Why? Because enough VCs/Hedge Funds have bought into the lie that is crypto or “AI”. Is this some kind of economic extortion?

Famously: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-c...

More recently, insider trading and pump-and-dump charges.

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2018/lr24201.htm

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-121

Penny stock frauds like that are more about ripping off retail.

Yes, precisely. Executives want to pump the stock price because it's a large part of their compensation. Many Hedge funds/VCs want to invest in "innovative" companies .

More like a race to the bottom. If everyone else is e.g. using Bahamian tax shelters, and your company explicitly states that it won't do that, then your company's stock price will go down, because the market predicts that without those "table stakes", your company is not going to be competitive with all the companies who are willing to do that. (Whether that's true or not is irrelevant; it's only about whether the market believes it's true.)

VCs reward investments into all that horse hockey, because VCs reward investments into it. It's greater fools all the way down, a weird self-fulfilling prophecy.

I still remember when companies proudly claimed their software contains XML and therefore is worth unicorn dollars

Crucially they don't need to buy the lie themselves, they only need to believe others will.

Traditional values are gossip based pseudoscience. The majority will never dig deeper, so it works, but what’s more they’ll never understand the nuance so why bother? Stick with gossip.

The most distressing aspect of the current bull run has to be that it's difficult to point to concrete examples/products that use the best buzzwords.

Web3? Show me an application which isn't just trying to sell some other crypto scam. Why can't I know simply access a web 3.0 web page, is the web 3 not the web?

AI? I see lots of ML in products these days, but calling it AI is ... extreme. Products that look like they could match the description are relatively far from commercial viability.