A genre comprising a small number of artists on the internet reconstructing sound from audio wreckage and garbage music with computer software. Musical and aesthetic influences include experimental artist James Ferraro's 2011 LP, Far Side Virtual, a deadpan recontextualisation of glossy corporate music, as well as the work of Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin), in particular his 2010 tape, Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. I, and his 2011 LP, Replica, each of which make heavy use of the sampling of popular music and 1980s/90s television advertisements, looping, slowing down, pitch alterations and chop-and-screw effects.

The genre's name is thought to be a play on vaporware, a pejorative term for computer products which are announced but with no intention of market release ('selling smoke'),as well as being a reference to an alienating fog of vapour.