A Tech Demo is a live or recorded presentation that showcases new technology, prototypes, or concepts to an audience, often before the product is commercially available. It serves to generate excitement, prove feasibility, and communicate a vision for how the technology might be used in practice, and how humans are to be trained to use it. A performance of knowledge production, its outsized commercial and societal influence makes the tech demo a key site of epistemological enquiry.
Ridicule as Praxis is a term for using humour, rather than counter-argument alone, as a critical method against tech and AI hype. Where hype relies on being taken seriously and inevitable, ridicule withholds that seriousness. It reframes overblown claims as simply janky and tacky, deflating the mystique a system asks to be granted and refusing its premise, rather than debating the details on its own terms. (Bender & Hanna, 2025)