The Billionaire's Fever Dream: How Tech Hype Cycles Manufacture Mania
Remember Sora? The "TikTok of AI" that topped the App Store in October? It's already crashing.
Remember when the metaverse was going to be everything? When crypto was going to replace finance? When Web3 was going to decentralize the internet?
Neither does anyone else. We've already moved on to the next thing. We are already running after the next world-saving, existence-threatening, absolutely-cannot-ignore technological shiny object that will revolutionize everything.
But right now, there's a story unfolding that perfectly captures the moment we're in. In October 2025, OpenAI launched Sora, its AI video generation app, to thunderous hype. It hit 100,000 installs on day one. It topped the App Store. It reached 1 million downloads faster than ChatGPT. Commentators declared it the next big thing..
Well is anyone actually suprisied that Sora's downloads dropped 32% in December. Then another 45% in January. When I checked recently, I think it’s downeven more that it’s even threatening the entire AI bubble to burst..
The app that was going to redefine social media is now bleeding users, weighed down by copyright restrictions, competition from Google's Gemini.
What goes up must come down.
The honeymoon is over. And it lasted about a few months (how long honeymoons generally last)
I’m not writing a full blog on AI, but after a career in corporate tech, these headlines aren’t surprising. They validate what I felt the entire time I was working in those spaces. I’ll use the rest of the post to expose that very technocratic mindset.
That’s all to say, this is all part of a recurring pattern. It's not just Sora. I’m talking about the entire machine we're living inside. A cycle that feels increasingly artificial: artificial scarcity.. artificial demand.. the hype..the mania.. the inevitable crash
..rinse and repeat.
Exhausting right?? It's starting to feel pathological to everyone along for the ride. And we're all trapped inside someone else's psychological episode. I’ll get to that in a minmute, but first
The Machine That Runs on Hype
Capitalism has an innate tendency toward boom and bust cycles. This isn't a glitch; it's a feature of a system driven by future expectations rather than present reality. Or humanity’s actual wants/needs. Investment decisions are based on what might happen, not what is happening.
And because the future is fundamentally unknowable, those decisions are volatile, contagious, and prone to wild swings in sentimentality.
But something has changed in recent decades. The cycles have accelerated. The swings have grown more extreme. And they feel... manufactured to fudge with us psychologically.
I’m starting to think this is just how the machine works.
Here are some patterns I’ve noticed…
1. The Narrative Feedback Loop
A tinygroup of influential players (i.e. venture capitalists, tech CEOs, key media outlets, celebrity founders) create an echo chamber. One VC firm publishes a report on "the inevitable rise of AI." Tech media amplifies it. The chorus grows louder until it sounds like a groundswell of public opinion. Companies rush to adopt it, even thought the average consumer is skeptical at best.
This chamber is just powerful men’s delusion bouncing off each other until the general 99.9% mistake it for ultimate reality.
2. The Prisoner's Dilemma of Investment
Every major tech company knows they might be participating in a bubble. But they also know that if they don't invest or if they don't burn billions on AI infrastructure or whatever the next thing is, they risk being left behind. Fomo becomes a hostage situation for the rest of us.
3. Vibes
When a company's value is based not on earnings but on vibes..the ability to tell a compelling story becomes more important than building a viable product. I’ve seen this more times than I can count working in tech. The story itself IS the product. Remember Theranos?
4. The Greater Fool Theory
The entire cycle is built on the expectation that you can sell your overvalued asset to someone else. That here’s a "greater fool" before the crash. I don’t know what took me so long but I finally watched Margin Call last year and yeah, I know this isn't a secret of the game. This is how the game is played. And to play it successfully, you need to create manic belief..but sell before you end up holding the trashbag of regret.
BIPOLAR AF
The trajectory of a tech hype cycle maps almost perfectly onto the phases of a bipolar manic-depressive episode. Here are similarities between them..
Mania
Psychology: Euphoria, delusions of grandiosity, racing thoughts, reckless spending, restlessness
Tech: Irrational exuberance, "this time it's different," massive speculation, toxic work culture, founders halted as heroic visionaries or saviors, frantic investment
Crash
Psychology: Emptiness, despair, worthlessness, withdrawal
Tech: Panic, bubbles threatening to burst, bankruptcies, asking for bailouts
Both also happen to be really disconnected from a more sustainable reality. It has a hard time holding the Both And, when it comes to the promises and the limitations.
I really do not mean to be problematic with this take because there is a crucial difference between a clinical condition and this market phenomenon: in the market, the mania is often intentionally induced and manipulated by a minority for profit. Which raises the question…
Can we stop living in the imagination of an insecure, bipolar billionaire????
The billionaire's power lies in our belief that their reality is the only one. Breaking the spell requires reclaiming our agency on multiple levels, from individual to collective
The Personal Layer: Detoxing Your Own Mind
1. Practice Attention Activism
Your attention is the raw material of the hype economy. Every click on a hyperbolic AI article, every share of a dystopian tweet, every moment spent consuming their feeds… this is giving your power away.
You can, instead, curate your inputs ruthlessly. Vote with your attention. Unfollow the hype men. Seek out thoughtful, wise. critical, historically informed voices. Read a book about the last dot-com crash. Recognizing and mindfully observing the pattern is the first step to not being caught in it.
2. Embrace Boring Human Technology
The manic phase fetishizes the "disruptive," the "revolutionary," the "instant." Reclaim your sanity by valuing its opposite.
Celebrate technology that is reliable, maintainable, and serves a clear human need. Spend time doing things that have a natural, unhurried rhythm: gardening, cooking, a gentle workout, etc.. These are acts of quiet rebellion against the manic pace.
3. Develop Your Own Benchmarks
Consciously use tech, rather than letting it use you. Respect the natural limitations of the tool you are using. Your adoption of new tech should be based on real-world needs, not on FOMO.
Don’t fall for it and you won’t fall with it.
The Community Layer: Building Alternative Structures
4. Create Reality-Enforcing Communities
Find or build groups where you can talk honestly about technology away from the hype. A book club, a local meetup, regular conversations with trusted friends.
5. Support Public Alternatives
The billionaire's imagination thrives on privatizing everything—knowledge, communication, even social interaction. Instead support public libraries, local clothing swaps, public broadcasting, mutual community-owned cooperatives, open-source high and low-tech solutions. These are institutions whose goal is not endless growth but genuine community well-being. They're proof that another way exists.
6. Shift from Consumer to Creator
Instead of just consuming whatever the next hype cycle produces, create things of value in your own community. These can be less tangible “value” i.e. not just in monetary value.
Mentor youth. Teach a creative skill. Organize a community clean-up. Petition for more public transit. This creates real-world value that's utterly immune to stock market fluctuations and keeps your eyes and hands busy building what will last the test of time.
The Systemic Layer: Demanding Accountability
7. Advocate for Regulation
Demand laws catch up to the tech industry. Support local and state policies that:
demand algorithmic transparency and privacy for the consumer
prioritize the ecology and enviornment
strengthen antitrust laws to slow down monopolies
stop inventivising companies to play the hype cycle
protect labor laws and unions
protect the working class and employees from mass layoffs
8. Decouple Social Goods from Stock Performance
Our collective well-being (i.e. pensions, endowments, sense of progress) shouldn't be so tied to the rollercoaster of hype. This is where you might have to do more homework on what investing looks like for yourself and maybe rewrite the rules for yourself. In the meantime, advocate for robust funding of public infrastructure, education, healthcare, and social safety nets. This makes society less vulnerable to crashes engineered by the insecure few.
9. Tell a Different Story
Tell stories about a future not defined by tech billionaires, but by the people. Stories about resilient communities, about thoughtful technology in service of human flourishing, about a world where we've chosen invest in the slow, steady work of building good lives for ourselves and everyone around us in community.
The billionaire's power lies in our belief that their reality is the only one.
Some More Tips for Surviving the Fever Dream
Become a pattern-recognition machine.
Ask: Who benefits from me feeling this way?
Adopt the Long-view. When a "revolutionary" thing launches, set a reminder for one year later. Likely most if not all the hype will have evaporated.
Prune your social media aggressively. Unfollow accounts that peddle urgency without accountability
Find an analog hobby. Pottery, woodworking, baking, learning a new language or an instrument., make hand-drawn zines
Touch grass. When existential dread hits, go outside. Nature operates on a completely different rhythm.
Read a physical book for 30 minutes/day
Practice local-doing before global-thinking. This keeps you from trying to boil the ocean when it comes to finding solutions.
Separate the tool from the cult and refuse to worship at their altar.
Cultivate ironic detachment. Learn to laugh at spectacle because most of this is ridiculous anyways…
Here’s the bottom line: Beyond a list of tangible hot tips, we must remember that we are not powerless.
The billionaire's imagination only has pull because we continue to agree to inhabit it and thus reacting to its downstream effects. By reclaiming our power, when we get our attention back. When we reorient to building up our dreams, our communities’ dreams, and reimagining a better world, we stop living in their fever dream.
We've simply been told to adapt and to keep up. But here's the thing they've never understood: imagination runs both ways.
Imagination Runs Both Ways
So imagine this: there’s an alternative world where the tech bros have to live in our imagination for a change. Where the vision isn't set by OpenAI or some billionaire's manic episode, but by the vision of the people for the people.
What would that world look like?
It would be a vision that actually benefits real humans. Not "users." Not "consumers." Not "human capital." Not “investors” just..people.
I beliebe in a world that is in harmony with nature. One where we stop blowing up the planet for extraction and start treating it as a home. Where the goal isn't endless growth on a finite planet, but balance. Stewardship. Content with enough
A world focused on human wellbeing, on mental health, on community connection, on meaningful work, on rest for its own sake. On things that can't be scaled, can't be disrupted, can't be turned into a subscription model.
Imagine for a second what it feels like to stop playing their game…
Their game of FOMO. It’s a distorted view of nature where the operating system runs on "adapt or die"
In this game you're always behind. One mistake from obsolescence.
Now imagine them having to play our game. Our game is called thriving. Our game is called flourishing. Our game is about cooperation instead of competition. Being present instead of being ahead. Caring for each other instead of profiting off hype.
And that's exactly the point.
The billionaire's power lies in our belief that their reality is the only one. But the future doesn’t just belong to whoever has the capital, but the most "vision."
The future belongs to whoever shows up for it. And we're still here. We're still capable of imagining something better and building it too.
So let’s build it together,
Christina