Aris Chatzistefanou
The picture of a hipster taking a selfie during G20 protests in Hamburg has gone viral despite the fact that many have questioned its authenticity.
But authenticity is not the issue here.
For free market bigots having an iPhone and protesting capitalism is contradiction in terms. According to them every achievement of modern science and technology must be a product of free market capitalism.
But is it?
Let’s first have a look at a very short excerpt of the documentary THIS IS NOT A COUP where the British Economist Ann Pettifor explains that very few companies owe as much to the public sector as Steve job’s creation does.
“Mr. Apple” Ann Pettifor told us, “needed the American government to invest in the basic elements of the iPhone in order for him to develop it as a private product. He himself was not entrepreneurial enough to invent the internet and all of those major elements of the iPhone which could then be privatized and used in the private sector”.
A few years earlier economist Mariana Mazzucato took up the task of analyzing the components of every single Apple device one by one. And inside the company’s bitten apple she would always spot what neoliberals would call the “worm of the state”. . ,
