That's true but it's not just monopolies per se. Another big part of it is information flow. The kind of idealized free markets that "work" involve relatively transparent interactions between buyers and sellers. Sort of like, well, a market --- an old-fashioned bazaar-type market with sellers offering their wares. You can walk down the line and see 10 people are selling apples or saddles or whatever and you can compare the prices and the products and make your decision.

Even in that setup, people can try to game the market. They can make something that looks like a good saddle and sell it to you and then it falls apart not too long afterward. They can get you to agree to a price but then tell you the stirrups aren't included even though they're attached to the demo model. They can ask for half payment up front while they custom make your item, then skip town.

And mechanisms sprung up to prevent this: regulation. Some are market-internal (reputation) and some are enforced (people can report you to the authorities for selling fraudulent goods, and you can be jailed or whatever).

The problem is mainly that nowadays companies have turned the majority of their innovation energy towards this kind of market-gaming meta-activity. It's no longer about goods, services, buyers, sellers, or any of those things. It's just about finding new ways to manipulate the market itself.

This is what the article seems to be saying, and I agree. I'm not sure I'd call it "hype", though. It's not that "the hype is the product", it's that the market activity is not oriented towards products at all. Products have become like abstract proxy tokens that are moved around to simulate what we think of as market activity, but all the real activity is happening in the meta-market.