Criti-hype, a term I find both absurd and ugly-cute, like a pug
Cory Doctorow, who has a new four-part CBC podcast series entitled Who Broke The Internet? wrote this week about the [‘mind-control ray’]9pluralistic.net/2025/05/0…) that Mark Zuckerberg keeps “flogging to investors.” What he means by this is the overblown claim that Meta is developing technology that is so amazing at making people buy stuff that investors fall over themselves to shovel money in his company’s direction.
One of the things that Cory is great at doing is linking to other, previous, relevant things that he’s written in the area. Which took me to a post from 2021, which discusses the phenomenon of ‘criti-hype’, coined by Lee Vinsel:
Recently…I’ve become increasingly aware of critical writing that is parasitic upon and even inflates hype. The media landscape is full of dramatic claims — many of which come from entrepreneurs, startup PR offices, and other boosters — about how technologies, such as “AI,” self-driving cars, genetic engineering, the “sharing economy,” blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, will lead to massive societal shifts in the near-future. These boosters — Elon Musk comes to mind — naturally tend to accentuate positive benefits. The kinds of critics that I am talking about invert boosters’ messages — they retain the picture of extraordinary change but focus instead on negative problems and risks. It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.
[…]
But it’s not just uncritical journalists and fringe writers who hype technologies in order to criticize them. Academic researchers have gotten in on the game. At least since the 1990s, university researchers have done work on the social, political, and moral aspects of wave after wave of “emerging technologies” and received significant grants from public and private bodies to do so. As I’ll detail below, many (though certainly not all) of these researchers reproduced and even increased hype, the most dramatic promotional claims of future change put forward by industry executives, scientists, and engineers working on these technologies. Again, at the worst, what these researchers do is take the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip them, and start talking about “risks.” They become the professional concern trolls of technoculture.
To save words below, I will refer to criticism that both feeds and feeds on hype as criti-hype, a term I find both absurd and ugly-cute, like a pug. (Criti-hype is less mean than the alternative, hype-o-crit, though the latter is often more accurate.)
I have seen a lot of criti-hype in my career. Around MOOCs and Open Badges, around digital literacies, crypto, and now around AI. It’s the opposite of the “jam tomorrow” offered by tech bros. Kind of a… “poison tomorrow” approach? Everything is terrible, stop using this thing because of these bad omens and portents.
We live in a world where, because of algorithms, to get any attention, things either have to be amazing or terrible. I guess this is why a lot of my work flies under the radar. For example, the Friends of the Earth report that Laura and I co-authored points out good things and bad things and is pretty measured. But that doesn’t lead to outlandish headlines. It’s neither hype nor criti-hype.
Source: Lee Vinsel (archive link)
Image: Matthew Henry