What do I do when I first wake up? I grab my phone. I'm reading the news, browsing Reddit, reading articles on HN, looking up the weather and anything else I might need to know about during the day. It's not until I open my tabs view, to switch back to something, that I realise I've managed to open half a dozen tabs within the space of minutes.
In 2004, Mozilla Foundation placed a two-page ad in the New York Times announcing version 1.0 of Firefox. "Are you fed up with your web browser?" the ad asks. "There is an alternative." Mozilla had a compelling story: in the wake of the browser wars of the 90s, in which Internet Explorer had ascended supreme over Netscape Navigator, Firefox, which started life as an experimental fork of the defeated browser, had "risen from the ashes" to defy Microsoft.
Firefox ad in the New York Times, 2004
Many users were disgruntled with Explorer at the time. Firefox boasted a number of improvements, including pop-up blocking and extensions. Perhaps the most visible difference, however, was tabbed browsing. Tabs weren't new, by any stretch of the imagination. Firefox wasn't even the first web browser with tabs. And yet, for some reason, the time was right. Browser tabs symbolised something deeper: they were a user interface for the new millennium.
What is "hype"?
Curb brokers on Wall Street, 1920s
It's so easy to talk about how tech is so scammy nowadays, how hype is everywhere nowadays as though hype were a side effect of social media or the post-truth era more generally. We would be greatly mistaken to think about hype this way. Hype is as old as capitalism. Indeed, hype is an essential component in the mechanics of capitalism broadly - arguably it is the thing that makes capitalism capitalism as opposed to any other currency-based economic system.
Broadly, when we talk about hype, we are talking about the so-called "business cycle". Two broad schools of thought presently dominate discourse on this macroeconomic phenomenon:
The Schumpeterian school, after the work of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) The Minskyite school, after the work of Hymen Minsky (1919-1996)
The two models were seen as contradictory for a long time. Indeed, they have largely been ignored, during the neoliberal consensus era, as "heterodox" economics. After the global financial crisis of 2009, however, renewed interest in the two theories led to increasing dialogue between them, and a period of consolidation has followed.
... continue reading