Is it that time in the market?

Todays market is characterized by HFT, ETF's, Passive Indexing, Zero commissions, day traders, crypto, NFT's, ARKK and a seemingly endless array of fast money speculation, I find it has all happened before  with slightly different accessories. 

"The object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment today is "to beat the gun", as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, to pass the bad ,or depreciating half-crown to the other fellow.

This battle of wits to anticipate the basis of conventional valuation a few months hence ... does not even require gulls amongst the public to feed the maws of the professional; it can be played amongst the professionals themselves.  Nor is it necessary that anyone should keep his simple faith in the conventional basis of valuation having any genuine long-term validity.  For it is, so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs -- a pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passes the Old Maid to his neighbor before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when the music stops.  The game can be played with zest and enjoyment, though all the players know that it is the Old Maid which is circulating, or that when the music stops some of the players will be unseated."

This quotation is pulled from SUPERMONEY by Adam Smith  (nom de plume of George Goodman) a book written in 1972. The quotation was originally written by John Maynard Keynes in THE 
GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLYMENT, INTEREST AND MONEY published in 1936.

Speculative mania appears again and again in history, and leads one to believe it is a feature of human behavior rather than of the market mechanism itself. None of this to say the current manifestation is certain to immediately collapse but merely to wave a caution flag or perhaps a wet blanket.  But I am an old Boomer seeing events through the biased lens of an old futures pit trader bearing the scars of many mini-booms/busts.