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.