Science & Tech Quote by Steven Cojocaru

The “hype machine” is a deceptively blunt metaphor: it turns culture into an apparatus with gears, levers, and momentum, something that doesn’t merely persuade but physically carries you. Steven Cojocaru, a critic whose job is to stand adjacent to celebrity spectacle without being swallowed by it, is admitting the occupational hazard out loud. Critics are paid to be the immune system of pop culture, separating signal from PR; this line concedes that the immune system can catch the same fever.

The intent is partly self-indictment, partly a warning. “We all” collapses the hierarchy between tastemakers and audiences, stripping away the comforting fantasy that media literacy is a vaccine. “Swept up” is key: it frames hype less as gullibility and more as velocity. You don’t choose the wave; you either ride it or get dragged. That’s a shrewd repositioning of blame. If everyone is susceptible, then getting taken in isn’t a moral failure, it’s the baseline condition of living inside an attention economy designed to be irresistible.

The subtext is also about complicity. Hype doesn’t happen to us; it’s produced, circulated, repeated, monetized. Critics can puncture balloons, but they also inflate them by covering the balloon in the first place. “Nobody is immune” reads like humility, but it’s also a quiet acknowledgement of structural power: the machine wins not because people are foolish, but because the incentives - status, belonging, the dopamine of being early - are engineered to override skepticism.