Charles Reed Anderson draws attention to the issue of tech hype that over promises and under delivers.
I’ve been watching this for twenty-five years.
The dot-com crash that wiped $1.7 trillion and took half the industry with it.
The telecoms execs who spent $100 billion on 3G spectrum licences before building a single tower — and then couldn’t explain what anyone would actually use it for.
The metaverse, where Facebook (aka Meta) burned through $73 billion before realising people didn’t want to attend meetings as a legless cartoon.
The $500 billion city in the desert that’s now being quietly repurposed as a data centre.
Different technologies. Different decades. Different magic words.
New hype cycles. Same ending.
The problem was never the technology. The problem is the playbook. And the playbook never changes. Overhype. Oversimplify. Underdeliver.
Nobody remembers anything. Not the $1.7 trillion. Not the misspent billions. Not the technologies that were going to change everything and quietly vanished.
The pattern is sitting right there, in plain sight, and we walk straight into it anyway.
Some people see it, but not enough of them are in the room when the money moves.
Two questions worth taking into any room:
Have I seen this pattern before?
What human outcome does it actually deliver?
If nobody can answer the second one — you already know what you’re looking at.
The pattern repeats. So should you.
Read the article, The History of Tech Hype – Because Nobody Remembers Anything, on Substack.
Listen to the podcast, The New World Order: It’s not a transition, it’s a rupture!, onYouTube.