Are We There Yet? Crypto, AI, and the Search for a Way Out
Technologies used to promise better tools, but crypto and AI promise something bigger: escape from the world we're stuck in. What happens when belief itself becomes the product?
We no longer talk about what technology does. We talk about what it means.
Crypto and AI have ushered in a new way of thinking about technology and progress. The old frame—this is faster, better, cheaper—has given way to something else: a language of rupture. Burn down what exists, install something else, and believe that it will be better. Not because it’s been proven in practice, but because it fits the vision.
In crypto, the vision is to rebuild the architecture of modern finance. Fiat currency and the banking system are seen as constraints to be replaced. In AI, the scope is even broader. Human intelligence is treated as the bottleneck. Superintelligence is imagined as the release. It promises to cure disease, eradicate poverty, and redefine civilization.
In earlier cycles, technology promised improvements. Now, it demands replacement. We aren’t being invited to try the new. We’re being told to clear the decks.
That shift matters. Technologies like crypto and AI don’t just sit on top of existing systems. They aim to rewire them. The financial system, the labor market, the knowledge economy. They hold a mirror to complex social and economic institutions, and see in its reflection better code.
Technology used to be measured in users and revenue. Now it’s measured in claims about how life should be organized. Our role changes too. We move from participants to followers. From choosing tools to adopting beliefs.
In this piece I trace how crypto and AI have altered the way we talk about technology, why that change took hold when it did, and whether it signals a lasting realignment in our expectations of what technology is for.
The Loneliness of the IT Enthusiast
Before crypto and AI, there were other promised revolutions.
Voice interfaces. 5G networks. Smart devices that would change how we live. Each had its champions, people who believed that speaking to technology or surfing on low-latency wireless would transform the human experience. Screens were clumsy. LTE was slow. The future would be hands-free, buffer-free, frictionless.
But these champions were often alone. Every company had a few, but never enough. Enough to be known, to nod at one another in meetings, but not enough to shift the culture. Their enthusiasm never scaled. No matter how many devices shipped, it still felt like an IT story, and they still sounded like IT enthusiasts.
Crypto and AI arrived differently. They didn’t start inside companies. They arrived with movements—early, self-organized, and ideologically driven. Not just products, but prophets. Vast communities, internal schisms, divergent visions of the future. The end of fiat. The end of human labor.
Charismatic inventors. World-altering stakes. Entire systems on the table. This is not what happened with 5G or voice. Not with cloud, mobile, social, gaming, or ecommerce. Not even with search.
The closest we’ve come is the internet itself, a technology that grew with our use of it, not just our belief in it. The internet was hyped, but its transformation came through use. It scaled with, and through, us.
Crypto and AI activated belief systems and collective worldviews. They form organized communities with protocols, media channels, and capital networks. What once felt fringe now moves with institutional force. It shapes how we think about the purpose and arc of technology.
Up and To the Right
The internet taught us to see progress as an arrow pointing up and to the right. The technologies that took off started small, found product-market fit, and scaled fast. Ecommerce, gaming, social, mobile, cloud. Growth meant more users. Adoption meant success.
Crypto and AI still carry that narrative. Everyone wants to grow. But growth isn’t the only goal. These technologies aim to replace how we move money, do work, structure systems. Displacement is part of the pitch.
In crypto, up and to the right means less fiat and fewer intermediaries. A two-tiered financial system replaced by decentralized tokens, smart contracts, and public blockchains.
In AI, up and to the right means fewer humans. Not computers that assist knowledge work, but ones that do it. People move from the center to the edge. From decision makers to monitors.
When success includes displacement, the meaning of progress shifts.
It is no longer about scaling new tools. It is about building something else on the other side. And that reshapes what it means to participate in technological change.
Tell Me What It Means
Understanding past tech waves was the work of analysts and journalists. They decoded the ecosystem through daily newsletters, annual internet reports, deep dives into business models and market dynamics.
If you were building in commerce or gaming or social, you ended up in Mary Meeker’s slides. Everyone—builders, users, analysts—shared a common set of frameworks. You knew what counted, what good looked like.
Crypto and AI don’t fit in those boxes. They’ve created new categories of tech commentator: the translator and the prognosticator. These voices don’t analyze what the technology does so much as interpret what it means. What future it points to. What to believe.
Bitcoin is going to halve. What does it mean? Ethereum completed the merge. What does it mean? The latest language model shows signs of chain-of-thought reasoning. What does it mean? These aren’t product updates. They’re signs to decode.
Prognosticators go further. They narrate the future backward. Bitcoin matters because it will displace fiat. AI matters because it leads to superintelligence. What these technologies are doing today is only relevant in how it gets us to tomorrow. Here’s where we are on that timeline.
There’s still analysis of use cases and business models—especially in AI—but it’s a different conversation, often led by different people. The draw now is interpretation. Translators and prognosticators don’t explain what is. They reveal what’s becoming. What’s coming next. They are meaning-makers for technologies no one quite understands.
We’re making peace with the idea that technology now sits outside our understanding. We no longer expect shared frameworks. We hope for believable interpretations.
And as the frameworks shift, so do the roles. Technology has always had insiders and outsiders, builders and users. Now, the divide is between believers and nonbelievers. Interpreters and adherents. Those who can shape the narrative, and those who have to trust it.
Exit
Crypto and AI arrived in a moment of accumulated frustration. The institutions that powered earlier waves of innovation had started to feel like constraints. And the stories we told about progress were getting harder to believe.
In finance, regulation insulated incumbents from the kind of disruption that reshaped other industries. Banks upgraded interfaces, not business models. In tech, the biggest platforms absorbed the gains of mobile and cloud. The path to scale and exit for startups grew narrower.
Crypto and AI promised an exit. Not just better products, but new systems. A way around the institutional bottlenecks of finance. A new path to growth, beyond the capture of incumbent platforms.
They also arrived at a time when our narratives of progress had broken down. For believers in crypto, the old story—save up, retire eventually—didn’t make sense in a world shaped by the financial crisis, stagnant wages, and asset inflation. For believers in AI, the breakdown was broader. Progress in politics, climate, and technology all seemed to hit their mirror: hyper-polarization, extreme weather, enshittification.
In both cases, a new story—HODL, AGI—offered something to believe in. Hold on for dear life (HODL) turned being left out of the financial system into a form of resistance, even superiority. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) promised to break through systemic paralysis with a new form of intelligence that could act where humans no longer could. Both promise a better future if you believe long enough.
In a world of fragmented, contested narratives, where coherence could only be sustained by ignoring lived reality, crypto and AI offered a singular arc. A way out of the world we are in, toward something better.
Reentry
Both crypto and AI are technologies of exit. To deliver on their promise, they have to re-enter. Crypto must transform financial infrastructure and the everyday exchange of value. AI must remake how we work, learn, create, discover, and consume. Their success depends on replacing what exists.
This is where the weight of transcendence begins to show. Movements promise a destination. Technologies need adoption. Eventually, the future has to land.
And so the question becomes: Are we looking for signs that the post-fiat, post-labor future is coming, or content to upgrade the systems we have today?
In AI, the enthusiast storyline still ends in superintelligence.That vision leaves little room for making the tools safe, reliable, or widely usable. What matters most is proximity to the endpoint. Everything else can wait.
Yet many businesses are working from the ground up. Building applications, chasing market share, leaving the big questions to others. Not chasing transcendence. Shipping product.
Crypto faced a version of this earlier. Would any network besides Bitcoin get us to a post-fiat world? Probably not. But stablecoins emerged across chains, enabling new forms of value exchange and the slow march of institutional adoption. In the process, the narrative shifted. Less myth-making, more implementation.
Stablecoins are crypto’s descent into the practical. The application layer is AI’s. Both are finding momentum not in visions of rapture, but in monetizable deployments. They trade transcendence for institutional absorption, exit for upgrade, belief for benefits.
Off Ramps
Exit is largely a feature of advanced economies. In parts of the world where access is the deeper tension, technologies like crypto and AI serve a different role. For many in developing economies, crypto isn’t an end to money but a bridge into global systems. AI isn’t transcendence, it’s a tool for leapfrogging.
In the West, exit has become the lens through which movements interpret technological change. First with crypto, now with AI, the hype cycle has been recast as a story of transcendence. A story about surpassing the limits of existing systems. And there may be no going back.
Fragmentation, polarization, the breakdown of meaning, and decaying institutional trust—the result of decades of twenty-first century shock—have created fertile ground for narratives of exit. Our most advanced technologies are more than capable of meeting that narrative moment.
Crypto and AI deliver on dreams we haven’t fully made sense of. They build parallel communities where the incoherence of modern life is collapsed into code.
A new financial system with its own networks, protocols, currencies. Computing power that, in a single prompt, promises to absorb the labor of the knowledge economy. These are technically plausible myths of exit. And they’re believable in a way that the work of restoring institutional trust or rebuilding social cohesion no longer is.In that sense, belief itself becomes the product. It’s how these technologies grow, how they’re funded, how their roadmaps are understood. But it’s also something more. In a culture stripped of coherence, belief is the tool we have left to generate meaning. What started as a way to sell the future has become a way to make sense of the present.
We follow the narratives and participate in them. We repost, debate, retweet. We adopt the interpreter’s frame and share it as if this has always been how we talk about technology. Together we rewrite the story of progress, and our roles in telling it.
There is something thrilling about pursuing wholeness through code. The power, the speed, the feats of strength. They sustain our ability to imagine a future where everything will be different.
And that longing for something different won’t go away. There is too much accumulated fatigue with what is, too much recognition that across industry, economy, society it’s been business as usual for far too long.
Crypto and AI didn’t create that longing. But they have become the clearest expressions of it. They have stepped into a vacuum left by stifled innovation and stalled institutional renewal. If upgrade culture belonged to a previous era, these technologies now offer its replacement: not improvements to what we have, but offramps to something else.