The answer is that capitalism fucked it up, but since we were a capitalist country even in the 1970s to '90s, this obviously requires further analysis.

We didn't "win" the Cold War. Rich people did; working people lost. The rest of us are worse off than we were beforehand, and in the former Soviet bloc this is especially true: the Russian 1990s were even worse than the American 2020s (so far).

I'm no advocate for the Soviet system. It was deeply flawed and its eventual failure was not entirely caused by imperial aggression. That said, the USSR's existence was a boon for the American middle class. Whatever you think of communism, this is an objective fact. One of the reasons is that, during the Cold War, we needed research supremacy.

Both sides of the conflict were so scared of the other, they invested heavily in building a middle class, because that's where most of the research talent is going to come from--even if you're a staunch elitist who actually buys into upper-class meritocracy (a belief refuted, in the US, by any contact with the actual upper class), the middle class is so much larger, so any society that wants to excel in R&D is going to treat it well. Both the USSR and the West deliberately engineered middle classes that they protected from the failures of their systems.

Tech was "cool" because our society gave a certain set of highly talented people R&D jobs in which they could pretty much work on whatever they wanted. You weren't guaranteed to get rich working for DARPA, but you'd have a solid middle-class lifestyle and lifetime financial security, and basically have free rein in your choice of projects. So, there was a lot of innovation, because people could work on things that might not drive revenue in the next quarter.

Of course, we "won" the Cold War in late 1991 and the Soviet Union is no more. The elites of the West no longer need a huge middle class. In the EU, there has been some political resistance against dismantling it; in the US, there was almost none. We had a few good years when we were able to coast, but after 9/11--and certainly after 2008--it was clear that the same people from the First Gilded Age were back in charge. And now tent cities and mass preventable death by infectious disease and even slavery (prison labor) are fully back. Yay capitalism?

So, these days, tech is no longer about expanding human capability; it's about enriching the already rich (and careerist middle managers). Almost all of the money in technology is made in these seven things:

1. Unemploying people (evergreen, alas).
2. Spying on people to unemploy them, or to squeeze more out of workers (also evergreen).
3. Dressing up old rent-seeking businesses as "tech companies", thereby allowing them to run at a loss for ten years (dumping) while they try to outlive existing players.
4. Speculative nonsense investments like badly-drawn pictures of butts.
5. Usury (evergreen) and myriad technologies and tools necessary to support an economy that runs on it.
6. Killing people for the benefit of various private entities (a nation's supposed "economic interests").
7. Wanton exploitation of tech nostalgia, often through mediocre accomplishments. In the late 1960s, we sent people to the Moon. In 2021, a CEO whose workers pee in bottles spends millions (billions?) to take a piss 70 miles over our heads, and we treat that as a real accomplishment because it's "private spaceflight". SMFH.

These are all shitty, not at all cool, and the culture follows. Consequently, we flooded by the refuse of other industries--the people who fail in private equity or aren't smart enough to become traders all go West and boss nerds around, earning $500k (or more) in jobs that involve teabagging H1-Bs and teenagers with their Agile Scrums.

If we want tech to be better, we have to take back our industry. This will be hard, and we will face opposition--possibly violent opposition, seeing as people are physically harassed and blacklisted even now on the suspicion of union sympathies.