How to Study the Phenomenon of Tech Hype

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AI hype is everywhere, and the CEOs of many tech firms are promising that the tech will soon eclipse human intelligence. The trillions in investment towards this goal and the massive deployment of capital and the human and natural resources it purchases both requires this kind of hype and causes it to compound.

Today’s guests are studying this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, building out a line of inquiry they call "Hype Studies." It's the subject of an occasional series of contributions to Tech Policy Press.

Guests include:

• Jascha Bareis, a postdoctoral political scientist at the University of Fribourg;
• Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves, a sociologist of design and technology pursuing a PhD at the Tecnopolítica unit of the Open University of Catalonia;
• Marché Arends, a South African independent investigative journalist.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

Good morning. I'm Justin Hendrix, editor of Tech Policy Press. We publish news, analysis, and perspectives on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy. AI hype is everywhere and the CEOs of the world's biggest companies are promising that the tech will soon eclipse human intelligence. Elon Musk is a good example.

Elon Musk:

The rate at which AI is progressing, I think we might have AI that is smarter than any human by the end of this year, and I would say no later than next year.

Laurence D. Fink:

Wow.

Elon Musk:

And then probably by 2030 or 2031, call it five years from now, AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively.

Justin Hendrix:

The trillions in investment towards this goal and the massive deployment of capital and the human and natural resources it purchases both requires this kind of hype and causes it to compound. Today's guests are studying this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, building out a line of inquiry they call Hype Studies. We've been running an occasional series in the subject on Tech Policy Press. Let's jump right in.

Jascha Bareis:

Hello, my name is Jascha Bareis, I'm a postdoc at the University of Fribourg, and I'm a political scientist, looking at civilian and military AI, especially the political communication around these two phenomena, and I'm a co-founder of the Hype Studies Group.

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves:

My name is Andreu Belsunces, I'm a sociologist of Science and Technology at Open University of Catalonia, I've been for the last, let's say five years, been studying the relationship between economy, the future technology and politics, and along with Jascha Bareis and other colleagues, I'm also co-founder of Hype Studies.

Marché Arends:

I'm Marché Arends. I am an independent investigator journalist from South Africa, I'm based in Cape Town. My work currently is at the intersection of big tech accountability and labor in the global majority. I am an associate of Hype Studies.

Justin Hendrix:

A lot of folks, when they think about hype, they might just think about it as enthusiasm or marketing noise. What's wrong with that understanding? Why are you trying to establish Hype Studies as something distinct from perhaps that lay understanding of what hype is in the world?

Jascha Bareis:

So, we started looking at Hype Studies in the sense of the discipline in the field in 2024, and we were actually quite surprised that in the beginning we didn't find so much resources and academic literature on it because we understand that hype is a powerful thing which is pervasive influencing economic trends, political agendas, and narratives. And we understood that we have to look at hype from a whole societal perspective because you cannot hype alone, this was our very initial observation. So, this is why we have this platform where many people can take part. And so, we are working together with journalists, with designers, many different academics, also psychologists, economists, and people who look at this course to really understand how this slippery fish traveled through society and really better understanding what it does to society.

Justin Hendrix:

So, this is a collective phenomenon, it's something that involves many different types of actors, and yet you assert that hype's not accidental, but there is a modus operandi that's at play that hype is often strategically crafted. Where does hype come from?

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves:

Before answering this question, I just want to add something to what Jascha said. Hype Studies started in 2024 at a science and technology studies conference with a double panel, it was me with Vassilis Galanos, and then we started to discuss with other scholars, and it was a moment where AI hype was very evident for everyone, and its politics, its economical dimensions, and so on was very clear to everyone. So, we started to discuss with scholars from different schools, different perspectives, and we found the need of creating this some sort of sub-discipline that we call critical hype studies. And now. Answering to your question, in our group, we're really interested in understanding hype as a political phenomena, as a sociotechnical and political phenomena. Understanding that hype is not only, as you said, noise, or is not only a matter of excitement, but it's also a matter of power.

Not everyone has the same capacity to create hype, not everyone has the same legitimacy to create hype, not everyone has the same access to platforms to spread their narratives about technological futures. Not everyone has the same capacity to influence the way scholars, businessmen, public funders, regulators think about technology and think about the progress that will come or the dangers that will come with a specific technology. We call this, and to this, probably Jascha will have more to say, we call these kind of actors, those who have the power to create hype dynamics, hypers.

We can find examples of hypers in, of course, tech gurus, CEOs, but hypers are not only those who start the hype, but also those who profit from the hype. And here in the clickbait economy, journalists profit a lot from hype, but all sorts of influencer, politicians who claim to engage some sort of unavoidable future by fostering a new technology, of course, research centers and so on.

Jascha Bareis:

In the end, we really want to see how hype travels, and that's why we look at these different arenas. And again, there are amplifiers of hype who, when you may think about it, are they aware about the game they are playing? So, when, for example, I'm a journalist and I see that Sam Altman does a very big statement, and I want that people click on my article, well, then I'm part of the attention economy. And this is a game which is played that makes hype circulate, and this is something we have to always take into account that there are many actors who are triggering, but also who are amplifiers of hype, and also hype needs an audience. It's all of us who are in the social media lacking things and healing things. And especially also Marché can talk about her perspective because she is a journalist and she knows best how journalist newsrooms probably also work.

Marché Arends:

Yeah, I don't come from an academic perspective. So, just for context, I was an AI accountability fellow with the Pulitzer Center in 2025, and I conducted a year-long investigation into microtasking companies who are hiring, recruiting workers, African workers to train LLMs. And through our investigation, we conceptualized hype less as a phenomenon, and because we're accountability journalists, we want to know who is accountable for harm. And so, we conceptualized hype as a mechanism or a tool that is used by those who have power for ideological control. So, less phenomenon, less how it functions, not that I disagree with how it functions, but more about the intent and where it starts, and who can be held accountable for it.

Justin Hendrix:

Hype is an old issue. I think about the madness of crowds and tulip mania, and we think about the enthusiasm for railroads, or radio stocks, or the whole history of technological or industrial hype, this is just a part and parcel on to some extent of capitalism. It's part of it, right? It's just a feature of capitalism that there have to be these enthusiasms, they have to spread, and they result in major investment, of course. To what extent is this sort of a natural phenomenon of capitalism, and one that in this AI age, we're simply, I guess, witnessing another version of it, another instance along a trajectory?

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves:

Of course, hype, I would say that it precedes capitalism. Hype is a very specific, we like to call it social technical phenomena. Because it's not only a discursive phenomena, it also implies media, implies bodies, implies affects the way we feel when a new technology appears. But I would say that it's differential right now is that we live in a stage of capitalism that is extremely influenced by the speculative dynamics of finance. And the speculative dynamics of finance are embedded in the way that tech industry functions because of the central role of venture capital that we know that there are actors who basically bet on possible new technologies that could operate at a planetary level.

So, in a context of what I like to call techno-financial capitalism, there's some sort of double speculation. The economic speculation that tries to make profit out of the future and a technological speculation that tries to orient new technologies or new inventions towards the future in order to disrupt, capture, or transform markets. And in this conversance between economic speculation and technological speculation, hype plays a fundamental role. We are seeing this very clearly right now with the AI hype. We published in our series an article reflecting on the role of venture capital in technology hype, and in 2025, almost half of the GDP of the US depended or was related to AI. And we know that AI is a technology that is incapable of delivering the profit that it promises on one side and on the other, it cannot pay .... but there has been a massive investment on AI, and AI right now cannot deliver this amount of capital to deliver the return on investment. So, we see here how hype creates some sort of economic capture, but not only this, also when we see, again, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, or now that I'm talking about the dangers and the possibilities of AI, they also create, again, a framework of inevitability that captures regulation as well now, because it seems that the state should adapt to the tech industry. And we know that technology is not a force that is external to society, it's part of the society, but hype creates this illusion that technology is something almost divine, no?

Justin Hendrix:

So, this is a political project as much as it is a phenomenon of capitalism, and that does seem somewhat different this time around to me as well. I think when you think about artificial intelligence and the folks who are pushing it, not just in industry, but also in government and civil society, there is a sense of a effort to reorganize the world, and to reorganize the world's politics, to reorganize the way we engage with institutions, engage with one another, a sense that where we are isn't good enough, we need to get to another place. And I can't quite put my finger on exactly what that is, what's driving that, but it seems to come out of some extreme dissatisfaction with the way the world is, a desire to fundamentally alter it and to machine it in some way.

Marché Arends:

I think there's a doomerism narrative that is pervasive in tech, if this doesn't happen right now, we're going to end civilization. And I think that's there because speculative capitalism depends on hype in order to exist. It depends on investor FOMO. It depends on if we're not feverishly rushing towards AGI, so called AGI, you're going to lose out. You're going to lose the money, you're not going to get the money. And the point of speculative capitalism is winner takes all, right? It's to monopolize the market. So, you want to get there the fastest, and the way you get there is to hype up your product as much as possible. And I just want to say this is not to say that hype can't be used for good, activists use hype all the time to mobilize communities.

Well, at least I'm looking at it from an alarmist point of view, where hypers use certain words, certain narratives, certain ideas to fearmonger, essentially. And in that way, when people are scared, they're easy to control. And so, I think that the point is if you want to put your finger on it, it's money. Who has the most money?

Jascha Bareis:

But to add on this, I think it's also really coming from what Justin said, there's a crisis. There's this deep fundamental crisis in democracy also at the moment that hype can be so pervasive. If there's a crisis of legitimacy, if people don't think that the liberal values which are offered to people, like justice, equality, or opportunity are realizable in your society, if the economy doesn't grow anymore, you flee into the speculative. It's also some kind of escapism, and what is so weird is that it's so tied to this will of destruction because all the people we have mentioned also now are really there to destroy democratic institutions.

And they're getting away with it because, yeah, this is I think the central question, how come that democracy doesn't offer a better image of the future that these very crude philosophies, which are really crude in the way, how they're staged and what they picture for the future can take so much capture of attention, and they're selling a better story, which comes us to the notion of entertainment, I feel.

Justin Hendrix:

Someone who writes for us regularly, Eryk Salvaggio has written about this idea that hype has replaced hope in the 21st century, which I feel like is connecting with what you're saying there. But I also want to bring in maybe something that's quite of the moment, we're witnessing this rapidly expanding war in the Middle East, and there are AI storylines that are running through this conflict, it was immediately preceded, of course, by this conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon, and we saw just in the first few days of the war that AI is being used for targeting, surveillance, a range of other things, and that's part of the public narrative around this. There's a sort of sense that this is America's first AI war or war in the LLM era, if you will.

One of the authors in the Hype Study series that we've published so far on Tech Policy Press, Elke in particular, has brought this particular dynamic to it, the connection between the hype machine and the war machine. I want you perhaps to just address this particular intersection, why there appears to be such a strong connection right now between this financial incentive towards hype and war interests. I think on some level that's obvious, but I'd be interested to hear how you think about it.

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves:

So, I think we've been discussing with Jascha for a while, it's the fact that we were seeing the AI bubble grow, and Jascha was always saying at some point there will be a bailout, public money will try to save the AI industry. And unsurprisingly, I would say that I don't want to make a simplistic casual narrative here, but the fact that not only... Because venture capital are bridges between great capital, very big capitals and the startups, but they've been moving so much money from private banks, pension funds, and so on towards startups, that now a good way of making this big investment worth the effort is to apply it into very juicy contracts. No? And also there's this because the amount of money the venture capitalists mobilize, it's so big that the scale of the technologies they deploy should be, as I said before, they should happen at a planetary level. And engaging in wars, it's a way of channeling public money into these private companies, and get a little bit of the return on investment.

Jascha Bareis:

I think that when you see that now venture capital and many private military firms are investing into geopolitical instability, you can think and you can draw a line as if this was a consultancy, and a consultancy has an interest of never really solving the problem, and when there's geopolitical instability, there's always a market which you do not want to saturate. So, if there's constant conflict, and this is what also Elke was writing about, if there's constant conflict and constant stability, you will have continuous market possibilities. And in the saturated economic growth model, which doesn't seem to grow anymore, I see it also as a new paradigm.

Okay, if the economy doesn't grow anymore with civil goods, let's create military goods, and for using them, we need to create conflict and instability because when has ever a regime changed worked, bombing away a leader from above, and not sending any troops? Or the Iraq conflict and so many, like the Afghanistan conflict with the Soviet Union moving in back then, there's so many instances where this idea of a short intelligent intervention from the military perspective as a clean strike was disseminated, leaving really brutal state failure behind. But this is a continuous opportunity for investment and reshaping of an economy, and that's why I think Elke's piece was also very strong to see that there is an interest in instability on a geopolitical landscape.

Justin Hendrix:

It does seem to me that's something at play here, that especially here in the United States, also Israel, another party to this particular conflict, which is deployed artificial intelligence in novel ways in the campaign in Gaza, and in surrounding countries, there's almost this sense that this is precise. This is driven by technology, this is something different, a different type of campaign, a different type of war. And we even see that in some of the propaganda that's coming out of the White House right now, which is literally mixing in video game footage and other manifestations of tech and artificial intelligence in some of the imagery, very strange ways in my view. I want to also just ask you, Marché, about the role of journalism a little more directly here.

Journalists are doing their best in a lot of instances, they're covering the news as it happens. Sometimes they're framed as hyping things simply when they report on phenomena, like what executives say, that sort of thing. I don't know. What do you think is the role of journalists in trying to puncture hype, and where are the key failures that you observe?

Marché Arends:

Very good question. And before I answer that question, I just want to say, Anthropic's PR masterclass, that was great. No, like using hype to turn regulatory tension into virtue signaling, amazing. Anyway, I think that traditionally the role of the journalist is the fourth estate, the watchdog, the protector of democracy, but because of capitalism, because of speculative interests, a lot of journalistic enterprises have been co-opted. And I don't think we're doing a very good job, to be honest, as journalists, I think we're doing a very poor job. I think a lot of journalists are, I'd call them stenographers, to be honest. The role of the journalist is to critically analyze and inform the communities they serve. It's public service, where we're doing a public service. And if we're not serving our communities, the interests of our communities, we're not doing our jobs. If we're serving the interests of capital, of empire, we're not doing our jobs.

That's PR, that's not journalism. And I think a lot of mainstream media has been captured. And so, we're just seeing the same narratives being peddled over and over and over again. No one really critiquing asking why, asking how, asking when, the simple questions that are just being thrown to the wayside.

Justin Hendrix:

And let me just press you on that, are there particular narratives that you think are especially malignant?

Marché Arends:

The idea that AGI is a real thing, that super intelligence exists. The idea that AI is going to take everyone's jobs as if humans don't train AI and AI needs humans in order to exist. The idea that a future where AI is smarter than everyone else is inevitable, words like transformation and inevitability and this drastic change that must happen immediately... Urgency, so urgent. Those narratives are so pervasive and fine, put them out there, but also critique them. That's our job. My job is to critique. My job is an accountability journalist, to look at how is my community being affected by this?

Jascha Bareis:

And it's also so difficult because when somebody is in a speaking position, like the tech oligarch, and putting out their very crude statement, the hypothesis that, as much as I said, AGI will be rogue actor coming and taking over society. Of course, this is a very sensational claim, it's a wonderful, people have then the Terminator in their head, and it's real tied to emotions, and already by critiquing this kind of narrative, and that's the problem of hype, you're also staging it. So, you talk about it, and by talking about it, and it's something also we are still trying to figure out what's the best way to get away from hypes. By talking about it, you're consuming attention capacities, which is very scarce in the attention economy.

So, when people talk about it, no matter if it's critique or no matter if it's hailing, you're taking away space from other structural maybe problems of society, which are not so techy, which are maybe not so wonderfully transformational, but are actually the problems that you're dealing with for ages in society. So, critiquing can also be very quickly swallowed by hype because also critique can then cater to this idea of the spectacle and entertainment.

Marché Arends:

Yeah, and I think if you think of the journalist as the gatekeeper of information, I think that's an important distinction to see that what you choose to put out there, what you choose to critique is what you think is important, and what you think the world should know. And so, it's not just about critiquing, it's also about like Jascha just said, what are we covering? Why are we covering AI? Should we be covering migration? Should we be covering the climate crisis? There are so many other things that are happening in the world that require our attention, our immediate attention, our actual urgent, immediate attention that are not being covered as well.

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves:

I will have to say something about the relationship between science and spectacle, because history of science shows how even at the beginning of modern science in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, spectacle was central in the scientific communication, no? I don't know. I'm thinking about the world first, no? In many cities of the world, also the very idea of the exercise of anatomy in those others. No? There's a staging of science in order to defend this positivist way of understanding the body and the world. And if you think about this, an academic conference implies spectacle and staging.

So, I'm not sure until which extent we can really separate science from show, and I would say that for a short period of time, socially, we managed to do it, but the forces of capital in knowledge production ended up putting the spectacle and the logics of advertising again at the very center of knowledge production. And this happens very logically, more strongly when this knowledge is produced by corporations, which rely on advertising.

Justin Hendrix:

There's been a debate mostly on blogs in the United States over the last few weeks over whether critics of AI, particularly those on the left, are somehow missing something, or using outdated frameworks or understandings of where the technology is. And I think that there are a lot of folks that are somehow both absolutely would agree with 90% of what you all have said here, and yet they also see some truth in that there appears to be a mismatch between what's happening in the market and with artificial intelligence technology, particularly this last round of models and the advent of agents and the rest of that, and the critiques. There's some kind of mismatch. Now, whether that's right or not, we could argue about, but how does hype studies keep up, I suppose, with actual advances in technology?

Certainly it's the case that technology does advance, it does move forward, it does improve on some level, and whether of course that ever lives up to the hype is a question, but still that's the case, right? Improvements are made thanks to advance. I just want to put that to you. How do you think about that? How do we... Well, again, back to Eryk Salvaggio, he has this thought of, how are we critical of useful AI? Of course, useful might be in quotes.

Jascha Bareis:

I guess the most prominent question you have to ask then is what shall AI solve? Because you cannot say if AI is useful or efficient looking at the human labor and all the ecological footprint without saying in the first place what it shall solve. Because in the US, yes, you have one of the most innovative companies in the world, who can train wonderful large language models, who then do cool chatbots, but the question is what are they an answer to? When we look at slop, for example, when we look at deepfakes, when we look at synthetic data, which is now really flooding the internet, are we not creating even more problems our policymakers have to take care of than in the first place? So, AI is always hit as an efficient technology, but actually if you look from the resource footprint, from all the energy we use, we have to ask yourself, okay, what kind of problems does it solve?

Does it solve very structural problems of infrastructure of loneliness and capitalism, of inequalities, of mobility, et cetera? Or does it actually even great artificial problems you didn't had in the first place, and now have to deal with, and we have to deal them on the world? The U Commission with the AI Act, now every kind of country has a AI regulation, and don't we have anything better to take care about? So, I think to really answer this question, you should always have to get one step back and ask, what is AI to solve? And maybe it creates even bigger structures which are hurdles, then it facilitates something.

Marché Arends:

I think the other question that you really need to ask is at what cost? I think there are very high level conversations about the regulation, where it's going, and we forget about the human cost, we forget about the millions of people who are training these LLMs, who are being exploited, who are being paid 25 cents an hour, who are being told that they are unemployable and therefore should be grateful for a job, who are waiting for work.

And so, even if the debates about AI are so speculative, they're so in the future, they're so what's going to happen, da da da... What's happening now? Right now, data centers are destroying communities, water ecosystems. Humans are being just taken advantage of. And I do think you have to step back and you have to be like, we can't just think about the future, we can't just think about what's going to happen next. We have to look at what's happening right now as well.

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves:

To me, this is a super fascinating untimely question in a way because as a matter of fact, AI is challenging our metaphysical, philosophical categories with which we think the world to start with intelligence, no? And this opens new forms of political imagination that the left should deal with in a way. That's for sure, no? And the kind of questions you were, Marché and Jascha were bringing, they are very classical leftist questions, let's say, progressive questions. My question is in the world where we are today, in a context where the balance of power has shifted, and we are really in post-democratic times, I would say that we've been there for a while, but now it's very evident for everyone, we really need to make an effort of creativity to think about governments in an era where the categories with which we've thought about governance might not be useful anymore.

That said, also we need to be super careful with which kind of narrative and political frameworks are we engaging with, because the people who are setting, let's say, the coordinates or the frameworks to think about politics today are people who have been trying to disrupt markets for 30 years, and now they are trying and they are succeeding at disrupting not only the very democratic strengths of our societies, but also the epistemic or the knowledge tools we used to think about the world. So, the fight, it's both at the, let's say, infrastructural, technical, and regulatory level, but at the same time, there's a matter of the Overton window is going so crazy towards authoritarian frameworks presented as innovative, and the left is not that the left should react to this, but I would love to see... I don't know, we can talk about left accelerationism or fully automated communism, for example.

No? There's a lot of very interesting, challenging, exciting thought already there. But the thing is that it's very speculative. I'm not saying that Peter Thiel is not speculative, but he has the means to convince the people to make this speculation come true. So, yeah, it's a matter of which kind of framework we used to think with and how we activate those frameworks in an effective way.

Justin Hendrix:

There will be more to a say on that, I'm sure, in the series in the months ahead, I'll look forward to seeing how you contend with this particular issue. You're pushing for hype literacy, and part of the purposes of Hype Studies isn't just to study the phenomenon, but also to pass along some tools and some ideas to policymakers, to journalists, to ordinary citizens. Just in terms of what you're up against, this is right now a kind of rebellion, I suppose, it's an effort to stand up to a much larger cultural and political and economic force, and try to ask questions. How does Hype Studies succeed? If we were to look back and say, this worked, what would we look back and say, these were the things we accomplished?

Jascha Bareis:

Justin, you're asking six, seven researchers two years ago who had actually a coffee at a conference, and of course, already now our dream comes true that we can have this podcast and this series which gets translated. So, this is, for example, also one thing of literacy, not taking just the American and the Anglo-American perspective as English language, but translating all the different articles we are publishing here in Spanish with El Salto, with Jacobin in Germany, with Humanistica in Polish... I'm sure forgetting a language, which Andreu will add on later. But for sure also our thing, our idea is that to reach literacy, we have to reach out to communities who are maybe not part of the end product, which we always see in the West, but more harmed by the collateral damages of exploitation around the world. Yeah, it's also why we talk, for example, with the co-operating house of Jacobina in Brazil, where a lot of rainfall forest, for example, is harvested for data centers.

So, this is one point to reach different communities. We are right now working with the Deutsche Welle, so with the German broadcaster for international news on a hype literacy toolkit for journalists, which we are going to present in Peruja, which is the International Journalist Festival coming up in two months, and it's really like a online course anybody can take. So, all the resources we offer on our webpage are free to access. And it would be, of course, our dream if many journalists and people who are interested in hype can take the course, just educate themselves, and see also their role they're having as an amplifier or as a passive but catalyst audience in the hype game. And my dream would be in the future to come up with something like a hype observatory. So, from the early stage, see who gets to speak in certain audiences, analyze the networks, and on the early stage, identify the triggers in markets and new circulating in society to warn policymakers that this is a hoax.

This is basically expectations, which are not grounded in any plausibility looking at the empirical facts, and there's an opportunism here. And if we can get this kind of literacy to policymakers and to journalists and anybody who is taking place in the hype arenas, this would be a dream of mine, at least.

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves:

One of my objectives when we started creating the Hype Studies Group was to show decision makers in general, we see this a lot in academia, for example, that academia is buying every new hype cycle, but this happens in the European Commission, buying also hype cycles that come from the United States, and to me, it's very clear that each hype cycle comes with a political program behind. It disguises a political program as if it was a project of technological progress, and human emancipation. It's always the same. But whenever sovereign territories are buying into the AI hype or other, I don't know, big data, internet of things, et cetera, et cetera, the metaverse or cloud, they are letting in general projects of technological imperialism. Let's think of, for example, all the cloud hype, there was a huge hype from years ago, and now more than 50% of the internet and the web services of the Spanish government, for example, they are hosted in Amazon Web Services.

What happens when the CEO of Amazon is aligning with an authoritarian politician? What happens with our data? What happens with our infrastructures? So, buying into hype, into technology hype, it's also buying into the hidden technopolitical program behind it. So, I would love decision makers to be aware of this.

Marché Arends:

My personal goal as a journalist is to build a counter narrative, and that can happen in many ways. One fun way I think it can happen is to use hype to fight hype, put ads on Facebook and say, "Meta is lying to you just for fun." But also to build on the work of Karen Hao, for example, who is doing an amazing job of highlighting digital colonialism and AI colonialism. So, my perspective comes from the majority world, my perspective comes from Africa. And so, I'm interested in raising awareness and creating understanding so that people can shape their own futures, and not walk into a future that some tech bro is saying is inevitable. That's my goal.

Justin Hendrix:

What's next for the series? What can we expect in the coming months? We're looking forward to publishing more pieces.

Jascha Bareis:

So, coming up will be actually Marché, who can talk in a minute about their piece, and in April and May, we have Hannah Ruschemeier, who is a legal scholar in Germany, she will talk about hype in the AI regulation also on the European level. Where actually the hype and the urgency, this idea of the window, the closing window of opportunity was very prevalent,, looking at the AI Act and how the very prominent speaking positions of certain actors created the urgency and legal regulation. And we have many people coming up also talking, for example, also on hype on the role of gender, on the perspective of gender. So, the idea about taking space, being bold and disrupt in this kind of broke culture, of course, also a very masculine phenotype about taking space and making bold claims about the future, then we have also a perspective coming from Jack Stilgoe, who is also an academic in London, and an AI researcher, who will talk more about doomsday hype and catastrophic AI.

So, the idea we have already pointed at, how this kind of doomsday narratives is creating uttermost attention about the AI, about rogue AI, getting out of the control about humanity, and how this is certain trope, which is making technology converted into a natural force which overcomes society without talking questions of infrastructures, and without questions about who is actually inventing these kind of technologies. And I will now give the floor to Marché so she can speak about her article because she's coming up very soon.

Marché Arends:

Very, very soon. So, my articles about AI colonialism and how microtasking within the global south within the global majority is ruining communities. And I think the point is that these global north tech oligarchs have exported, what do we call it, a type of labor model to Africa, to India, to the Philippines that benefits them. And it doesn't work for anyone else except the ones who are getting the money. And so, my research was on African workers and how using words like invisible, and hidden, and the workforce that can't be seen, how they're rising up. And they're saying, we want to be co-creators of the AI future, we're not just the foundation that builds it, and it's going to be talking about how imperialism is alive and well. And I think the colonial project never ended, it just got better PR.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, I am excited to use what a role Tech Policy Press has in commanding folks' attention to bring more attention to this work and to this series, I'm grateful to you all for coming to us with it. I look forward to the work we'll see in the months ahead. I would commend my listeners and readers to go and check out Hype Studies, and Jascha and Marché, Andreu, thank you so much for joining me.

Jascha Bareis:

Thanks for having us.

Marché Arends:

Thanks so much, Justin.

Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves:

Thank you.