I didn’t get the post communist part either. But I connected with the idea that we are moving to a world where people think that innovation can only be produced by certain classes of people.
The Wright brothers lived at the same time that Kafka and Weber were writing about bureaucracies. It was the time of positivism; the belief that social sciences could usher in scientific societies led by technocrats. Bourgeois professionals of the less progressive inclination thought that people could be managed in a mechanical fashion (now only certain kinds of less socially aware engineers dare to admit to their self-serving professional biases in public).
I don’t think the turn of the 20th century was more egalitarian in the sense that you speak of.
I don’t think that time was more egalitarian. The Wright brothers are just an excellent example of innovation coming from people nobody expects it to come from. Even their methods were top notch.
Back then they had classes of people who thought innovation was theirs solely and we have that now too.
