HYPE

It’s something in the air. Pure hype. Everyone wants a browser, a bundle, to get their toolbar installed with an opt-out provision on the software that transforms the HP Pavilion some guy bought for cheap in a package deal into the computer he was hoping for. To monitor. To know where you go, what links you make, what cookies you accumulate, what search terms you enter, how much time you are online, how long you stay at a site: a complete record of online behavior. To figure out how to profit. They don’t want or need or even hope to control the user, not at this time; that will come on its own. They will convert investor money into personal riches, wealth for the company, charitable donations, steady streams of income.

The hype will make good. It won’t just be advertising supporting advertising, it will be etailing, ecommerce; the infrastructure for our way of life will move online (as it has) and they will be the Mall to our suburban teenage social scene.

A grand plan, a long shot, an inevitability whose realization they work assiduously to ensure. Until then, there is hype. In the fullness of time, in the next age, in the near future, in the next moment of consumer capitalism, it won’t be hype. It won’t be the future, it will then be the present.

Hype functions to pave the way for this realization, but is also the primary nature of the industry at this point in time. It is potential, where things might go, a direction or a kind of latent energy. The hype has sustained itself for years, through many companies, between business models, amidst devastating evidence to the contrary. And it isn’t primarily a dream, there’s no necessary or single utopic model in the hype, and little reason to believe those dreams will ever take form as the hype suggests.

Hype nominates something as cool. When we see something cool, we do the hype. When we hear the hype, we might want to check it out. I suggest to others that they enjoy what I have enjoyed, I expect that they will do the same for me.

Hype is auditory, it’s a hubbub (Twitter in 2007), it emits wild screams (M.I.A. between albums), it can only sometimes be heard from far away (Thaitanium), it echoes (it is “viral”), it surrounds something which is real, but it has no body: it is a vibration, a disturbance, a real phenomenon, but lacking substance or materiality in the sense of traditional sculpture. Permanence, solidity, presence, opacity, form, and weight? No.

But the hype coordinates, attracts, incites, deforms, deters, guides, influences, questions, popularizes, neglects, denies, or lifts. It is not a body hewn of earth, but it may be a prevailing wind.

Hype tends to build on non-knowledge, ignorance, misunderstanding. How excited we are about bright fresh new things with which we’ve not yet spent long hours getting familiar.

Hype predicts what will be the future, and so enacts the arrival of an immediate future, that is thereby also the present rather than anymore the future. Bigger shoulders, bright orange for men, neon for everyone, netbooks, and Michael Jackson mashups. Expecting them, they take form already. Knowing them, they are no longer the future but just trends in the present.