Marina Leivald
CMO/Tech Strategist
The Ghost Bus Economy
Imagine a bus route where the bus doesn’t exist. Ads show smiling passengers already onboard. Influencers post selfies from inside. Investors brag about how many tickets they’ve pre-bought. You show up at the stop, and — surprise — no bus. That’s not an accident; it’s the business model.
The old “Gartner Hype Cycle” was descriptive — an observation of how new tech lived through collective optimism, disappointment, and eventual utility. But 2025 runs on a different operating system: hype is no longer emergent, it’s manufactured. Cycles are forced into existence, inflated on demand, and collapsed when capital needs to move elsewhere.
Deep Analysis: Mechanics of Forced Hype
Not All Hype Is the Same
Understanding the type of hype tells you where it breaks — and what survives.
Speculative cycles (capital-led):
Examples: tokens, NFTs, meme assets.Failure mode: liquidity vanishes.Residue: infrastructure (wallets, exchanges).Technological cycles (demo-led):
Examples: XR headsets, robotics breakthroughs.Failure mode: great demos, weak daily use.Residue: developer tools, patents, code.Cultural cycles (community-led):
Examples: play-to-earn, creator economies.Failure mode: incentive collapse.Residue: cultural literacy, new aesthetics, communities.Policy cycles (state-led):
Examples: CBDC pilots, AI safety regimes.Failure mode: bureaucratic stagnation.Residue: standards, rails, compliance structures.
Each cycle type leaves behind scaffolding. The trick is separating the ruins from the foundations.
Capital as Narrative Weapon
Capital no longer just funds technology; it scripts its storyline. A single VC tweet can summon a narrative, pulling media, analysts, and FOMO investors into its gravity well. The metrics don’t matter; the story is the collateral.
Case parallel: Web3. Most 2021 token projects had less functional infrastructure than a Wordpress plugin, but valuations soared because “the future was inevitable.”
Field note: As a strategist, you don’t ask, “Is this tech ready?” You ask, “Whose portfolio benefits from us believing it’s ready?”
Framework: Narrative Liquidity Model
Stage 1 — Spark: Seeding whitepapers, leaks, and stealth hype.
Stage 2 — Acceleration: Media amplification, influencer campaigns, staged demos.
Stage 3 — Liquidity Event: Valuation spike, capital exit, hype drained.
The cycle doesn’t need adoption — only narrative liquidity.
Algorithmic Amplification & Simulated Proof
The platforms aren’t passive conduits anymore; they’re active multipliers. TikTok, X, LinkedIn — they hardcode hype into cultural circulation.
Once a phrase trends (“AI agents,” “metaverse,” “superapps”), the algorithm locks it into everyone’s feed.
Narrative velocity becomes more important than narrative accuracy.
Attention is treated like liquidity — pumped into certain narratives until saturation.
Case parallel: AI-generated girlfriends. These weren’t “adoptions of future tech,” they were algorithmic glitches amplified into cultural inevitability. One viral TikTok = thousands of clones = investors asking where to wire money.
Simulated Proof of Concept
Why prove traction when you can simulate it? This is where forced hype cycles achieve uncanny realism: demos, renders, synthetic data, and illusions of scale.
CGI drone shows of skylines that don’t exist yet.
AI-powered products showing “screen recordings” of workflows that never ran.
Startups reporting “user engagement” based on synthetic traffic.
Case parallel: Magic Leap (2015). Investors poured billions on the promise of “revolutionary AR.” The demo footage? CGI. The illusion bought enough runway to pull in capital — long before hardware existed.
Forced Scarcity Thought-Trap
Scarcity drives hype, but in forced cycles, scarcity is fabricated: invite-only access, token drops, “stealth mode.” The product isn’t scarce; the access narrative is.
Case parallel: Clubhouse. It wasn’t just an app — it was an invite. Scarcity created hype velocity; the utility never caught up.
Strategic Implications: How to Read the Noise
Exploit Hype Early — But Don’t Marry It
Founders who ride hype responsibly can fund themselves into survival. But if your business model is the hype, you die with the cycle.
Build to survive the Trough of Disillusionment, not just the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
Design your metrics for resilience: real adoption > synthetic impressions.
Character.ai rode the AI companion hype to millions of users but is now facing churn as novelty wears off. Meanwhile, Perplexity leveraged the LLM hype to capture attention, but invested heavily in core product stickiness — fast answers, citations, real-time data — to avoid being just another “AI wrapper.” One positioned for survival, the other risks peaking too early.
Instrument Your Intel Like OSINT
Forget press releases — watch GitHub commits, API traffic, actual hires. Forced hype cycles thrive on projected inevitability, but the truth hides in operational breadcrumbs.
Treat hype like an intelligence problem. Think of it as an OSINT dashboard overlaying seven streams of data:
Adoption curves – WAU/MAU by geography; organic vs incentivized usage.
Retention – Cohort survival after incentives end; day-30/90 habit formation.
Economic behavior – Real transactions, not speculative churn.
Capital flows – Venture, retail, and grants; speed + concentration.
Builder velocity – Shipping cadence, open-source commits, roadmap credibility.
Regulatory momentum – Sandbox pilots, licenses, enforcement temperature.
Cultural diffusion – Local-language chatter, creator uptake, event density.
Field rule:
Where three or more streams show durable movement → you have signal.
Where only narrative + venture floodlight the scene → you’re looking at noise.
Count the engineers, not the influencers. If staff growth is marketing > devs, you’re watching a hype balloon.
Several “AI agent startups” went viral in 2024 with demo videos of bots “running companies overnight.” But OSINT told a different story: no real repos, no API calls, and job postings only for community managers. Compare that with Anthropic, which quietly scaled hires in applied alignment and infrastructure — a signal of real build vs synthetic hype.
Counter-Hype Immunity as a Brand Strategy
Hype-burnout is real. Users, clients, even investors are exhausted by chasing buzzwords. Positioning yourself as the anti-hype brand can earn loyalty.
Basecamp thrived by being openly hostile to hype cycles, turning skepticism into market differentiation.
In AI, Mistral positioned itself as the stripped-down, no-nonsense alternative to bloated models — open-sourcing weights, delivering lean performance instead of “AGI promises.” The anti-hype stance didn’t just attract users; it built trust.
Case Files: Forced Hype in Action
Crypto/NFTs (2021–22): Narrative of “digital ownership” engineered by capital + amplified by celebrity influencers. Real traction? Marginal. Liquidity event? Massive.
Metaverse (2021–23): Zuck’s rebrand was less about vision than about survival. The cycle was forced to redirect attention, not driven by adoption.
AI Agents (2024–25): Demo videos of AI “running companies overnight” spread algorithmically. Most were stitched workflows + hallucinated outputs. But the hype unlocked early capital flows and new SaaS niches.
Framework: The Forced Hype Cycle
Synthetic Peak: Narrative manufactured by capital + amplification.
Forced Plateau: Algorithms maintain hype despite lack of adoption.
Liquidity Cliff: Early investors exit; narratives collapse.
Residual Value: Survivors adapt into real markets — often years later.
The curve isn’t organic anymore — it’s scripted.
The Hangover Economy
Forced hype cycles function like quantitative easing for attention: print narratives, pump valuations, hope reality catches up before the liquidity cliff. The real danger isn’t hype itself, but habituation. Markets begin to expect hype as oxygen — and punish anything that doesn’t inflate fast enough. (Scale,scale,scale! Isnt's the thing that scales infinitely is called "cancer"?)
The winners? Not the ones who scream the loudest at the synthetic peak, but the operators who know how to decode illusions, exploit the noise, and quietly build while the crowd waits for buses that never arrive.
Field Note Final: In 2025, hype is the product. And if you’re still waiting at the stop, clutching your ticket, maybe you’re the business model. Being cynical can be a brand positioning.
