutionaries—many of whom would become today’s tech gurus and enter the heart of political power. Not by chance, the NASDAQ index, the exchange platform for technology companies in the stock market, increased fivefold from 1995 to March 2000.

This gold rush met its limit in a perfect storm: investors began to realize that dot-com companies were not profitable enough, while the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates six times, making borrowing more expensive and risky investments less attractive. This situation unleashed the infamous dot-com bubble burst. By late 2002 the NASDAQ lost 78% of its value and many internet companies and small venture capital firms vanished. The political optimism of neoliberal market deregulation that dominated Western governments in the 80s and 90s suffered a big crack. The same media that celebrated and carried hype were now reporting on failure, greed and fraud.

The phenomenon of hype: speculation, traction, frenzy

This is a paradigmatic case of technology hype. This phenomenon, as we study in the ‘Hype Studies’ research arena, has a social, cultural, political and economic nature. Tech-hype is characterized by the fascination with future-oriented technologies: exaggerated and unrealistic promises of value development are coupled with a strident optimism that captures the attention of investors, technologists, politicians, journalists, and the general citizenry.

Although usually regarded as a natural process, hype is never accidental: it is strategically crafted by tech companies and their CEOs to over-stress the positive implications of technology while undermining the negative ones. Hype’s objective is not to give literacy of the future, like scenarios or visions, but to attract attention, funding and clients. Any play in the emotional register, any proclamation of bold promises is legitimate in hype to entertain followers and venture capital so that they embark on “surfing the wave.”

Hype generates momentum. In its beginnings, it involves a peak of inflated expectations. This creates the illusion of a closing window of opportunity, the impression of being enlightened by a revelation, of being part of a decisive moment – what the ancient Greeks once called kairos. This sense of urgency fuels an emotional frenzy across all domains of society. Hype is fueled by desire and the feeling of belonging to a select group of the very few. Once hype reaches its peak, it tends to wave, creating disappointment, fear and frustration. Both in its ascending and descending curve, hype urges stakeholders to decide and act.

We want to insist on this point: hype is not accidental. To turbocharge initial growth, startup manuals encourage entrepreneurs to overstate their technologies, epitomized by the “fake it until you make it” and “think big” credos. Similarly, incubators and accelerators — such as Y Combinator, where Sam Altman served as president — train founders to pitch in ways that exaggerate market size, readiness, and traction, often using polished but incomplete prototypes. Many investors explicitly urge founders to paint the most ambitious picture of their product, framing it as a necessary survival tactic in competitive funding rounds. This narrative element shows a fundamental dynamic in hype. It is not that hypers lie — it is rather that they do not care about categories of truth or falsehood, about the difference of fact and belief. The ability to craft a compelling story is a prerequisite to attract funding for a new venture. Anything that works on the impression management stage in order to ignite a media frenzy, enchant investors, shine in the outlines or burst feeds on social media serves the purpose.

Everybody wants a bite of the apple

Leveraging on the early 21st century “revolutions” that resulted in hype waves, (the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, Big Data, Nanotechnology, Cloud Computing, the Platform Economy, the Maker movement, Virtual Reality, the Internet of Things), the cult of innovation has leaked into schools, city councils, small businesses, and governments, making the entrepreneurial culture around tech-hype a structural element in processes of contemporary sociotechnical change.

Building on novelty and spectacle, hype circulates rapidly, turning fictional visions into plausible trajectories. As the bubble around “the new economy” showed, tech-hype is the result of a double speculation: a financial one, aimed at multiplying investment returns in risky ventures; and a social one, where companies attract attention by promising disruptive advancements through technology that shall create unprecedented social opportunities.

Understandably, everybody wants a bite of the apple, including people in precarious economic circumstances that want to secure their pension, betting their little savings in the stock market. Journalists staging sensationalist “tech-revolutionary” headlines in search for clickbait and page rank. Or politicians, who polish governmental agendas towards shiny trajectories of tech-innovation and industrial growth in the quest for political re-election. All of these actors are needed to carry the hype —but all of them also expose themselves to the whims of the markets and their hype puppeteers that use the myth of “innovation” to satisfy shareholder greediness.

Since not everyone has the same ability to generate and decipher hype, nor profits from it in the same way, hype becomes a crucial arena of economic and political struggle. In the competitive race of the tech industry to achieve a monopoly position over competitors in the market, it is a battle of eat or be eaten. Given these circumstances it is of little surprise that hype thrives: inflated promises, gambling, bragging, bullshitting, even fraud are the rule rather than the exception in the Silicon Valley start-up ethos. In the survival of the richest and the most reckless, the ability to create and spread hype frames innovation, political, and media agendas.

Tech hype and its dangerous politics

In an increasingly financialized society marked by inequality and the deterioration of common goods, tech-hype becomes a dangerous force in at least two ways. First, those with less information and literacy about emerging technologies and markets are more vulnerable to the seductive promises of easy revenue. As the pyramid schemes of cryptocurrencies — where first investors sell when the value falls, leaving the newcomers to deal with the losses — show, hype comes as a promise of wealth.

Since the investor and startup culture that confuses progress with technology is becoming increasingly pervasive, citizenry embrace the Wall Street and Silicon Valley credo of “high risk, high reward,” often without considering that for insiders this is a calculated move with a safety net beneath them and the ability to quickly relocate capital. This reinforces dynamics of dispossession, in which the more privileged extract resources from the more vulnerable.

Secondly, hegemonic tech-hype is often driven by utopian promises of salvation that combine with the siren songs of inevitability, while it also advances a transition towards cyberlibertarian futures. The notion of cyberlibertarianism was coined in the mid-1990s philosopher of technology Langdon Winner — and recently expanded by the late David Golumbia — to describe a wide technocratic ideology rooted in the belief that free markets and meritocracy are not only more efficient, but absolutely necessary for individualist freedom — and a better social ordering principle than the democratic state. Cyberlibertarians often frame regulation, democratic accountability, and rights-based governance as obstacles to be bypassed by their tech-ruled vision of the future.

Hence, tech-hype is not only an opportunity for financial speculation, but also a catalyst for ideologies that apply the social-Darwinist mechanism of economic survival to the social sphere. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen writes in his Techo-Optimist Manifesto: “societies, like sharks, grow or die.” Natural selection does not allow a space for all in the future.

The need for hype literacy

In a historical context where tech leaders are openly embracing neo-reactionary (and intellectually shallow, ill-informed) positions such as the dark enlightenment and effective accelerationism, assessing hype is critical. Especially when the myth of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) —a sociotechnical fiction itself, since it has been repeatedly considered unachievable through Large Language Models — has amassed the largest private capital investment round in history. The cocktail of deep pocket actors embracing both unrealistic visions and extreme political positions make hype a strategy to make imagination come true — and therefore an urgent matter of political attention.

Even more so because, while the dot-com bubble burst, the power has never shifted. The nerdy geeks of Web 2.0 era became the Rockefellers, prophets, and media moguls of today. It is not only that they are obscenely rich: they hold the reins to steer the hype machine. With AI they own the algorithmic models and the dreamscapes for “limitless” growth and, more recently, lean towards a kind of Christian, crude prophetism. With LLM chatbots they increasingly take over societal “knowledge” production; and with social media platforms they control massive data and the flow of information dissemination in the “public” sphere. These are the perfect preconditions to ignite tech hype and let their ideologies circulate and thrive.

Current Western governments, from the White House to the European Commission, do not seek to temper tech hype, but rather have invited the purveyors of hype to the heart of power. Never before could tech bros like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Alex Karp, Mark Zuckerberg (the list is long) so openly preach their anti-democratic agendas while being encouraged and supported to do their business in democracies around the world.

Therefore, understanding and dismantling the current rise of techno-authoritarianism requires the creation of a hype literacy. Assessing hype as a political instrument can help policy makers and regulators, journalists and citizenry to be less vulnerable to the mandates of eugenic future visions that are presented as natural and inevitable by some tech-gurus.

This means understanding that hyping a technology involves embracing specific ideologies, that hype follows a script, that it fosters certain market actors and prioritizes certain futures over others. Being aware of who is included and who is excluded from these future visions, and observing who benefits from tech-hype, both economically and politically, can help reinforce democratic sovereignty in the face of the colonial dynamics of Big Tech.