Hypeful worlds

Abstract

Contemporary technoscience is rife with hype—inflated claims that rapidly propagate in favor of the next “new thing.” While scholars often strive to debunk and dispel hype, Tanzanian technologists working in health care face a different challenge: navigating hype. As these technologists embark on new projects in machine learning and other forms of AI, contending with hype becomes crucial. These actors operate on the margins of global technoscientific worlds, aiming to create novel African futures that promote technological sovereignty. To do so, they must grapple with hype and its political economy. For anthropologists, merely transforming these technologists’ experiences into an ethnographic object won't teach us much; a much more illuminating task is to examine how their work can provoke us to refine and transform our own knowledge practices. This is especially important because their innovations can seem both inspiring and dispiriting, both entrenched in and opposed to the troublesome technological global order.