I wanna do a little thought experiment, I am writing this as I go, I have no idea what's gonna come out the other end, but: whenever anti-capitalists point out how much capitalism Fucking Sucks, a common counter-argument is that "capitalism breeds innovation." In my experience, the saying is used as a shorthand for a longer argument:
The profit motive drives people to develop improvements on already-existing systems, rewarding innovations that provide better experiences for humanity as a whole.
Assuming this is the longer form of the argument, two things strike me as important: 1) that humanity as a whole should include the people laboring to enact those innovations, and 2) that profit cannot be the measure of success. You cannot say "the profit motive drove people to make more profit" as a justification for capitalism's existence – it has to be "the profit motive improved some metric of quality of life." There are a lot of ways in which you can make this argument true, false, or unprovable (e.g. defining what counts as innovation), but I want to take the skeptic's approach and assume that the situation is true. My follow-up question, however, is simple: how long does that improvement last? To do this, I want to look at two case studies, one in which I reasonably know the answer and one in which I don't: Uber, the on-demand taxi service that permeabilized the boundary between driver and passenger, and the Dot-Com Bubble, an economic boom that (as I understand it) was sparked by the invention & popularization of the Internet. This is all gonna be real casual research so don't expect this to be publication-worthy, but I'm hoping it'll give myself some context about how long we could expect "good times" to last as we wait for late-stage capitalism to consume us.