Every technological revolution has a hinge moment when the infrastructure is ready, but the institutions aren’t. AI and crypto have reached that moment. The rails exist. The world around them has not yet reorganized. In Carlota Perez’s framework, this marks the boundary between two eras: the end of the Installation era and the beginning of the Turning Point.

Perez spent decades studying how great technological surges unfold. Each one follows the same architecture. The era of breakthroughs and overbuilding is an era of installation, where financial capital races ahead, builds infrastructure, and makes outsized bets long before society fully understands the implications. Deployment is the worldwide absorption of the new paradigm — when it stops being “technology” and starts being how the world works. Between these two eras lies a period she calls the Turning Point: the moment when the frenzy collapses, institutions must adapt, and the real shape of the new economic order begins to emerge.

Perez would be the first to say her cycle is a model, not a law. All models are false, but some are useful — and this one is useful because it captures the rhythm of technological upheaval more clearly than anything else we have.

Fred Wilson described this beautifully back in 2015, before the crypto manias and before the AI explosion. He reminded readers that railroads, automobiles, and the internet all followed this sequence. Rails had to be built before the West could be settled. Highways and assembly lines had to precede mass mobility. Servers, broadband, cloud, and mobile networks had to exist before social media and the modern consumer internet. In every cycle, financial capital overbuilds the infrastructure, becomes irrational, and then breaks. As Wilson wrote, quoting Tom Evslin: “Nothing great has ever been accomplished without irrational exuberance.” Perez added the corollary: “Nothing important happens without crashes.”

Her point wasn’t pessimism. It was pattern recognition. The frenzy is how the infrastructure gets built. The crash is how unrealistic expectations are cleared. The Turning Point is where society renegotiates the rules — and where Deployment truly begins.

And that’s where we are now.

LLMs operate like cognitive infrastructure. Stablecoins move billions across borders in minutes. Wallet-native identity is emerging as a new authentication layer. Farcaster and Base feel like the earliest drafts of a social and economic platform built directly on open networks. The technological foundations are not speculative anymore. They are operating at scale.

What hasn’t arrived yet is the institutional reorganization Perez says is mandatory. Regulation is fragmented and inconsistent. Enterprises deploy AI but struggle to coordinate around it. Governments are improvising frameworks for digital rights, identity, and network governance. Social and economic norms still assume a world where data is captive, intelligence is static, and coordination is platform-controlled. The tools have outpaced the mental models.

Perez would describe this moment precisely: the end of Installation, the beginning of the Turning Point. Not quite crisis, not yet stability. A liminal corridor where the old order can’t fully contain the new one, and the new one has not yet built the institutional scaffolding it needs. This is the phase of renegotiation — political, economic, social, and cultural. It’s where governments rethink regulation, firms rethink strategy, and society renegotiates rights, norms, and expectations. The crash — whether sharp or distributed — catalyzes this realignment.

We are living in that hinge. Past the exuberance. Before the order. The period where the next era is shaped not by technology, but by institutional imagination. Perez would say the revolution has already happened. What remains is for the world to reorganize around it.

The rails are ready.
The institutions are not.
And that gap is exactly where a technological revolution becomes a societal one.

This isn’t the aftermath. It’s the beginning of the beginning.