Question One

When we say that capitalism “gives us” xyz in the form of “innovations” or “new technology,” what do we mean? Are we talking about consumer products? Consumer products of relative diversity and comparable quality to contemporary western products existed in the Soviet bloc; while it is by no means exhaustive, this compilation of advertisements for, among other things, a dimmer switch illustrates the argument. If we mean scientific and technical advancements, it is worth noting that for much of the latter half of the spacefaring age, the Soviet Union worked in tandem with the United States, and the Soyuz vehicle is currently the standard of human space transit.

There was, a while ago, a post floating around the ancap tag on tumblr — why I was there, I do not know, but that is beside the point. The post compared a laptop from the 1980s with a MacBook Air, demonstrating a belief in the efficacy of the free market in terms of innovation; this was contrasted with US mail trucks, which the post argues have not changed at all in the same period (despite the proliferation of different types of mail vehicles, including repurposed minivans). The easy response here is to ask, “Why fix what isn’t broken?” In other words, what, if anything, is so wrong with a design that simply works?

Linux works. Public broadcasting works. The Internet works. Municipal utility infrastructure works (although, in the US, it could go for a significant upgrade). None of these things would exist without the state, and all of these things could exist without capital.

So many of the innovations heralded by the apologists of capital are essentially aesthetic modifications, at least at the level at which they are experienced by the end user. What is the utility of a laptop that can cut a banana, when a knife and a heftier computer are both measures better tools for the tasks therein entailed? What is the utility of the Windows GUI that is not more efficiently afforded by an X server with a decent window manager on top? So much innovative energy is wasted on making things pretty, rather than on making them more useful. Pretty sells to the consumer, because the consumer has been told to value aesthetics over power. So much of the “need” for better hardware is constructed by those who seek to extract value from that need.

There is a reason that there hasn’t been a huge overhaul to Donald Knuth’s TeX typesetting system in ages — indeed, updates are years apart, and contain only bug fixes. It is because it works. It works, it is free, and people use it, despite the fact that alternatives with prettier syntax and more robust GUIs exist. It is the same reason why people balked at updating from Windows XP, despite the termination of support (a cozy euphemism for Microsoft coaxing users into paying up!). When something works, and the community supports it, innovation is unnecessary.