The Ten Principles of Cyberhype
by Roy Latham

There are universal features of advertising and promotion of which we are all aware. No one with a product for sale is going to include the risks, shortcomings, and disadvantages of the product as part of the hopefully-eye-catching promotion. "GREAT NEW SOFTWARE WITH STUNNING GRAPHICS AND USELESS MANUAL DONE IN A HURRY!" Not likely. We expect to hear about the good points first and then to have to figure out the drawbacks ourselves. This circumstance actually has its advantages.

Most products fail to attract us even when only their good points are stressed, so searching for the drawbacks is not an entirely illogical next step in the hierarchical process of determining what products are suitable to our individual needs.

Within this overall principle of promotional strategy there are less extreme and more extreme examples of the art. Virtual reality products seem to lend themselves to the more extreme end of the practice. Partly, this can be attributed to the enthusiasm of the practitioners, who may, for example, consider instant nausea to be only a minor disadvantage to an otherwise exciting VR experience. This is not as extreme as, say, a hang gliding enthusiast who is willing to overlook the risk of instant death as being a minor drawback to a wonderful sport. In a way, it is good that VR has such dedicated enthusiasts; such people will press ahead against all odds. Those of us who are not necessarily so avid need to keep in mind the relative perspective from which we and the enthusiasts may view the same experience.

Enthusiasm may equally sweep away a product's inventors. It is human to fall in love with our own creations. Again we can admire the enthusiasm of the inventor which will propel a product over the countless obstacles of non-believers all the way to the marketplace. That boundless enthusiasm may lead to promotional excess, but we ought to be able to understand that and to some extent sympathize.

Then there are people whose main talent is promotion - not innovation, not engineering, not production - but promotion, despite a thoroughgoing lack of substance. Engineers are a rather conservative lot not subject to promotional excess, and in fact subject to promotional deficiency. Since they themselves would never dream of going so far out on a limb, they tend to suppose that others are similarly conservative. A thorough engineer will sift through the hype and ultimately find the truth of the matter. Engineers, having discovered the hype, take an extremely dim view of the huckster. You can hardly imagine how dim the view can be.

VR is especially suitable for the art of the huckster. We have as a starting point all the enthusiasts who are, in relative innocence, blurring the distinction between fact and promise. Then there are the potential users who are conditioned by all the enthusiasm and ready to believe it is true. The users are not necessarily technical people who are well equipped by training to sort out bold claims from facts. As the costs of VR systems drop, there are more and more potential users with interesting applications, but without a staff of experts to evaluate the claims of hucksters.

Now, for the benefit of all, we reveal the top ten principles of cyberhype. These principles are sometimes practiced with complete innocence, and sometimes with less than complete innocence. Whatever, examples abound.

1. Stress a vision rather than a reality. "Imagine a system that is completely portable and unemcumbering in which a person cannot only see objects, but touch and even smell them!" There is no problem imagining it, the problem is doing it. Whatever the vision is, claim it to be your vision and assume the attitude of the one who originated it. Make the vision seem revolutionary, even if it is trite. The foolish prospect will conclude that only a person who passionately evokes the vision can achieve it, when in fact precisely the opposite is most often true. Usually, it is sober folks who will grind their way to the vision, an inch at a time, even if they did not get first money from a foolish sponsor.

2. Stress the general achievements of technology and the rate at which technology is advancing, rather than to close the gap between dream and reality with specifics. "The advances of video game technology are astounding, and in just a few years the equivalent of a full-blown military flight simulator can be made for less than $2000." The hype evaporates when a list of the features and performance specifications of a full-blown flight simulator are actually checked one-by-one with reasonable continuations of the trends in the growth of technology. Yes, new levels of performance for price will be achieved, and these will be usefully applied. But there will be no miracles.

3. Stress the plan rather than the accomplishments, especially if pressed to close the gap between dream and reality. As all those who have worked in large organizations know well, a detailed plan can be made to do absolutely anything. If sunrise is to be made to occur thirty minutes early tomorrow, the plan can start with recruiting six of the top metaphysical gurus or six of the top astrophysicists, depending upon one's taste. It is not the plan that counts so much as the realism of the steps in the plan.

4. Always accomplish some "firsts." Arrange the first meeting in cyberspace over the Internet of university researchers on different continents to discuss the shape of doughnuts. Produce an image of a doughnut modeled with twenty-two polygons to include in the press release. Entertainer Garrison Keillor has long made fun of this type of hype by promoting himself as "America's tallest radio comedian."

5. Establish and promote free standards. How about defining the standard interface format for controlling force-feedback devices from a VR environment? Or maybe one for controlling an antigravity machine? The point is that it is much easier to define the interface than to make the machine it controls. Moreover, if you do a bad job on the interface it will not be as immediately obvious as if you had botched a system with an observable use. And if by some chance your interface catches on, you will get to reward your friends and punish your enemies by controlling what is in revisions to the interface and who will hear about the changes first.

6. Make showmanship the focus of your demonstrations. Costumes, music, dancing, smoke, and lights should be stunning. The less said about the products the better.

7. Solve non-problems. Do things over networks that amount to sending and receiving e-mail, with some frills on both ends. Promote what you are doing as being an open architecture, since unless you are a giant organization there is no chance that you could afford to design enough of the components and interfaces to make it a closed architecture.

8. Team with other non-producers. Form a team with others who will each fail to solve a different aspect of an overall problem.

9. Use exotic terminology. A hat with a buzzer in it shall be called a vibro-acoustic cranial haptic interface. University training is extremely valuable in the advanced art of highfalutin names.

10. Attempt something that cannot fail, and then claim victory. Set out to prove conclusively that whatever you have built has a detectable trace of usefulness. Prove that your vibro-acoustic cranial haptic interface can be programmed to be a better aid to navigating hallways than nothing.

One hesitates to name names, but there are good examples of the application of each of these principles. There is no point in upsetting people when they may believe themselves to be perfectly innocent of unfriendly characterizations. There are notable firsts as well as meaningless firsts, useful standards as well as useless ones, powerful teams as well as nonsense teams. Each is a judgment call that we will leave to you, the reader. In your work, feel free to quote any of the ten principles by name and number.

How To Work Nearly All The Time

No one in their right mind wants to work long days, every day for weeks or months on end, at least not without an extraordinary reason. Many people have commitments to family and to others that make such a schedule impossible - such people are called "normal." However, for the elite cadre of marathon workers, we have some tips. Most important is to plan your work day so that the most difficult work is done when you are most productive. If you are most alert and productive in the morning, that is when you should do your most challenging work. This may mean that you do creative design work in the morning, schedule meetings in the afternoon, and catch up on e-mail and correspondence in the evening. It may seem obvious to do things this way, but it is surprisingly easy to get caught in the trap of doing simple things first and ending up with deep-think tasks pressing late in the day. There is no point in working twice as many hours if you are only producing at half efficiency, so do whatever it takes to structure your day in accordance with your pattern of efficiency.

Next most important is to keep in mind some pleasant work for times when you are too tired, bored, or frustrated to do anything else. This is in keeping with the dictum that there is no point in working unless you are producing. Do not stay stuck staring at a computer screen trying to compose a difficult report when your intellectual resources have run dry. Instead, do some work that you enjoy doing, like reading a newsletter. Since all the work has to be done eventually, it is not vital that it be done strictly in priority order.

Note that since you are working nearly all the time, you may as well take your limited time off when it most pleases you to do so. For example, it may be more pleasing to take an extra hour off in the middle of the day and then work until 10:00 in the evening, rather than quit at 9:00 PM and have the hour after that. Taking breaks at various times, even relatively brief ones, makes life more interesting. It also helps preserve the illusion that you are actually a free person, rather than the slave to work which you really are. For example, you might take a reward of a good restaurant meal at midday rather than late in the evening. You might think that time off should always be taken when you are exhausted, because when exhausted you cannot work in any case. This is not so, the midday break will make you more productive later on, so that nothing is lost.

Lost time is the bane of the marathon worker, and time spent in travel is the easiest to lose. If you are alert during your morning commute to work you might consider dictating a report into an audio recorder or making phone calls on a cellular phone. On business trips, always bring something to read while waiting in ticket lines and the like. There seems to be more potential lost time waiting for airplanes than actually traveling on them. Airlines are so cramped, many people will find it more productive to read or write on board rather than to try to use a portable computer. Portables are great for hotel rooms, especially if the portable has a fax capability.

You must always be ruthlessly honest in monitoring your productivity. The objective is to get as much work done as possible, not to put in as many hours as possible. If your reserves are drained, take a day off and sleep rather than going through the motions of doing work with no accomplishment to show for it. How often you need an "exhaustion day" depends upon many factors. In truth, very few marathon workers will get by with less than one per month, and two per month is a more realistic plan.

Knowing the basics of the game of marathon working, how do you know if you should be playing the game? If you are doing it only because someone else wants you to, get hold of your senses and run for distant hills. If the marathon work has an end in sight - perhaps a proposal submission date, you most likely want to continue for the satisfaction of having done the job, and for having put everything you've got into it. Thereafter schedule a long vacation with loved ones, at least those who still remember you.

Those are the easy cases. What if you are doing this for yourself and there is no horizon in sight? Entrepreneurs can relate to this. We admire people of passionate conviction and determination; we pity the insane. It is up to each person to evaluate their stance with respect to the line between determination and insanity, and to stay on the side of mere determination. By the way, the line moves with age.