I'm excited to be part of this GameChangers/AFREF event next week!
Hilary J. Allen
@profhilaryallen.bsky.social
1.7K followers 355 following 682 posts
Law professor at the American University Washington College of Law (but all views expressed here are my own); author of Fintech Dystopia and Driverless Finance; mythbusting crypto, AI, and other fintech Internet serial: fintechdystopia.com
![I want to leave you with a word of caution before we start looking at these tech business models in detail. It is very easy to fall into the trap of accepting industry hype at face value, and then criticizing that hype rather than reality – as professor of science, technology, and society Lee Vinsel puts it, “it’s as if [criti-hypers] take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.” But criticizing hype rather than reality can unwittingly amplify that hype and distract us from technology’s real but more mundane harms. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be proactive and forward-looking: we absolutely should think about the downsides of realistic trajectories of technological development and use. But the word “realistic” is important here.
Criti-hype is a product of techno-solutionism because it uncritically assumes that technology will eventually do exactly what its boosters say it will, and then criticizes that. It fudges over present-day harms associated with the developing technology, and discounts the possibility that the technology is simply not capable of living up to the hype – not just that it’s just “early days,” but that the technology will never be able to deliver. Sometimes, the limitations of a particular technology can be hard to figure out in the moment, but sometimes they’re actually pretty clear if you care to look.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4bcrv573bktwj6xw5tie2im5/bafkreihgiete74w43pppne56ivtflb3srh42mop3qtbcl32vzrbs46ujnu)
