CAN WE ASSESS HYPE?
Hype Studies explores how hype distributes attention, power and resources, but also how it frames what is desirable, unavoidable and invisible. Consequently, it influences political regulation, as well as R&D pathways and investment directions.
At the beginning of June Wenzel Mehnert, Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves and Jascha Bareis organized a double panel on hype assessment at the ETAC6 in Vienna.
It turned out that addressing hype is essential to confronting technopolitics, especially in a context where the foundational assumptions of TA, such as the idea that rational decision making can steer technological futures through public debate, have lost legitimacy. In the meantime, while the promise that informed publics would deliberate and guide science and technology has eroded, yet we continue to act as if science and reason alone will resolve our polycrisis.
Why should TA and responsible innovation engage with hype? Because hype:
- Drives tech journalism and shapes public agendas
- Creates enthusiasm and inflates the value of products
- Private communicators use it more than public researchers, deepening inequalities
- Financialisation of R&D encourages exaggerated promises despite weak technical foundations
- Functions as an instrument in geopolitical tech arms races
- Plays a role in sociotechnical transition projects, especially those leaning toward technocracy
- Can both foster and undermine technological developments
- Is entangled in controversies and greenwashing dynamics
- Is embedded in forecast reports that guide public and private decisions
- Is mobilised to meet industrial goals, such as cultivated meat
- Generates hope, which influences behaviour
- Relies on neologisms, with science fiction providing the semantic infrastructure where new meanings are created
- In moonshot projects like AI or quantum, comes loaded with civilisational promises
- Is actively engaged by states, both as producers and reproducers of hype
- Is a political force mobilised by hegemonic actors
⚡ So, assessing hype implies ⚡
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Strengthening the political economy perspective in emerging technology analysis
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Developing a clear anti-anti-democratic TA stance and futures literacy
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Tracing the anti democratic path dependencies embedded in technological visions
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Observing which imaginaries and knowledge systems are systematically marginalised
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Creating spaces for public debate that contest hyped future visions, expose power concentrations, and examine the technological governance they imply
The contributions to the panel can be accessed here:
Hype and the Cyberlibertarian Transition: A Call for Hype Assessment
-- Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves
TA and dysfunctional liberal democracy: Bridging crisis through a politics of hype
-- Jascha Bareis
“Strong Opinions, Weakly Held”: How Hype Shapes Narrative in Silicon Valley
-- Michelle Venetucci
Fictional Technofutures: Exploring the Role of Science Fiction in contributing to a global hype of emerging technologies
-- Wenzel Mehnert
Quantum Computing: Another Trip up the Hype Curve?
-- Dave Rejeski
Hype, Neglect, and the Future(s) of Cultivated Meat
-- Arianna Ferrari
Cultivated Meat: a Hyped Technology Neglected by (Global) TA?
-- Martina Baumann
Hopes and Hypes in Technology Dynamics for Societal Transformation
-- Filippo Reale
Journalistic Hype: WIRED's Coverage of NFTs, Metaverses and Generative AI
-- Guillermo Echauri
From Hype to Responsibility: How researchers navigate expectations in communicating (medical) AI
-- Dominic Lammar,
-- Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller
