The Hype is the Product

Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their
customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their
products or pay for access to their services – their core focus. The
focus has instead turned towards the stock price.

Their real clients, the entities they really care about, are
the stockholders. Reasons are many, perhaps one of them being that
people making decisions tend to own stock options or have bonuses tied
to stock performance of the companies they run.

This means that for a large, established tech company the product or
service it offers does not matter all that much anymore. It needs to be
just barely good enough to keep people using it. The easiest way to do
this is some form of a monopoly.

Monopoly is the business model of Silicon Valley, and they are not even shy
about that.

Monopoly as a business model

If you ever tried moving an organization wholesale from Google
Workspace to Microsoft 365 (or whatever it is called this
week), you know what I mean.

These are two sets of office productivity services; on a basic level
their functionality is very similar. Mail, calendar, contacts, document
editing, access controls, and so on. And yet you can’t even directly
share a file from Google Workspace to a person who uses Microsoft 365
(or vice-versa) in a way that would allow them to access it within their
own service, using their existing account, without manually exporting
and importing the file.

Sidenote

This lack of basic interoperability is not a technical necessity but
a business decision. For example, Open Cloud
Mesh protocol allows for a lot of interoperability between providers
of such office productivity services, and is implemented by Nextcloud.

What this means in practice is that two people with accounts on
different independently-run instances of any software implementing this
protocol, hosted at two different providers, could not only share, but
collaborate on a file – each from their own account, using a familiar
interface.

Someone confidently using one of the two largest online office suites
can quite reasonably feel completely lost when presented with the
interface of the other. Interoperability and data portability between
them seems like science fiction, to a point where it is genuinely
difficult for some people to even understand the concept.

Barriers to migration

What this means in practice is that it does not matter if people
using their services hate
them – it only matters that they don’t hate them strongly
enough to want to go through hell of migrating over to some other
(or the other) provider.

With a barrier to migration between providers this high, people using
the service can be exploited in all sorts of ways they could not have
been otherwise. Cory
Doctorow aptly calls that enshittification.

At the same time, though, this also makes it really difficult for
service providers to compete on quality of the service or its features.
It’s not enough to have a product that is just a bit better
than the competition. It has to be so much better that it makes
it worthwhile for people to go through the hell of migrating over.
That’s a tough sell – that’s kind of the point of creating these
barriers in the first place.

And yet the line must go up. Somehow, tech companies need to convince
investors that their services are really becoming so much
better – so that they keep paying more and more for company
stock.

Enter the hype.

Learning to ride the Gartner
cycle

Hype, of course, is nothing new. Gartner even
made a graph about it, a long time ago.

Using hype to sell products barely anyone actually needs for prices
that make no sense has a long and storied history – so much so that
“tulip mania” has basically become a cliché. Using hype to scam people
out of their money outright (instead of selling them something tangible,
albeit at an unreasonably inflated price) is also not particularly
innovative. Just ask Elizabeth
Holmes.

What’s new here, I think, is large, established companies using hype
not to push products or services, but to push their stock. And doing so
in unison, pumping the same bubble together.

Big Tech paid close attention to the cryptocurrency and NFT bubble.
They
tried
to
get in
on it, but they mostly failed. Probably the most useful thing that
emerged from the whole NFT frenzy was that Twitter’s erstwhile
hexagonal profile pictures for NFT holders made it trivial to block
cryptobros for a time.

Then, Facebook tried to manufacture their own hype bubble with
Metaverse, somewhat piggy-backing on NFTs – and even changing the
company name (partially to
distract from their culpability in Rohingya genocide). Metaverse was
inevitable.
Anyone not on the Metaverse would
unavoidably be left behind.

Mark Zuckerberg bet the shop on that particular hype. The
shop lost 46.5 billion-with-a-b USD on it. Zuckerberg took
“full responsibility” by firing eleven thousand people.

Today Meta
is pivoting to – you guessed it – AI.

Pivot to AI, whether you
like it or not

“AI” is not the only hype game in town (Amazon for years tried to
hype drone
delivery as the obvious future, for example), but it seems almost
tailor-made for huge tech monopolists.

It requires insane resources and access to unfathomable depths of
training data, creating a barrier for any potential newcomers. It is
just futuristic enough to sound like magic and get people somewhat
excited even
though many of us are so, so bored with tech – but at the same time
not too out there, so that “Serious People” (i.e. large stockholders and
rich investors) can pretend to have intelligent conversations about it.
And it is pretty easy to integrate it with existing services (in the
end, it’s all just text).

Since Mark got hooked on spicy autocomplete, Facebook has become even
more of a hell-hole than before. Meta is also pushing LLM-based
chatbots down users’ throats in WhatsApp,
Instagram,
and soon
almost certainly Threads. Did anyone who actually uses these
platforms ask for that? No.
Is it already causing harm? Yes.
Does that matter? Not in the slightest.

Google is pushing their LLM-based tools into everything from search
to Google Workspaces – and
making users pay for that. You don’t want these tools anywhere near
your files? Tough luck; you might try to disable them, you
might even succeed, but you will still be paying for them. Same
with Microsoft.

Hype is the product

A lot of people paying for access to these services are definitely
not happy. But they’re stuck, and they aren’t going anywhere. So that’s
not really important, not something that is considered a serious
problem. Enshittification and hype-as-the-product are two sides of the
same coin; they are both enabled by barriers to user migration.

With such barriers solidly in place, what is important is
that in the next earnings call stockholders will hear that usage of “AI”
across all product categories went up by double-digits and revenue
increased. They won’t know or care that it’s only because somebody
flipped a switch and just gave everyone access, while hiking the price,
whether they wanted it or not.

There is more and more proof these tools are not as useful as they
are hyped out to be. LLM-based coding tools seem
to actually hurt programmers’ productivity. “Hallucinations” are not
going away because the only thing these LLMs can do is “hallucinate”;
they just sometimes (about
30% of the time, in fact) happen to generate some text that has some
connection to reality. They also keep
causing information
security problems and turn out to be vulnerable in most
hilarious of ways.

LLM chatbots are also causing real people real
harm.

And on top of all that it seems like “AI”
is actually a turn-off for prospective customers.

So what? Investors just
can’t get enough, and that’s what counts (even as they themselves get
high on their own hype supply).

In fact, increasingly, hype is the only thing that counts, as larger
and larger chunk of investment money is chasing it – to the detriment of
everything else that happens not to bolt the hyped tech onto its
unrelated but otherwise solid product or service.

The bubble grows. The line goes up.

Because the hype is the product.

And when “AI” loses it’s sheen, “quantum”
is already waiting in the wings.