When you can actually see it improving life, for one, rather than just improving efficiency, which doesn't really benefit the individual but only the corporation.
Is there any rational scheme to how they numbered the toilet components? If they had started with the handle at 1 and proceeded in the order of operation, the diagram would explain the process all by itself.
There was no hype at all about the white plastic they put in your teeth instead of gold or amalgam. There was no hype about bullet trains, they just happened.
Hype happens when people don't really need a product and the marketing machine has to compensate. It helps if the product seems like magic for the first month and then becomes obnoxious and boring without marketing.
The author misses the crucial final stretch of tying all that logic concretely into Bitcoin; indispensable through infrastructure and habit. The tulip bubble (Holland 1634-1637) didn't get the fastest-growing ETF in history in year 15.
An example of tech that was super hyped and deservedly popularand faded later is the Rubik's Cube.
There was a real rage in the press and in the street after it was released. Now it can still be bought, but most people would consider it uninteresting.
Man, that is really a story. I do remember tabs. They were this revolution in browsing. You could look at two things so easily. "Open in New Tab".
I love to "folks these days" so I shall. Folks these days don't know what a revolution Firefox was. Before that there were no "web standards" or anything. You had IE6 compatible and Netscape compatible and this and that. Linux web browsers would struggle to render pages. They came up with these ACID tests and these standards.
And Firefox was crazy back then. People now would lose their shit over the "lack of consent". People were talking about how they'd install Firefox and give it the IE logo so their parents would use it and everyone would talk up its leanness and this and that.
You couldn't get Netflix on Linux. It needed Silverlight to enforce DRM. These days the web is the platform. The complexity in the runtime and every application runs on Linux. Man, I never could have guessed 20 years ago that this would happen.
For me the fastest I've seen mind-blowing technology go from sci-fi to banal is LLMs. When TalkToTransformer first allowed you to do it there was this completion model that seemed insane. Like magic. Now, everyone I know uses an LLM for all sorts of things. It's so integrated into life. Wild.
Hype is the difference between the buzz around something and what it can actually deliver, and lasts as long as those selling the hype can convince people that difference is small or zero.
This is an amusing attempt at finding the field of marketing through a first principals analysis of some successful products.
Could have fun by looking at any social spread. Not just of a technology through the society. Fashion similarly spreads. Behavioral patterns spread. Language usage. All of it.
Two good books that intersect technology, hype, and economics/finance are Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Perez (going back to the 1700s):
Most actually innovation (in the US?) occurred from about 1920-1950,† with mainstream acceptance from 1950-1980, with very little newness (leading to economic/productivity growth) occurring post 1980s: the main exception of course being computers and the Internet, but that seems to have maxed out in the '00s.
† The (first?) Industrial Revolution is discussed, as well as early scientific discoveries that led to later engineering development that turned into usable products.
I started disabling tabs in my editors and only using the quick open menus, and got back a lot of time wasted managing tabs. Saw it in a presentation from someone at Jetbrains long ago and tried it with some skepticism at first but I am a convert now.
I was expecting the story to go: look at the toilet flush mechanism, such a simple gravity/float device with such a wondrous utility — arguably, one can make it themselves with not much experience or tooling (it might not work as well, and might leak a bit, but it really is simple IMO).
Conflating "hype" with the "business cycle" is not a good choice. The content is interesting reading once you move past that.
The business cycle would likely exist in the absence of emotional choices. Part of it is that businesses that are near-failure tend to fail when the economy declines, which causes additional decline. This means that near-failure tends to build up during good times and then fail en masse during a decline.
There are technologies that actually solve genuine problems or meaningfully improve people's lives, and then there are technologies that are immensely overhyped solutions desperately looking for problems. We're having too much of the latter kind lately.
Hype is foremost a word embedded in a framework of specific values and a specific concept cluster. It's a pejorative used by a variety of factions: those who share the values, and concepts, but are in some fashion competitors or allied with competitors, etc.; or, those who have a different set of values.
Most human behavior, especially commercial and economic, is a function of one's own received beliefs—and one's observations about and participation in the beliefs of others.
Whether a given assertion is factual is secondary to whether it alters belief.
Though I suppose even "belief" is too strong a word. Let's say "behavior."
One need to not believe the hype, to seek to extract value from a market.
The question I'd look it is, how are beliefs and behavior shaped by various assertions, and how well do those assertions correspond to various observations and predictions about the nature of reality—including collective behaviors.
The funny thing about ponzy schemes and hysterical markets is that the usual account about how they form and how they collapse, hand waves around the core of the whole question: the source of value.
A good socialist materialist might attempt to link value to utility amid other prosaic and pragmatic qualities,
but our nature as a social species—one motivated in increasing part as we shuffle down the hierarchy of needs by intangibles such as status and its signaling—means that even the concept of utility is just another contentious ambiguity.
17 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 33.8 ms ] threadThose supermen... when I first wake up I crawl to the coffee pot.
Hype happens when people don't really need a product and the marketing machine has to compensate. It helps if the product seems like magic for the first month and then becomes obnoxious and boring without marketing.
There was a real rage in the press and in the street after it was released. Now it can still be bought, but most people would consider it uninteresting.
I love to "folks these days" so I shall. Folks these days don't know what a revolution Firefox was. Before that there were no "web standards" or anything. You had IE6 compatible and Netscape compatible and this and that. Linux web browsers would struggle to render pages. They came up with these ACID tests and these standards.
And Firefox was crazy back then. People now would lose their shit over the "lack of consent". People were talking about how they'd install Firefox and give it the IE logo so their parents would use it and everyone would talk up its leanness and this and that.
You couldn't get Netflix on Linux. It needed Silverlight to enforce DRM. These days the web is the platform. The complexity in the runtime and every application runs on Linux. Man, I never could have guessed 20 years ago that this would happen.
For me the fastest I've seen mind-blowing technology go from sci-fi to banal is LLMs. When TalkToTransformer first allowed you to do it there was this completion model that seemed insane. Like magic. Now, everyone I know uses an LLM for all sorts of things. It's so integrated into life. Wild.
Could have fun by looking at any social spread. Not just of a technology through the society. Fashion similarly spreads. Behavioral patterns spread. Language usage. All of it.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
And The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Gordon:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Most actually innovation (in the US?) occurred from about 1920-1950,† with mainstream acceptance from 1950-1980, with very little newness (leading to economic/productivity growth) occurring post 1980s: the main exception of course being computers and the Internet, but that seems to have maxed out in the '00s.
† The (first?) Industrial Revolution is discussed, as well as early scientific discoveries that led to later engineering development that turned into usable products.
The business cycle would likely exist in the absence of emotional choices. Part of it is that businesses that are near-failure tend to fail when the economy declines, which causes additional decline. This means that near-failure tends to build up during good times and then fail en masse during a decline.
Most human behavior, especially commercial and economic, is a function of one's own received beliefs—and one's observations about and participation in the beliefs of others.
Whether a given assertion is factual is secondary to whether it alters belief.
Though I suppose even "belief" is too strong a word. Let's say "behavior."
One need to not believe the hype, to seek to extract value from a market.
The question I'd look it is, how are beliefs and behavior shaped by various assertions, and how well do those assertions correspond to various observations and predictions about the nature of reality—including collective behaviors.
The funny thing about ponzy schemes and hysterical markets is that the usual account about how they form and how they collapse, hand waves around the core of the whole question: the source of value.
A good socialist materialist might attempt to link value to utility amid other prosaic and pragmatic qualities,
but our nature as a social species—one motivated in increasing part as we shuffle down the hierarchy of needs by intangibles such as status and its signaling—means that even the concept of utility is just another contentious ambiguity.