CONCEPT
Visionary vs. Pragmatist
The foundational psychological distinction in Moore's framework — two adopter populations with incompatible evaluation criteria whose misalignment creates the chasm that kills most technologies.
Moore's distinction between visionaries and pragmatists is the psychological foundation of Crossing the Chasm. Visionaries adopt because of what a technology could become; they buy potential, tolerate incompleteness, and absorb personal risk to make half-finished tools perform. Pragmatists adopt because of what a technology has already done for someone like them; they buy proof, require institutional infrastructure, and treat visionary enthusiasm as a warning signal. The two populations are not positioned along a single continuum of risk tolerance — they inhabit incompatible evaluation frameworks, and the structural consequence is that visionary testimony, however accurate, cannot cross the chasm to pragmatist audiences. In the AI context, the triumphalist posts that dominated 2025–2026 discourse were visionary communication reaching pragmatist readers and actively repelling them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction begins with Rogers but sharpens under Moore's analysis. Rogers described early adopters as respected local opinion leaders whose deliberate adoption legitimizes an innovation for the early majority. Moore's innovation was to show that this legitimizing function