There's a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight, capital no longer had any reason to stay on the nicer end of the spectrum.

So in the terms of tech, this means that tech is no longer developed to just be useful/practical unless there's an exploitive monetization scheme attached or in the works. This is basically the enshittification cycle. Cool new functional thing that's cheap/free. But really it's just a ploy for market/platform capture via market share etc. So within short order, that useful tech gets bled of it's value proposition as it approaches monetization/enshittification. The profit motive has recuperated the development of tech completely. It's almost impossible to create something useful if it doesn't already have some profit/rent seeking mechanism embedded. And if you try to do a startup to challenge some market giant, they most likely just buy it out and bury it before it becomes a serious threat. Maybe if your lucky, some aspects will get ported into the existing product in some half-assed manner to appease the user base.

Sorry for the rambling rant, I had a few beers earlier.

The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.

That's never what held back capitalist expansion, the direction of economic surplus towards the luxury of a tiny minority is a defining trait of feudal production that capitalism substantially reduced. It only played a role in technological progress back at a point when meaningful advancement was still achievable by kind of resources and directed effort of the eccentric and idle rich pursuing experimentation.

The stagnation we have isn't a result of a lack of possible gadgets for the 1%, it's us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive. Capitalist technological innovation has always been primarily about process improvements and expansion to/creation of new markets, with resources only directed where capital returns are reasonably expected; any scientific discovery is purely incidental. There's also the fact that most scientific advancement within capitalism has been state-backed, and neoliberalism has eroded the institutions involved.

Not because we’ve reached any sort of technological apex, but because we’ve perhaps reached a point where the capitalist mechanisms for innovation are sputtering.

It's the neoliberal mechanisms. The machine was doing OKAY for tech progress under Keynesian policy. Not better than socialism but it wasn't the crawl we're currently seeing.

The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.

They do want immortality.