Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
If there isnāt a term, maybe you get to invent one! Just exploring the concept a bit here to try to generate leads, in case you wanted them.
To rephrase your concept, you have A) things that are collective attention thieves/time sinks for a particular field or industry, and B) this vaporware appears to have a good profit-to-opportunity cost ratio, but in reality, it does not.
You could focus on just A), with a direct naming of ācollective attention thiefā. You can substitute ācollectiveā with āindustryā and āattention thiefā with ātime sinkā, etc. Or something like ākleptowareā or āsinkwareā, āholetechā, etc.
Focusing on just B), you might come up with something like ābubblewareā, ābubbleā indicating that the vaporware has inflated value.
Combining the two, you might name it after a scam. Maybe āpigeonwareā after the pigeon drop scam, or āfawneywareā or āfiddlewareā etc., there are many scams you could use.
Iād describe it as parasitic disruption. The scam analogies are on point and fine for rhetorical purposes, but they imply a degree of intentionality which is not necessary for some tech to be parasitic.
Say you invent a new type of electical power line thatās more durable and power efficient than the existing type. The materials are also ten times more expensive than for the same length of normal power line and the only factory making this type of power line can only make enough to fill the needs of a few small customers with special needs. Meanwhile local government in Eriador is planning the electrification of the Shire community when the well-meaning councilor Brandybuck mentions this new type of power line he read about in a magazine. Perhaps the council should wait and see how that develops before committing to building power lines that might be obsolete the moment theyāre put up.
Neither you nor the councilor are deliberately using your invention as a tool to stall electrification of the Shire, but the same effect happens anyway.
You point about property B is a pretty good one. My hunch is that tech follies like these are related to economic bubbles and share similarities with them. Iāll postulate that most parasitic disruptions go hand in hand with economic bubbles, but not necessarily all of them.
Another, a little more snide name I came up with while writing that: āfree drinks tomorrowā tech, after a popular sign seen on the walls of bars around the world.
Fair! Since youāre coming in with lotr references, maybe pumpkinware. Named after the pumpkin in one of the endings of PJās RotK where the hobbits are in a pub and everyone else is impressed with the large pumpkin, oblivious to what the present could have been.
Also, in order to grow a large pumpkin, you probably gotta ignore/prune all other pumpkins and just feed the one growing. So thereās that too.
I think pumpkinware is catchy but that a more saleable story for the term is cinderellaās stagecoach turning out to be a pumpkin
Parasitic Disruption is a great name for the overall structure. I think another way of framing it in economic terms would be to talk about the opportunity cost of innovation. Even if we take hucksters and monorail salesmen out of the picture (which is exceptionally generous steelmanning imo) weāre looking at the fact that the ādisruptiveā option has a whole lot of unknowns on the cost side of the sheet in terms of timeline, monetary costs, downsides and tradeoffs, etc. The upsides are also unknown, but are usually assumed to be āperfectly solves the problemā. On the other hand, the boring, well-understood option is going to have very specific answers to those questions. That skews the discussion strongly against actually doing anything, and creates a lot of room for the aforementioned grifters to work.
I think this framing also gives us some tools to fight back. You can easily turn those unknowns into horror stories of boondoggles past, and focus on the major advantage of being able to start today. The opposite of state-of-the-art is rarely āunusably antiquatedā and the cost of leaving the problem - be it energy independence, mass rapid transit, or whatever - unsolved and festering is something we can push.