The world is going through many changes right now and sentiments are starting to change on a fundamental level. If you study history, you see that societies themselves go through phases of ups (growth, transcendence, romanticism) and downs (austerity, grounded-ness, materialism) that balances itself out over time in order to prevent social systems from complete collapse.
All of this stuff sounds very academic and abstract, so for most people it's easier to understand when certain figures who epitomizes those traits happen to emerge. In recent years, we've started to see these shifts happen in new leadership styles in the US that started to emerge.
Politics: @realDonaldTrump -> Michelle Wu, @ZohranKMamdani, @wilsonformayor (A Swing Towards the Left)
Economics: @RayDalio (The End of the American Dollar as the Global Reserve)
Culture: Alysa Liu (Form to Freedom)
Technology: Satoshi Nakamoto (Centralization to Decentralization)
What these figures have in common is that compared to their predecessors is that their approach tends to be more pragmatic and "grounded", as opposed to relying on idealism to push their ideas and agendas, though. These ideas have always been around - but the difference is that society's sentiments has shifted enough to where people are willing to put them in charge.
I've been talking about Alysa Liu a lot lately because I think her winning the gold medal is a sign that people are looking for something different than before, even aesthetically - figure skating up until now has had a reputation for emphasizing form, appearances (i.e. starving yourself for the sport), and technical execution, while Liu's style is more improvisational and personal in nature.
It's similar to when jazz music broke into the scene in the early 20th century - classical music fans turned their heads and were "what is that?? 😲" and couldn't help themselves at this new thing that just emerged. It was a breath of fresh air and brought life to the music world that was much needed at the time. It's not a coincidence that Ray Dalio talks about improvisation (specifically jazz) in his management classes and that jazz itself is also very strongly correlated to the progressive politics that often compliments the political scenes in those circles as well. It's all Zeitgeist, all related.
Now the interesting thing is that in this shift, tech finds itself out of place - depending on how you look at it, it may have been too early or too late because the "grounded" version of tech is in blockchain/crypto technology, which focuses on decentralization and being "peer-to-peer". But in the last decade or so, the "Web3" worlds have moved away from that ethos and became more and more reliant on centralized models, which makes them almost indistinguishable from regular banks.
This was largely because the emergent figure in this shift has been dead or missing for a while (we still don't know) and there has not been anyone there to carry the torch of the new paradigms that emerged. (@VitalikButerin tried to be that but he is not it, sorry ETH folks).
So both Bitcoin and Ethereum are now largely failed projects - dead in the water - that are largely waiting to get replaced by the crypto movement's original intentions. So far, no clear contenders yet (I'm leaving my personal opinions out of this one though people who know me know what they are) and it's still anyone's game.
As of today most of these movements are moving independently from each other, largely silo'd into its own domains and they fight to replace the old guards that have been holding them back. But at some point, the sky will open up and the folks with similar values will look at each other and say "hey, maybe we should do something together?"
That's around when the next generations of ideas will start to make its move and grow. This is how history has always played out - in those cycles of Creative Destruction that the tech people always talk about but never actually do. But it is finally coming, this time for real...☯️