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For office innovators, the unrealized dream of the ‘paperless’ office is a classic example of high-tech hubris. Today’s office drone is drowning in more paper than ever before.

Then the “high-tech hubris” refers to “the failure of the realization of paperlessness” or simply “the pursuit of paperlessness” ?

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    Note that neither failure nor pursuit occur anywhere in the original sentence—that's just how you've paraphrased the sentence. It's not fair to "make up" two words and then ask which of the two the original sentence is talking about; it's not talking about either of them.
    – Jason Bassford
    Jul 17 '20 at 9:16
  • As Jason says, it's not failure to realize nor is it the pursuit. It is the unrealized dream of the [promised] paperless office that demonstrates the hubris. The implied promise could not overcome the limitation of reality. Over-promising is a hallmark of hubris - a belief in yourself/organization that exceeds your abilities.
    – EllieK
    Jul 31 '20 at 17:22
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Wikipedia and others have hubris as meaning foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence. In this case, “high tech hubris” means unjustified and dangerous confidence in high tech solutions.

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The sentence has the word "is" in it.

the unrealized dream of the ‘paperless’ office is a classic example of high-tech hubris

It should be a simple case of x = y:

unrealised dream of paperless office = example of high-tech hubris.

"Hubris" means over-confidence, so had the dream been possible it would not have been an example of overconfidence. It is the fact that it remains unrealised that makes it an example of such.

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