The last 500 years have witnessed more advancements in technology than the 2000 years before it. This period happens to coincide with the rise of capitalism. It is easy to mistake anything good that emerges from a system as a product of it, even though it might have emerged in spite of it.

What prompted me to write this was a tweet that criticized a leftist for her "hypocrisy" in using the "internet" on a "smartphone" to criticize capitalism.

For starters, Internet was initially ARPANET developed by US DARPA, an organization funded by tax payer's money. Email was developed as part of the same program.

Touchscreens, microchips, GPS and accelerometer were all projects funded with the public's money. A whole lot of what makes our smartphones "smart" have little to do with capitalism.

Doppler Radar, The flu shot, MRIs, Supercomputers, Satellites, Cell sorter, Autonomous Robots, 3d seismic imaging, Computer simulation software, Enriched infant formula, lactose free milk, Zidovudine (AZT), The human genome project, genetic tracing services, Lead free solder, Modern Upper & lower limb prosthetics, Hybrid corn, The kidney matching program, vaccines for hepatitis A & B, haemophilus influenza and HPV are all projects that were funded by the public sector. Even Siri is an offshoot of the DARPA funded CALO project.

Google was developed by Phd students in a publicly subsidized campus (Stanford University). ALOHAnet developed by the University of Hawaii served as a precursor to WiFi.

Multi touch interface that Apple claimed to have developed, was a project developed by a University of Delaware graduate student, funded by the NSF & CIA before it was bought by Apple.

LCDs were developed by a pentagon organized industry consortium which later shut down. After Ibm, Xerox and 3M refused to fund the project, it was revived by ARPA.

Private businesses dominates research funding in the west. But when they do fund research, they make sure that they're putting their money in areas of immediate commercial value. They can't afford the time and uncertainty involved with funding research in all the other areas.

The government on the other hand isn't profit driven and does fund research without expecting immediate results. It is usually here that researchers and students come up with ground breaking technology. Every example provided above is proof of that.

I'm not saying that there isn't enough technology out there that owes its existence in some way to private funding, but giving credit for innovations in technology as a whole to capitalism merely because the type of system out of which it emerged was a capitalist one is flawed logic.

Irrespective of the sector funding the project and putting it into production, it is the working class that develops technology and it is most definitely them working on the production lines.

Most of the celebrity CEOs wouldn't have tightened a single screw on the products they get credit for. It's the workers who build trains, busses, aircrafts, cars and bridges, they write the code, make the ACs, TVs , refrigerators, robots and laptops.

They happen to do all of that under a capitalist system. Poetry written under dictatorships are plenty. The dictatorships don't get to take credit for them. Capitalism is a profit oriented system, not an innovation oriented one. It can't take the credit for technology that emerged in spite of it.