Beanie Babies and Flying Cars.

Pick out your own benchmarks, but Beanie Babies and flying cars are two I recognize. Beanie Babies were a fad back in the 1990s—little pellet-filled cloth animal toys. They were mega-hype for a time, and everyone moved on. The idea of flying cars, popularized by scifi films and cartoons, has long been held up as some majorly cool thing that we would one day have, and yet (along with a few other hyped possible future technologies) have never come about.

So when we want to talk about some new trend, it’s useful to do a noun-replacement with our terms, and sort of consider what that says about the hype and the world.

Self-driving Meat.

An example always helps? Self-driving cars and both non-meat meat and lab-grown meat might be useful examples. But there are plenty of others you could take out for a test-flight, like carbon capture or fascist emergence or resurgence in democratic nationstates.

Some fit better with the beanbags and others with the flying contraptions. I’ve never seen lab meat offered for sale, and I believe my state banned it by statute, so I may never. Likely a flying car. Fascist creeps are still working their hype on stupid-as-a-policy-choice, but they’re on the decline side of the growth curve, so they’re clearly landfill fodder.

Others aren’t so clear. It’s plausible that carbon capture could avoid both boats, if some passive low-energy option were developed. But it probably won’t happen: the economic incentives aren’t there. That’s because there’s not enough regulation of carbon pollution to begin with. As long as spewing carbon is a Republican tax on the future and not formally taxed in the present, the incentive to develop remediation technology is very low.

Self-driving has promise and has limited deployments, but it’s unclear that it makes sense as a replacement for how we currently use cars, rather than mostly as a low-speed last-hop piece of a transportation strategy that leverages trains for longer distances.

And plant-based non-meat meat is already here. It’s not as profitable as it was at peak hype, but it doesn’t look like it goes away. So it exists as some kind of Beanie-Babies-but-useful zone. We need a third reference!

Now we’re getting somewhere. A use. A purpose. Something the thing does that people want or need. Not a fictional one, but a real one. Nobody needs to fly down to the grocery store, unless you live somewhere like remote Alaska. And there a bush plane makes a lot more sense than a flying car. Helicopters exist for similar purposes, but are mostly toys of the rich outside of a few key industrial, military, medical, and informational applications.

So in evaluating some subject of hype, we can ask what actual applications it has. If it’s a useful thing, and it can be done at a reasonable cost without disrupting peoples’ lives and communities, it may get you somewhere. You might end up buying one or renting one. It may be like sliced bread.

Looking back at the Segway, which still stands out as the ultimate hype-cycle I’ve seen (Segway: History: Independent company says: “Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that it was ‘as big a deal as the PC’.”), the idea that it would reshape cities was clearly crazed. Yet, during that hype-cycle it was presented as sliced bread.

And there’s the final lesson for the day: the product being sold wasn’t the Segway. It was what people wanted to believe about the future. The idea that we would rebuild cities to afford ourselves better lives was a comforting and laudable idea. It had nothing to do with the product, but marketing seldom does.

Sneakers won’t make you play better ball, but you want to be good at ball, you like the fantasy of being snazzy and good at sports. You want to be healthy? Eat the latest protein-laden thing! Everyone knows the missing piece of the health puzzle is protein. Protein today, fermented foods tomorrow, and next week it’s chewable water. They turned food into a new kind of fashion.

Beanie Babies were cute and had the added illusion of making the owner wealthy. Flying cars? Wow! Can you imagine being thousands of feet up, with you flying it? Looking down at all the people like ants on the ground? The final lesson is to draw those lines between the numbered dots to look at the big picture. What are they trying to make you feel is missing? And is it missing? And if it is missing, how can you find it on your own?

A good example of this in politics is the fake backlash toward transgender kids spread by repubs and other fools on the back of a couple of virtues: protect women and girls, and the general sentiment of “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” by Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce.

If you aren’t familiar with the song, the basic idea is that cowboys have a rough life, so mothers should avoid letting their kids become cowboys, so as to help them to avoid that rough life. But the subtext of the song is that some people are born to be cowboys. And if you read the statistics, it is tough for many transgender people. Some of that is the social stigma, the anti-transgender sentiment. If people feel they need their body to be different to get on in life, that should be their reasonable choice as they are the ones who have to live in their body, not some politician or the voting public.

Healthcare for transgender kids is overwhelming careful, as it should be for everyone. For a brief introduction see Transgender health care: For transgender youth. Politicians lying about surgeries that don’t happen doesn’t help anyone.

And as to the sports thing. Girls need protecting. So do transgender girls. They need their chance to play sports too. I’ve already written about that plenty: “Transgender Kids and Weird Sports.” (2025) and “The Issues of Transgender Youth Sports.” (2021) for example.

But boys also need protecting. Men need protecting. We all need protecting. That’s one of the major reasons for forming a society, after sharing dessert recipes. Reasonable safety should always be a baseline for human activities. Pretending that sports needed this little tweak to spite transgender girls does not fix any problems. Bathrooms do not represent some special threat, but the same politicians ignore countless examples of failing to protect society, including for veterans, for soldiers, for law enforcement, and for firefighters. They aren’t proposing a blanket law against dangers in youth sports. They aren’t calling for clean water, for clean air. They’re picking on transgender girls and ignoring the rest of society.

All they are trying to do is sell a rhetorical trick, hoping to sell out transgender people for votes. They don’t want to talk about actually protecting people, because they don’t want to fund universal healthcare or support changing labor conditions or other regulations. They don’t want to talk about making room for transgender girls to play sports, because that doesn’t fit with their election strategies. That isn’t society. That’s anti-society, and it will go the way of the Beanie Babies.