Sanjana Paul: why tech billionaire hype is an environmental justice issue
“I spend a lot of time thinking about data centers: the actual, physical buildings consuming water and electricity across the planet. But I also keep thinking about something that seems trivial by comparison: why are the CEOs of all-powerful tech companies so cringe?”
Sanjana Paul published an essay in Hype Studies exploring “Why Tech Billionaire Hype is an Environmental Justice Issue”.
“The combination of absolute material domination and social desperation feels nauseating, but this cringe is a constitutive part of tech billionaires’ power, revealing that tech billionaire hype is doing political work that wealth alone cannot. Large swaths of the public are actively grossed out by the push for artificial intelligence in everything all the time, but this push is winning in many narrow institutional rooms where infrastructure and contracts get approved. Call this 'hegemonic hype': a mythmaking that is fragile on the surface (which is why it has to be performed so constantly) but durable in the institutional spaces that approve infrastructure and sign contracts. This is what I mean when I say tech billionaire hype is an environmental justice issue.”
