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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Is there a general term for the type of experimental or vaporware tech whose main function is creating FUD and FOMO which slows down the adoption and development of more mature conventional solutions? In the case of public transit these are collectively known as gadgetbahns. Examples from other fields include SMRs, direct air carbon capture, various embrace-extend-extinguish schemes in the software world, extraterrestrial colonies and a host of consumer IoT gadgets.
if there isn't, I'm calling it muskware, its conceptually close enough to vaporware.
hmm I'm not aware of one beyond general "obstructionism" but that probably is a thing that needs a word
If there isn't 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 "collective attention thief". You can substitute "collective" with "industry" and "attention thief" with "time sink", etc. Or something like "kleptoware" or "sinkware", "holetech", etc.
Focusing on just B), you might come up with something like "bubbleware", "bubble" indicating that the vaporware has inflated value.
Combining the two, you might name it after a scam. Maybe "pigeonware" after the pigeon drop scam, or "fawneyware" or "fiddleware" etc., there are many scams you could use.
I'd 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 that's 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 they're 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. I'll 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: "free drinks tomorrow" tech, after a popular sign seen on the walls of bars around the world.
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) we're looking at the fact that the "disruptive" 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 "perfectly solves the problem". 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 "unusably antiquated" and the cost of leaving the problem - be it energy independence, mass rapid transit, or whatever - unsolved and festering is something we can push.
Fair! Since you’re coming in with lotr references, maybe pumpkinware. Named after the pumpkin in one of the endings of PJ’s 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 there’s that too.
I think pumpkinware is catchy but that a more saleable story for the term is cinderella's stagecoach turning out to be a pumpkin
Ye it's called a "grift"
I mean sure, all gatgetbahns are grifts, but not all grifts are gadgetbahns you know