I feel the main reason this cycle still needs those decades to loop back again is that the world underwent its digital revolution during current iteration. We can't do synthesis without breaking everything, so we instead spawn sub-cycles on top - and then most of those end up frozen mid-way for the same reason, and we spawn sub-cycles on top of them, and so on. That's why our systems look like geological layers - XML at the bottom, JSON in the middle, and at the top JSON w/ schemas, plus a little Cambrian explosion of alternatives forming its anthitesis... and looking at it, SGML starts looking sexy again. And sure enough, you can actually use it today - but guess how? That's right, via an npm packge[0].

Wonder if we ever get a chance to actually pull all the accumulated layers of cruft back - to go through synthesis, complete the cycle and create a more reasonable base layer for the future.

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[0] - https://sgmljs.net/docs/producing-html-tutorial/producing-ht... / https://sgmljs.net/