Here is total VC investment over time:
And here's the Gartner hype cycle:
One reading of this is that the advent of the internet was the technology trigger, the dot-com crash was the trough of disillusionment, and 2004-present is the slope of enlightenment (with a mini-crash in 2008 due to the implosion on Wall Street). This reading would be consistent with Carlotta Perez's theory that we are now in the multi-decade deployment phase.
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