nostr:npub1zxmpvhtcvwp8vc3fnjahp053m0vnsqeajujy5zt6fvhnet3qws6sjgzzy9 

Stories like this about how capitalism drives scientific progress are always coming up - and they're always distortions.  I wrote the following reply to somebody that used the iPhone as one such example...

iPhones didn't suddenly emerge fully-formed out of nothing, or out of any one economic system.  Without the long history of civilisation the development of mathematics and of mechanical computation iPhones are literally inconceivable (an early history, by the way, that seems to have been largely Asian and African - as is obvious enough if you know the etymology of al-gebra, al-gorithm, etc...)

Moreover, many, perhaps most of the crucial steps to modern computers have been taken not in a 'capitalist' milieu but just the opposite - Babbage, for example, was not a businessman, but a university mathematics teacher, Turing never worked in the private sector - all his crucial work was in fact government-funded, as was that of Berners-Lee.  Others will know better than me the role of public funding (and the military) in American computer developments.

Of course the various economic systems in which all these developments have taken place have had a role and influence - but what they primarily depend on is the accumulation of knowledge that we call civilisation - which spans many very different economies, societies and cultures - and (hopefully) will continue to do so...