In December 2023, just as ChatGPT marked its first birthday, Politico asked Signal president and tech critic Meredith Whittaker which tech trend she thought was most “overhyped.” The role of a critic, the interviewer seemed to assume, is to draw a line between promise and reality, between hype and fact.
Whittaker, however, decided to sidestep the question. Rather than pointing to any particular technology, she suggested that “the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype.”
Today hype is nowhere more ubiquitous than in the world of artificial intelligence. From superintelligence to outer space data centers, AI certainly seems to inspire ever wilder fever dreams. Every PR stunt is followed by a debunking, and every stellar revenue prediction countered by a bubble warning, and yet the hype trend — despite recent doubts from famed short sellers like Michael Burry — seems to only go in one direction: up.
The seeming ineffectiveness of anti-hype (no matter how correct the anti-hype may be) suggests that Whittaker’s little sidestep is important. Instead of playing whack-a-hype-mole, she suggests that the aim of critique should be “understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.” The promises of a technology differ from its real effects, and the gap between those two seems to grow ever more pronounced. Surely hype, PR, and constant over-promising are part of this.
But is hype all there is to the chasm? And why is there a chasm in the first place? Why, Whittaker encourages us to ask, are the promises of technology always so loud and always so hollow?
In Whittaker’s framing, hype isn’t so much about particular technologies, start-ups in general, or even Silicon Valley culture overall, but it is inherent to a particular way to reinvest past profits: venture capital (VC). In other words, the production of hype is a question of political economy.
For…
Auteur: Hagen Blix
