How Hype Builds the Future
"Software is eating the world", were the famous words of Marc Andreessen, who founded Netscape in the 90s. Correctly he points out that software, and technology more broadly has disrupted nearly every industry we can imagine, built entirely new ones and will continue to disrupt industries that are yet to exist long into the future.
Technology, however, has (traditionally) taken a long time to develop and mature. At least in the scope of business cycles. For example, the iPhone was not created overnight nor all of the apps that came to be associated with it. Years of investment were required into touchscreens and other mobile technologies that led to its development. Andreessen emphasises this "deployment phase" - the long period where new technologies go through extensive development before suddenly becoming ubiquitous.
These visionary ideas, though disruptive and ultimately beneficial, are not cheap pursuits. Often they require years of investment with no guarantee of return. Building genuinely transformative technology demands what Andreessen calls "patient capital" - sustained funding for experiments that will mostly fail, but where the few successes can reshape entire industries.
Hype as we now call it, is often seen as an inherently bad thing, and whilst it doesn't do much direct service to technical conversations - hype is a critical part of cultivating the resources necessary to see that vision through. Rather than seeing boom-bust or "hype cycles" as failures, these are just natural and healthy corrections in the market.
Of course, critics of hype cycles raise valid concerns. The dot-com crash and recent crypto volatility show that excessive optimism can lead to painful corrections and wasted resources. Hype can sometimes direct capital toward flashy but ultimately hollow technologies while overlooking more practical innovations.
However, these downsides, while real, miss the bigger picture of how transformative innovation actually happens.
Silicon Valley perhaps more than any other place on earth geographically embodies this hype, it presents as a place of raw optimism - where VC money defines the landscape. This culture of optimistic investment is precisely what enables betting on ideas that seem impossible to more conservative markets.
However, without this raw optimism and the resources of the hype cycle these ideas and technological leaps forward simply wouldn't be possible. Rather than seeing the hype as a bug, it's a built in feature of the funding model that drives technology forward.
Scepticism for all its value in keeping us grounded, is not a great vision for selling speculative disruptive change - that often might take years, if not decades to fully realise as the case may be with AI. The technologies we take for granted today - smartphones, social media, cloud computing - all went through periods where they seemed overhyped and underdelivered. The difference is that Silicon Valley's optimistic culture kept investment flowing even when progress seemed frustratingly slow.
Take AI as a current example. Critics dismissing it as "just hype" miss the real value being created - from drug discovery and protein folding to how we write code and process information. Yes, the predictions about AGI might be premature, but the technology is already reshaping industries. The hype has mobilised unprecedented resources toward solving genuinely hard problems. Those focused on debunking the excitement, risk overlooking the substantial progress happening beneath the noise.
Without the hype, we might live in a more stable world, but also a significantly less innovative one.