The Market Technique of Hype Is Not Accidental, but Designed as a Market Device

As the same author points out, “hype is a game that constantly takes place in the future, in order to generate the present that makes the future possible.” Hype seemed to run, like an electric current, through the demonstration areas of Virtual Educa, overflowing with faith in fantastically narrated technological fables. Even the idea of nationwide cloud classrooms — when many rural schools in fact operate without a reliable working telephone line — could become real. It did not matter how detached those projections were from the known and lived real conditions of the present; there was a general optimism across the various product platforms that made up the space. However, as much as advertising exaggeration and optimism were used among the attendees at Virtual Educa, it was clear that they functioned only as one important element within the full range of possible affective market devices. Beyond the dazzling demonstration spaces, in the conference rooms where corporate sponsors and government officials participated as panelists in presentations before the audience, a markedly different kind of affect was invoked: one based on the dystopian projection of heightened risk, disruption, and even destruction as future prospects.

For example, before an audience made up of Peruvian public school teachers, who were literally standing while listening to the lecture, Matías from Hewlett Packard, Silicon Valley, explained the company’s perspective on the contemporary challenges facing global educators and their role in promoting innovation in the digital age. He did so by emphasizing serious projections about the future of teaching: “We have worked in many countries, we have collaborated with many countries […] and one of the challenges we have seen is that the educational system in which we all participate today, in our view, is currently obsolete. It is not a system that generates talent, nor is it a system of personalized education.” He went on to give several discouraging examples of supposedly failed and ineffective teaching techniques still used by public educators in classrooms, before turning positive: “But this is the news I have come to give you: we are here to help you, we are here to support you in this process of technological adoption and educational practice, which consists not only of showing slides. HP is celebrating 75 years as one of the world leaders in technology, and we bring and offer you all that experience to change lives and the present, to prepare ourselves for a better future. So count on us in that transformation!”

This was not the first time I had heard an actor from the technology sector approach an audience in such a disconcerting public-relations manner. But in this case, he not only had the confidence to directly accuse professionals of being obsolete and of failing to help create national talent; in order to reassure and calm his audience, he did so by telling them that even if the current education system in which they participate had become obsolete, there was at least one resource educators could count on to avoid risk: HP and its 75 years of history and “experience” as one of the oldest companies in Silicon Valley. In this case, Silicon Valley is mentioned as a concrete existing model, since its evident success is assumed to require little explanation. But the framework in which Matías places HP does not revolve so much around the company’s high modernism, as a system that has maintained its order and rationality at a high level, nor even around its capacity to use those values to generate new wealth creation. On the contrary, this narrative revolves more around the idea that HP has managed to cultivate a record of survival and growth for almost a century within the highly competitive, uncertain, and shifting ecology of Silicon Valley, where growth, risks, and death are marked by technology: a space prone to sudden popularity as well as sudden market irrelevance. In other words, in this case, Matías emphasizes that the company — with an unprecedented history among Silicon Valley companies — has long demonstrated its ability to respond to conditions of rapid change and market uncertainty.

It is suggested that HP’s ability to become a market leader and remain in that position through the sudden market shifts of the twentieth century, as well as its ability to face the uncertainties of the computer industry for nearly a century, are what make it an unparalleled ally in confronting the dynamic market and technological changes already manifesting in the digital economy of the twenty-first century. HP’s acceptance is particular, and to appreciate it one need only replace HP with a company from another sector included in the Global Fortune 500 list — banking, energy, consumer goods, or services — and imagine speaking on behalf of another globally recognized industry giant. Regardless of the symbolic power and capital granted by the Fortune 500 list, it is difficult to imagine corporate actors from those sectors speaking in such terms without provoking some degree of indignation or distrust in the audience. Actors from the current information-technology sectors prove to be something of an exception, and HP, even after Matías’s statements about the contemporary obsolescence of the teaching profession, was instead received with applause from the room. Actors from the information sectors somehow prove to be the exception, and HP, even after Matías’s statements about the contemporary obsolescence of the educational profession, received instead a wave of applause.