The Industrial Revolution should have been humanity’s greatest awakening — a turning point when science, invention, and collective imagination lifted every soul. Instead, it was hijacked. Capitalism captured it, twisted it, and locked the fruits of human genius behind proprietary walls.

The stolen awakening

In the 19th century, the world celebrated names like James Watt and Thomas Edison. But alongside them lived millions of unnamed innovators — young girls denied schooling, Black inventors refused patents, Indigenous knowledge-holders dismissed as “primitive.” Their ideas, methods, and discoveries were erased from history, not by accident, but by design.

By 1900, over 90 percent of US patents were controlled by corporations or wealthy men. Barely 4 percent of young adults attended college. Meanwhile, 1.75 million children laboured in dark factories, their questions silenced under conveyor belts, their brilliance unrecorded. This was not simply neglect — it was a deliberate structuring of society.

Capitalism did not want a world of thinkers. It wanted workers — obedient, compliant, easily replaceable. It needed consumers, not creators; labourers who followed orders, not visionaries who rewrote the rules.

The lie of “meritocracy”

We were told a story: that innovation was open to all, that the best ideas always rose to the top, that hard work guaranteed recognition. But the evidence tells a harsher truth.

In 2023, just two corporations — IBM and Samsung — filed over 10,000 patents. Yet less than 0.1 percent of humanity has ever filed a single one. Pharmaceutical giants spend 75 percent of their R&D budgets on diseases of the wealthy — hair loss, erectile dysfunction — while malaria, tuberculosis, and Chagas disease, which kill millions, are starved of funding.

Even publicly funded discoveries, paid for by ordinary citizens, are funneled into private monopolies. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 legalized this theft, allowing corporations to patent taxpayer-funded inventions. From Google’s algorithm to Moderna’s COVID vaccine, the people have paid for the research — only to have corporations sell it back to them at staggering profit.

This isn’t innovation. This is extraction. This is a cognitive heist.

Genius that refused to die

Yet the system never fully succeeded. Genius........

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