Global Perspectives
Hype Studies
Collective of researchers, designers and practitioners
The Hype Studies collective is an international group of researchers, designers, and practitioners interested in the phenomenon of hype across science and technology. Emerging from the first Hype Studies panel at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) conference, the collective brings together people who share questions about how hype shapes knowledge, innovation, expectations, and practices. It fosters dialogue, exchanges perspectives and approaches, and builds a community committed to critically exploring and understanding the dynamics, effects, and implications of hype.
At the time of writing, the scale of AI capital expenditure by BigTech companies is so vast that it eclipses federal budgets of entire nation states, like for example Austria or Switzerland. This unprecedented financial commitment is both a testament to the perceived transformative potential of AI and a source of growing concern for economists, policymakers, and society at large.
In 2026 alone, just four US-based technology giants are projected to spend a combined total of 650 billion US dollars on the construction and equipment of data centers (Reuters, 2026). This figure, which dwarfs the annual economic output of most countries, underscores the massive capital allocation currently being funneled into AI infrastructure. Looking further ahead, analysts at J.P. Morgan have forecasted that global investment in AI infrastructure could reach a staggering 5 trillion US dollars over the next five years. To justify such an enormous outlay, the industry would need to generate annual revenues of at least 650 billion dollars—a target that, as of now, remains speculative at best (Hamid et al., 2025).
These investments are primarily directed toward building the foundational infrastructure required for large language models and general-purpose AI systems. Yet, despite the scale of these commitments, a clear and profitable business model for large language model based AI has yet to emerge. For instance, companies like Anthropic are not expecting to turn a significant profit until at least 2029, while OpenAI has publicly acknowledged that it anticipates negative cash flow until 2030 (Muppidi & Palazzolo, 2026). This disconnect between massive investment and uncertain returns has raised questions about the sustainability of the current AI boom.
The frenzy surrounding AI investment has also sparked a wave of national and regional strategies, many of which appear to be driven by a fear of missing out on the perceived benefits of AI leadership. This anxiety is reflected in recent financial and policy discussions. In the United States, stakeholder reports such as “After the AI Crash” have already begun to outline policy recommendations for mitigating the fallout from a potential bursting of the AI bubble (Ramzanali, 2026). Meanwhile, in Europe, scenario reports like “Europe 2031: What Getting AI Wrong Means for Us” paint a dire picture of the continent’s future, warning in emotional and alarmist language that Europe risks “sliding into irrelevance” (p. 58) if it fails to match the computational and technological advancements of its global competitors (Backer et al., 2026).
The current wave of AI investment is characterized by both extraordinary ambition and significant uncertainty. While the potential benefits of AI are undeniable, so are the facts pointing to a lack of proven profitability, the risk of path dependency, and the specter of a potential bubble burst.
In summary, the current wave of AI investment is characterized by both extraordinary ambition and significant uncertainty. While the potential benefits of AI are undeniable, so are the facts pointing to a lack of proven profitability, the risk of path dependency, and the specter of a potential bubble burst . All serve as cautionary notes in the global race for AI supremacy.
Exploiting the insecurity of the future as hype
As we can see, the current narratives surrounding AI’s future trajectories offer little in the way of clear, actionable foresight. Instead, they are dominated by emotionalized and inflated rhetoric, underpinned by enormous financial commitments that amplify both hope and anxiety. These trajectories do not provide societies with the tools for future literacy—an understanding of what is likely, or plausible to happen —but rather present a series of contradictory extremes. On the one hand, there is the staged urgency of a fear of missing out: the pressure to invest in the AI “revolution” (Galanos et al, 2026) or the risk of being left behind in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. On the other hand, there is the looming specter of financial bust, with warnings of an AI bubble poised to burst, leaving investors and nations alike to grapple with the consequences of overcommitment.
This duality creates a paradoxical situation. The same voices that champion AI as the next great economic and societal transformer are often the first to caution against its unsustainable hype – or, the same voices that promise a liberation of tedious work through AI are also the ones that warn in fearmongering tone of a rogue AI taking over humanity or making working life obsolete, with society bursting in chaos (Bareis, 2026).
Both extremes are a paradigmatic example of hype because they are two sides of the same coin. They show that the AI hype is not about understanding how our societal future with AI will look like, but to stage the idea that AI is capable of delivering a vast societal transformation. AI is given agency as if it was an unstoppable natural force befalling society. Science and technology studies have coined this trope of rhetoric already long ago as technological determinism (Winner 1978), masking that any technology and its development is highly embedded in regulation, capital, power, media attention and imagination.
The result is a discourse that oscillates between euphoria and alarm, each extreme reinforcing the other. In this environment, decision-makers—whether in government, business, or civil society—are left navigating a landscape where the stakes are framed as existential, yet the path forward remains obscured by uncertainty and hyperbole. But note that at any time inside the hype frenzy, the attention dynamic asks for immediate action. Because hype speeds everything up it creates urgency and pressure so people act fast without fully thinking things through. In markets, this can lead to speculative bubbles; in technology, it can rush flawed products to release; and in politics, it can push through policies before their consequences are understood.
Let us look in a more structured way how to understand the phenomenon of hype.
The AI hype is not about understanding how our societal future with AI will look like, but to stage the idea that AI is capable of delivering a vast societal transformation.
Defining the hype playfield
In the following section we circumscribe the main four pillars of the concept of hype, clarifying:
1) the actor dimension: who shapes, benefits, and is impacted by hype;
2) the affective dimension: how does hype influence minds and bodies;
and 3) the temporality dimension: what is hype’s relation to time, past and future?
In the attention economy, where bold promises decide on what reaches journalistic headlines, governance concerns or investment streams, hype must be understood as a deliberate mode of future capture (Geiger & Gross, 2017). Hype shapes what futures are thinkable, desirable, and fundable, while simultaneously narrowing the space for alternative pathways. What makes hype distinct from expectations, visions, imaginaries or scenarios, then, is that the aim of hype is to align attention, capital, legitimacy and urgency in a way that does not give any future literacy (Belsunces, 2025; Taschner et al. 2021).
To the contrary, hype must be understood as a normative phenomenon. This means that while hype certainly does coordinate resources under circumstances of uncertainty making it a central building block of any innovation culture, it does so by mechanisms of staging an uncertain value development as entertainment, spectacle and the allure of conquering the seemingly impossible.
This also shows that hype has an ambiguous relationship to the truth and facts. It leads to exaggerated claims, shaky predictions, and low-quality evidence. Instead of measured analysis, decisions are driven by sensational headlines, viral trends, or charismatic figures. Hype shows that structures of funding, valuation and legitimacy work with a different currency than future heuristics that aim at delivering plausibility, literacy or orientation. In the position paper of the hype studies group we explain what hype does as (Galanos et al., 2026, p.16):
«Hyped expectations performatively shape environments but are also often unsustainable in defining the trajectory of technological developments. Hype distinguishes itself as a normative phenomenon, taking advantage of various forms of rational thinking such as reductionist cause – effect relationships. It thrives on sensationalism and alarm, capitalizing on epistemological uncertainty for opportunistic gains instead of broadening public understanding, literacy, or future possibilities.»
The actor dimension: trigger, amplifier, audience
Hype is a dynamic that rests on the circulation of promotion (Powers 2012). This means one cannot hype alone. The arena to make sense of hype is the attention economy that has various societal fields with different actor roles and intermediaries. There are actors that trigger and lead hype, and actors that amplify and let hype circulate throughout society. This implies that hype is never a natural or accidental phenomenon but triggered, nourished and given traction (Klingebiel 2022; Pollock and Wlliams 2026 ). Hypes are never only descriptive but highly performative. This means action-ascribing, enabling, fueling. They make leaders, produce feeds, attract investors and orient innovation – and make forgotten harms like the exploitation of human labour and resources.
Hype shapes what futures are thinkable, desirable, and fundable, while simultaneously narrowing the space for alternative pathways.
Hype actors are connected through intermediaries like markets, news pages, analysts, social network feeds, reports, metrics, think tanks or official press statements which have their rules of attention traction (from news clickbait, exceptional ministerial speeches, to TikTok influencers). These are the empirical arenas where hype takes place as interaction and attention surges, gains traction or ebbs away.
Affective dimension: stage performance and entertainment
Hype’s objective is to attract attention, funding and followers. Any play in the emotional register, any proclamation of bold promises is legitimate in hype to entertain followers and amplifiers so that they embark on “surfing the attention wave”. As established, hypes do not care about what’s true or false. What ultimately matters in hypes is sensationalism: Any news is good news, as long as people talk and write about it – as this implies that it is capturing people’s attention in the scarce competition field of the attention economy.
Technological hype, as Stilgoe (2020) suggests “is not just exaggeration, nor is it idle speculation; it is an act of persuasion” (see also Bourne (2024). To mobilize attention, persuade investors, or craft a community, highly charged rhetoric and stage play is employed where emotions and figurative language take a central role (Oomen and Hajer 2022). Charismatic leadership plays with emotional and rhetorical effects that may intentionally mislead an audience with strategic ambiguity (Eisenberg, 1984) or overshadow complexities and uncertainties. Hypes often maneuver within the binaries of hopes vs. fears, or redemption vs. doom. These elements carry sociotechnical fictions (Belsunces, 2025a)–fictions disguised as technoscientific facts– and are building blocks of storytelling, like fairy tales, need suspense. Problematically, they also strongly simplify reality. Hype, then, is a powerful instrument that can enchant an audience and “validates technoscientific discourse that propels unrealistic expectations under socio-political, cultural, or financial incentives” (Galanos et al, 2026, p.18).
Temporal dimension: urgency and action
This also leads to the time dimension in hype. While some trajectories of development are staged as being very far and speculative, with promises of a long-term, civilizational transformations overpromissory dynamic (Belsunces, 2025b), hypes ask for action in the here and now.
To mobilize attention, persuade investors, or craft a community, highly charged rhetoric and stage play is employed where emotions and figurative language take a central role.
Hypes gain their real momentum by pointing to vast opportunities that lie ahead, which require the right timing if great potentials are not to be lost. To produce maximum traction and a feeling of urgency, hype can be described through the ancient Greek word Kairos (Bareis, Roßmann, Bordignon, 2023), meaning ‘the right time for action’, also known as ‘closing window of opportunity’.
Actors will frame emerging technologies as mirror images of past ‘revolutions’, ‘breakthroughs’ or ‘unbelievable transformations’. Hence, temporality is a crucial dimension for understanding and negotiating emotional technology expectations. Popular technology narratives often play with history to elicit grandeur, just to tell followers and investors that now is the right moment to invest (Rinaldi, 2012). The anxiety about being ‘late to the party’ can also push newsrooms, burst feed cultures and lock-in political actors in an emotional frenzy, spurring continuous circulation of a distinct promotion of a future.
Conclusion: The AI frenzy as an inherent political phenomenon
No matter if privileged speaking position in public, bursting emotions by followers or perceived urgency by investors: Hype is a child of the attention economy, and therefore has to be understood as an inherent political phenomenon that helps to understand many contemporary phenomena in our society. By amplifying particular technological promises, hype directs attention, investment, legitimacy and institutional support toward specific actors, agendas and governance models, while obscuring negative effects and marginalising alternative pathways (Belsunces, 2025b), publics and forms of collective organisation (Borup et al., 2006; Bareis, 2025; Smolka et al., 2025).
In the political economy of hype, different actors have different strategic positioning, bargaining capacities and speaking positions in innovation trajectories
The hype studies group aims at providing hype literacy, in order to understand which stories gain traction, whose voices appear authoritative, and which visions of the future become publicly plausible or sidelined. This perspective broadens the claim of inclusion from hyped narratives in the global North towards holding hypers and amplifiers accountable, as grappling with the effects of hype is a question of global justice.
References:
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