tl;dr: Exploring where we are within the cycle of history. And probably being wrong.

I was reading The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions, another analysis of the world using the Carlota Perez framework, by Ben Thompson of Stratechery.

Ben is one of my favorite, and one of the best, technology-centric analysts in the world.

Most of the first part of the essay is a recap of Perez’s thesis, so if you’re familiar with her work, it won’t be that mind-blowing, the I think I’d summarize the bulk of his essay as trying to answer the question of:

Where are we now? And, if this framework is right, where are we going next?

I have asked myself that same question, particularly within the microcosm that is crypto. The 2017 ICO boom/gold rush was definitely an eruption of the sector. Now, there’s an eruption within the sector of NFTs. I spent 2 days in New York last week as a guest of Unique Networks (discl: adivsor) at the NFT.NYC conference, the largest of its kind dedicated to the Non-Fungible Token space.

While it wasn’t as big or as crazy as the insanity that was Consensus 2018, more like Consensus 2017, it was respectable and it carried a lot of that mix of excitement, innovation, and sense of impending future.

More on the summit in a separate post, but I did get struck with a feeling of deja vu. I had seen this movie before and I suspect that, though NFTs are here to stay, I wouldn’t be surprised if an “NFT winter” hit at some point. There’s just way too much supply in the market right now.

But back to Perez and Thompson and the question of the next “Golden Age.”

Perez, whom Thompson quotes at length in the middle of the post, suspects that the next ‘Golden Age’ will come from the “Green” Revolution and she advocates a government-led/sponsored push in that direction. As she says

In order to get the technologies to go in the right direction, you’ve got to tilt the playing field, and I hold that the most effective way of doing that today is tilting it towards ‘Green’.

I am not as deep in that sector, but from what I have seen, it’s clearly taken off and I wouldn’t be surprised if the energy there is equal to (or maybe even greater than) what I see in the world of crypto.

Doesn’t really matter, as long as we know that the eruption is going to be supercharged by government-backed investment and that most of them (some of them already have) are going to fail spectacularly. Caveat emptor.

All of this, however, is part of the long “installation” period of the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Revolution. After all, “Green” is really “Green Tech.”

So, the “answer” if you will of “where are we now?” is that we are at the “turning point” of the Perez chart.

That is only in the “grand sense” of the ICT revolution. Within that, there are relatively “minor” revolutions that follow their own cycle, Green and Crypto being two of them.

Those two are less developed. I mean, most cars are still not electric and crypto is, despite what believers like myself might wish, somewhat far from mainstream.

Thompson puts it succinctly:

For what it’s worth my suspicion is that the current Installation period for crypto — if that is indeed where we are — has a long ways to run, which is another way of saying most of the economy will remain in the current paradigm for a while longer.

But the “biggest” takeaway from me is something I have appreciated going back to the early Social Media days. It’s not about the tech itself-even if it’s wicked cool-, it’s about the implications of the arrival of the technology.

Thompson agaain:

one insight that I find very compelling is that the demand that drives job growth is less about the technology itself and more about the new lifestyle that the technology enables (just like suburbanization drove the previous revolution).

To be cliche about it, this is where the money is made and how one proverbially ‘skates to where the puck is going.’

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the implications of social media: empowered consumers, rise of tech companies as nation-states and arbiters of speech, and fragmentation of society based on algorithms.

As we look down the path at the “Green” and crypto revolutions (as well as many, many others) the challenge, and the opportunity, is to try to figure that part out.