In like 2012-2020, people would push back on leftist talking points by saying "capitalism brings innovation" and point at the fact that most people have a smartphone. Now, smartphones are increasingly scapegiated for how bad things are, rather than capitalism which we were assured created them.

I have been listening to the radio lately and they're always talking about problems created by increased social media use and smart phone use, from declining birth rates to reduced learning in schools correlating to when smarphones became mainstream. I'm not interested in interrogating the specific claims, but it did strike me that if you argued that capitalism had flaws in the 2010s, people would say we can't change it because it's just amazing how it has given us smart phones, these amazing devices that let you access any information at all at any time. You wouldn't want to undo or fetter progress would you? Now when you say "boy it sure seems like the economic system we live under has huge problems" the response tends to be "yeah, it's probably the smartphones. They're what's messing everything up." It's always the cellphones, for good or for ill, never the economic social relations. They're always used as a synecdoche of modern capitalism.