When is tech not hype? Tulips, toilets, trains and tabs
48 comments
·July 15, 2025throw0101c
scroot
To add: one of the main arguments in Gordon's tome is that many if the most impactful innovations dealt with "networking the house" (gas, electricity, plumbing, and communications) and could _only happen once_. It's actually kind of sobering to read.
baxtr
How is "innovation rate" actually being measured?
It’s hard for me to imagine a KPIs that hasn’t been affected by mainstream internet and mobile smartphone adoption, which happened the last 15-20 years.
throw0101d
> It’s hard for me to imagine a KPIs that hasn’t been affected by mainstream internet and mobile smartphone adoption, which happened the last 15-20 years.
The Internet got going in the 1990s, and everyone in the US was basically connected by (say) 2010. Can you be "more connected" that already having your business or home being online 24/7 (i.e., DSL or cable, not dial-up modem)? Certain transfer speeds have gone up, and going from a V.92 56kbps to DSL is improves things, but how much productive is going from 10 Mbps to 50Mbps: do you get a 5x rise in economic productivity?
Can you point to a FRED chart or cite a DOI that shows that GDP is better in societies pre- and post-smartphone?
If all KPIs have been affected, then it should be easy to post a graph and see where there is an inflection point or change in the slope.
If you find it so hard to believe, shouldn't it be easy for you to cite the data showing so?
paulryanrogers
> ...how much productive is going from 10 Mbps to 50Mbps: do you get a 5x rise in economic productivity
Diminishing returns has kicked in for me. But hard to rule out any future bursts until the baseline raises. Perhaps lower latency could make things like VR and AR more appealing and useful.
thatcat
Think about it this way, if we still had a world's fair - what would even be on display? Improving some metrics isnt necessarily innovation
athenot
We still have world fairs, the current one is in Japan. A friend of mine just came back from seeing it and it's apparently quite impressive.
econ
I've talked a lot with all kinds of people about new inventions and things people /we could do if we put our back under it.
The responses are very cultural and nothing like what would be required to accomplish anything large.
To give an example. We could make tubes with hot and/or cold water running from Siberia to the Sahara. There are plenty of design challenges in such project. The correct mindset is to take a broad outline calculating ROI so that you have an idea how much the state of the art needs to improve for it to be viable. Then you take the largest expenses or technical hurdles and ponder what could be done to ease the pain point. You can ponder the diameter vs the temperature vs the flow rate or pressure, the distance between the pumps etc etc, not to build anything but to train the brain noodle.
If it wasn't a stupid idea people would be doing it already.
Many countries, if not all, had a period where great things were done. After that comes defeatism nihilism and a preference for talking about tarifs, Epstein, 911, etc
With tiny improvements everything shifts around. The steam engine had many challenges that have been solved long ago. Imagine that the 100 mph carburator didn't happen because you lose much of the throttle control. How silly this excuse is in the age of hybrids? It's pretty much a non-argument.
taeric
This is an amusing attempt at finding the field of marketing through a first principals analysis of some successful products.
Could have fun by looking at any social spread. Not just of a technology through the society. Fashion similarly spreads. Behavioral patterns spread. Language usage. All of it.
dawnofdusk
I think the more interesting observation here, although the OP doesn't originally point it out, is that the spread of technology is associated with some sort of utility. Fashion and language seem more subjective: there's not a reason to prefer one over another. But with technology the idea is often that there are better or more productive tools. For example, the steam engine is more productive than the water wheel.
The point of "hype", on the other hand, and the reason to be "hype-optimistic" as the OP is, is that it can result in the spread of technologies that are not necessarily better. In other words, tech hype or marketing will not necessarily spread technologies in a meritocratic way. But actually what many cultural anthropologists know, such as by studying the spread of early human tools, is that there is a wisdom of the crowd effect where large social adoption of suboptimal technology tends to improve that technology unintentionally.
Those who decry "hype" are operating from an engineering background, where good tools are designed from the top down. But "hype" is more like a social force, which can emergently produce better tools from the bottom-up. The latter dynamic is robust yet uncontrollable, but it's definitely a real thing.
taeric
I want to give kudos to the OP for seeing that infrastructure matters. The fanciest syphon system in the world doesn't matter if you don't have a way to get water to and from it. (For the toilette example.)
I'm seeing similar with so many people hyping solar power. People are fawning at how useful today's panels are. And they really are. But, that is largely only true if you have all of the other technology that we have to use the power it can generate. And this cuts in multiple amusing ways. Without electric lights, a lot of the power you'd have at home would be wasted. And, without modern electric lights, far more of it is lost in non-light generation than what we see today. (Lights are particularly interesting to look at. The amount of energy used by lights had such an extreme drop off that it is almost hard to really grapple with.)
Directly to your post, fashion and language may seem more subjective, but I question that. Obviously parts of it are driven less by utility and more from some other factors. But that is almost certainly true for technology, as well. Is why many places hold out from technology for longer than others, as an easy example.
nottorp
> What do I do when I first wake up? I grab my phone.
Those supermen... when I first wake up I crawl to the coffee pot.
Terr_
Relevant satire, "The Hustle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
doubled112
Sometimes I really struggle to make coffee pre-coffee.
Forget the grinds and it’s kind of weak.
Forget the water and nothing comes out.
Forget to turn it on and nothing happens at all.
Switching to a single serve coffee maker adds new failure methods. Forget the cup and it brews onto the floor.
rozap
Forgetting the portafilter cup and drinking the mess that comes out does wake you up though.
nottorp
We solved that by using a drip coffee maker with a timer function.
You fill it in the evening while you're still coherent. It starts on its own 10 minutes before the alarm in the morning.
cjensen
Conflating "hype" with the "business cycle" is not a good choice. The content is interesting reading once you move past that.
The business cycle would likely exist in the absence of emotional choices. Part of it is that businesses that are near-failure tend to fail when the economy declines, which causes additional decline. This means that near-failure tends to build up during good times and then fail en masse during a decline.
Noumenon72
Is there any rational scheme to how they numbered the toilet components? If they had started with the handle at 1 and proceeded in the order of operation, the diagram would explain the process all by itself.
necovek
I was expecting the story to go: look at the toilet flush mechanism, such a simple gravity/float device with such a wondrous utility — arguably, one can make it themselves with not much experience or tooling (it might not work as well, and might leak a bit, but it really is simple IMO).
hiccuphippo
I started disabling tabs in my editors and only using the quick open menus, and got back a lot of time wasted managing tabs. Saw it in a presentation from someone at Jetbrains long ago and tried it with some skepticism at first but I am a convert now.
bgwalter
There was no hype at all about the white plastic they put in your teeth instead of gold or amalgam. There was no hype about bullet trains, they just happened.
Hype happens when people don't really need a product and the marketing machine has to compensate. It helps if the product seems like magic for the first month and then becomes obnoxious and boring without marketing.
cperciva
There was no hype at all about the white plastic they put in your teeth instead of gold or amalgam.
When these came in, I remember my dentist being clearly very excited. There was absolutely hype... we just weren't the target for it.
azalemeth
The NHS largely prefers amalgam over white fillings for the simple reason that there is consistent but low quality evidence that they last longer (1) and are lower cost. There absolutely is hype in dentistry, and it's very dangerous as most procedures are irreversible.
Dylan16807
Bullet trains had/have lots of hype.
bgwalter
An example of tech that was super hyped and deservedly popular and faded later is the Rubik's Cube.
There was a real rage in the press and in the street after it was released. Now it can still be bought, but most people would consider it uninteresting.
taeric
I'm curious what you mean? It is a good puzzle, but it is hard not to think that hype helped make it more popular? Heck, used to you could go buy a ton of little puzzles to play with. Nowadays, I assume you can still do that, but it isn't exactly easy without going online.
bgwalter
It went viral in schools and among adults in the real world. The press hype seemed organic and not dictated by the newspaper owners.
What we see now with "AI" is that the hype is mostly by online shills with some connection to the funding. The traditional press as well as the alternative YouTube press is increasingly negative.
PokemonNoGo
Honestly think the Rubiks Cube is more hyped than ever.
tomjen3
iPhones comes to mind - except for a small group, most people no longer care. They used to stand in lines for the midnight release.
But the granddaddy for your question would be the Polio vax.
jxntb73
The author misses the crucial final stretch of tying all that logic concretely into Bitcoin; indispensable through infrastructure and habit. The tulip bubble (Holland 1634-1637) didn't get the fastest-growing ETF in history in year 15.
schmidtleonard
World finance is secretly backed by vaults of tulips held at each central bank, but THEY don't want you to know!
sealeck
When was the first ETF released? (Hint: late 1900s).
FuriouslyAdrift
I thought the Dutch East India Company started selling stock in 1602?
vel0city
ETFs are different from company ownership stocks.
TacticalCoder
[dead]
vouaobrasil
When you can actually see it improving life, for one, rather than just improving efficiency, which doesn't really benefit the individual but only the corporation.
esafak
Increased efficiency translates to reduced costs.
schmidtleonard
Only in the presence of healthy competition which businesses do everything in their power to avoid.
vouaobrasil
But often at the expense of something else: the commons, employee satisfaction, or even the joy of having just enough. No, costs are not as important as many other things.
renewiltord
Man, that is really a story. I do remember tabs. They were this revolution in browsing. You could look at two things so easily. "Open in New Tab".
I love to "folks these days" so I shall. Folks these days don't know what a revolution Firefox was. Before that there were no "web standards" or anything. You had IE6 compatible and Netscape compatible and this and that. Linux web browsers would struggle to render pages. They came up with these ACID tests and these standards.
And Firefox was crazy back then. People now would lose their shit over the "lack of consent". People were talking about how they'd install Firefox and give it the IE logo so their parents would use it and everyone would talk up its leanness and this and that.
You couldn't get Netflix on Linux. It needed Silverlight to enforce DRM. These days the web is the platform. The complexity in the runtime and every application runs on Linux. Man, I never could have guessed 20 years ago that this would happen.
For me the fastest I've seen mind-blowing technology go from sci-fi to banal is LLMs. When TalkToTransformer first allowed you to do it there was this completion model that seemed insane. Like magic. Now, everyone I know uses an LLM for all sorts of things. It's so integrated into life. Wild.
bee_rider
> And Firefox was crazy back then. People now would lose their shit over the "lack of consent". People were talking about how they'd install Firefox and give it the IE logo so their parents would use it and everyone would talk up its leanness and this and that.
I always interpreted those sort of stories as kind of… somebody doing something they consider at least a little duplicitous.
At the time though, there was the concept of a “family computer,” which isn’t really as much a thing anymore. Also it was assumed (whether or not it was true) that kids knew tech better than their parents, so there could at least be a kind of justification. “I’m modifying the shared resource that I know best in a slightly underhanded way so that my parents will use it better.” I dunno. I didn’t do that sort of thing but I was an annoyingly conscientious kid.
> You couldn't get Netflix on Linux. It needed Silverlight to enforce DRM. These days the web is the platform. The complexity in the runtime and every application runs on Linux. Man, I never could have guessed 20 years ago that this would happen.
Was 4K Netflix ever finally fixed on Linux? IIRC it was limited to lower resolutions for the longest time.
Dylan16807
> I always interpreted those sort of stories as kind of… somebody doing something they consider at least a little duplicitous.
Often it's a situation where someone doesn't really know what programs are, they just know that the blue E is the button for Internet. In that case it's not trickery to keep using the blue E on the Internet button, just practical labeling.
Two good books that intersect technology, hype, and economics/finance are Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Perez (going back to the 1700s):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
And The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Gordon:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Most actually innovation (in the US?) occurred from about 1920-1950,† with mainstream acceptance from 1950-1980, with very little newness (leading to economic/productivity growth) occurring post 1980s: the main exception of course being computers and the Internet, but that seems to have maxed out in the '00s.
† The (first?) Industrial Revolution is discussed, as well as early scientific discoveries that led to later engineering development that turned into usable products.