Modern VR started with the Oculus Kickstarter -- it was as nerdy as it gets. Some random nerd nobody had heard of (Palmer Luckey) just had a vision. It was announced on various very nerdy sites (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6172881). One of the big draws was John Carmack's endorsement. Yeah, later Facebook nabbed them, but before then it was pure nerdy enthusiasm, and to a decent degree it still is.
Bitcoin also started in very tight knit, technical circles, part people with libertarian ideals, part cypherpunks, part just random nerds curious about playing with new tech. Today the scene is very, very different.
Oculus and Bitcoin in their "indie" phases were both insignificant, i.e. not adopted enough to cause problems for the wider world.
Once both were co-opted by parties with enormous amounts of capital, both diverted heavily from their original missions. Oculus is now a tool for Zuck's Second Life clone, and Bitcoin has never been further away from being used as an actual currency.
Pretty much nobody gets to change the world as a normal person. Most things/people either stay at local notoriety, or get adopted by various large entities which then do the world-wide lifting.
Eg, when we think about AI art, we're not thinking about the CompVis group at LMU Munich, we're thinking about DALL-E, Midjourney and NovelAI.