> The tech economy is like the fabled sharks: needs to keep inventing hypes or it will implode
No, the tech economy wouldn't implode. It would just signal it had become an old, stable industry (eg automobiles). The so called tech economy isn't going away under any scenario, it underpins modern civilization across the globe, and that's only going to be more true in 20/30/50 years than it is already today.
The tech economy is a thousand times larger than it was in the mid 1980s. Despite one hype cycle after another. If your premise were correct, it would have ended a long time ago because it would all just be hype and it would inevitably collapse in on itself.
You've confused a necessary ingredient: venture capital investment, speculation, experimentation, some chaos, with thinking nothing good comes out of the process. The exact opposite is true, it's that very process that produces drastically more positive income and wealth than is destroyed in the inevitable pull-back of the hype cycle (whether it's gentle or a dotcom bubble style crash).
Should take a person less than a minute to grasp this, if they have any awareness of the extraordinary size of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, Amazon, etc. versus the dotcom bubble days (for the equivalent style companies of the time), much less the 1980s.
The global economy (as well as the US economy) is now drastically larger. If you produce a successful product, your outcome can quite easily be drastically larger accordingly. The global economy has expanded in a truly massive way over the last several decades, and the tech economy has gone with it. It's not riding on false hypes, generative AI and the like are a itsy bitsy tiny little corner of the present scale of the tech economy. Go take a look at Microsoft's operating income over the last 30 years and tell me what you see.