This post is part of a series on Hype Studies appearing on Tech Policy Press in 2026. More from the series is here.

Why do we fall for hype, again and again?

There are, of course, tempting psychological explanations. We are suckers for the charisma of the huckster. We fear, contextually and primordially, being left behind or left out. We each yearn to believe our future will be better. A lot can also be attributed to cynical opportunism. We hope that by riding the wave of hype we can surf to success. Maybe if we mimic the hyperbolic slop we hear gushing from our silicon overlords, it might make us sound adroit and better equip us to land deals, jobs and opportunities. We invest early, literally and metaphorically, hoping to sell our own speculation to a greater fool.

But in this short essay I want to propose another more theoretical sociological explanation. While hype may consist of lies, exaggeration and bombast, it also appeals to some aspect of each of us that yearns and deserves to build worlds and build them together.

I am not just speaking of the way the futuristic blabber of figures Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos profit by building elaborate fantasy worlds, seducing us to believe that they are visionary saviors of humanity working to take us to the stars or to ever greater horizons of human achievement. I am speaking of something deeper and more profound, and frankly quite tragic.

What animates hype, what gives it its attractive spark, is the way it touches (and manipulates) our estranged power as part of a cooperative, storytelling species.

The tragedy of the scammed

To explain, let me speak for a moment about what makes scams work.

There are, of course, “brute force” scams, the kind that are the equivalent of a mugging, exploiting our shock. Someone calls you claiming to be the tax authority and demands money. Or they tell you your child is in hospital and needs a immediate cash for a transfusion.

But there are more sophisticated kinds of scams, which might be best described as predatory storytelling: someone entraps you in a fantasy. This kind of scam includes “catfishing,” where a scammer uses a dating website to ensnare someone looking for love and companionship, only to rob them.

What makes catfishers so effective is neither the beautiful images or words of love they send their prey nor the plausibility of the sob story that prevents them meeting in person (a visa problem, a medical emergency, a debt. “Can I send you money?” the target volunteers). What really makes these scams work is the way the story they tell embraces and validates the scammed person.

On such reality TV programs, victims of scams often shamefully confess that the clues were there all along and that the scam was, in hindsight, blindingly obvious. But the victim was enraptured and, like anyone in the grips of infatuation, they ignored the inconvenient evidence. What so captivated them was not the persona of the scammer so much as the character they invited the scammed to play. The scammer and their target, like any two lovers, build a world together with words. The sophisticated scammer is adept at shaping that world so it validates and affirms the scammed as they would like to imagine themselves to be: kind, romantic, generous, gallant, selfless, trusting and desirable. The scammed individual does not fall in love with the scammer’s fabricated persona, but their own. They help build the fantasy world that now entraps them.

Hence the curious but not uncommon phenomenon of a scammed person seeking out their scammer even after the robbery and betrayal has been revealed. They want to regain access to the person even though they know they were caught in a predatory relationship. They want to return to the storyworld which they and the scammer created together, albeit with very different motivations and consequences.

We estranged worldbuilders

We are a worldbuilding species, and not only in the material sense that we make tools that transform the world that transforms us. We also change the world with words. The Caribbean radical thinker Sylvia Wynter speaks of us as homo narrans, a storytelling animal, and meditates on the profound power we wield through the stories we tell. Her primary concern is how stories about race fundamentally reshape a material world built on anti-Blackness. The transatlantic slave trade and the world it made was justified and normalized by a series of interconnected stories about race, value and fitness. Edward Said’s famous study of orientalism explores how a set of inaccurate stories about an imagined category called, by Westerners, “The Orient” came to be a key aspect of how imperialism was executed in those regions. In both cases, what is key is that such stories emerge asymmetrically and abusively from dominant power relations, and in turn helped to reshape and reproduce those power relations.

As a cooperative species, we create the world anew, in part, through the stories we tell, though we often take them for natural, normal and inevitable. True: in some societies some elites declare the monopoly on authoritative stories, for example the priestly caste in a theocracy. But every story, like every scam, is actually a collaboration. We make stories, stories make us, and we make the world, but not necessarily in circumstances of our choosing.

This has something to do with Marx’s famous theory of commodity fetishism, which is not, as it is commonly presented, merely an account of how individuals come to fall in love with things. It is, more profoundly, a forgetting of our “species being” as collaborative worldmakers. When we behold a commodity like a smartphone, we fail to see it for what it is: the product of millions of hands, working together, but not always under the circumstances of their choosing or in any way democratically. All are subject to the “mute compulsion” of money. Our hands, too, are part of that protean totality of cooperative potential from which the smartphone is a small crystallization. What we hold in our hands is a fragment of our own sublime and alienated collective power to imaginatively (re)make the world. The story that it is the gift of Steve Job’s creative genius is a co-option of the imagination that, combined with many other such stories, traps us in among the most monstrous scams in the history of our species: capitalist wage relations as such.

If we bring Marx and Wynter’s approaches together, we might recognize that the world we are always in the process of remaking is both material and imaginative. How we imagine the world, through stories and words, enables certain forms of collaborative activity (labour); that labor creates a material world that shapes the imagination. This process, on both material and imaginative sides of the coin, is not equal or egalitarian, but dominated by the powerful, whose power stems from their ability to shape the imagination and command our labor. It will not be enough to “seize the means of production” without also changing the way we imagine; but the way we imagine emerges from our material realities, and it is only in moments of material rebellion, resistance and refusal that the truly radical imagination can emerge.

The redemption of hype

What does this all have to do with hype?

Hype, like a catfishing scam, is a form of asymmetrical predatory storytelling. It requires both the hyper and the public to buy in, but they are far from equally powerful and suffer vastly different consequences. One of the reasons hype is so successful is it offers the chance for a great many opportunistic individuals to become a hyper, each hoping to benefit from a greater fool, increasing the magnetism of the story.

But all hype carries encrypted within it a tantalizing fragment of our estranged collective world-making power. Under the din of fanfare, hype whispers to us: the world can be different, the future can be otherwise, belief can change reality. And it’s true, but for all the wrong reasons. Beyond its particular rhetoric or claims, beyond the product or dream it is selling, what energizes hype—like a tiny piece of uranium in a huge nuclear reactor—is the way it refracts, in a perverted form, our collective capacity to change the world with words and stories, the potential of the imagination as a collaborative but alienated power. Another world is possible, we’re creating it all the time.

The problem is that, like the world promised by the catfisher which may indeed be based on the promise of genuine human connection, the story spun by hype is usually predatory. It does not actually make new worlds possible, it closes down possible futures by channeling our profound power of collective world-making into stupid projects that will be controlled by and enrich the ruling class who will exploit, abandon and abuse us. Believing the hype, we will invest our money, time, political will or simply our complacency in building a world that works against our collective interests, perhaps in the hopes that we ourselves may benefit or be spared the worst impacts. But for all it may claim to boldly open the door to the future, hype, like a catfishing scam that targets the lonely, preys on the tragic narcissism that is born of our estrangement from our species-being.

Embrace our hype

What does this mean for policymakers and others concerned with the role of hype in driving forward reckless speculative tech capitalism? I will confine myself to the following caution.

It can be tempting to imagine that, in the face of hype’s ability to hijack our optimism and beguile our judgment, we must encourage more sober, evidence-based, prudent realism. But this is the wrong impulse. Hype preys on us because we know something is profoundly, existentially wrong with this world and we all want change and know it to be urgent.

The problem is not our occasional irrational exuberance but a system that allows economic predators to prey on it. We are ecstatic, imaginative animals. We yearn to fall into our own narrative traps. We will always fall in love foolishly, even in utopia.

Rather than calling for everyone to calm down and be reasonable, we are better served by asking: to what other, better, more humane and generative purposes might our yearnings for change be put? How might we direct these towards the promise of a fundamental and radical transformation of the material economy? What other stories can we tell about what we, collectively, are capable of such that our radical capacities call themselves into being?

To believe the hype is, in a way, to believe in ourselves. How could we come to believe in our collective power to change the world in a way that proliferates our potential?