A lot of excellent points though it's completely inaccurate to frame the fall of the Soviet Union's scientific progress due to their hierarchy replacing the "prior capitalist one" when the former lead to the mass industrialisation and rapid economic growth that lead to the USSR being the first nation to conquer space flight whereas under the latter, the USSR was an agrarian society suffering from food shortages and mass poverty. The decline of Soviet science and economy had more to do with NATO and American restrictions on trade and movement than something self imposed by the Soviets.

Capitalism is completely compatible with hierarchies and censorship - indeed one could argue that capitalism is completely incompatible with a true flattening of hierarchies since it rests on the ability of an owner class holding a monopoly over the means of production. The majority of dictatorships around the world use capitalism as the basis of it's economy. Following the dissolving of the USSR, Russia continues to be authoritarian and arguably more so than the USSR was past the Stalin era.

Aside from that, I think it's a little premature to frame the internet's ultimate effect on the world as reducing the ability of the government to censor the population when it's only been around for less than 30 years and we are already seeing mass adoption and development of both censorship and surveillance tech that goes beyond even the wildest dreams of 20th century era dictators.

I don't really buy the argument that most technology is invented in systems with freedom and equality either. It just sounds more like something we want to believe than something borne out by data. The internet and rocket ships were the product of the military - an institution that has more to do with using force to enact the will of it's host nation on others and limiting their freedoms than preserving the freedoms of their own, especially for superpowers like the USA and the CCP, which are effectively immune to conquest by military force.

This is in fact the same for the Silicon Valley and most private industry, you only think all this tech is the product of your freedom and equality because all of the actual extreme inequality and lack of freedom is kept compartmentalised to the global south through long and convoluted supply chains. It's not really freedom if only 10% of the actual people involved in the sustaining of an economy have any semblance of it -leaving aside the observation that for even this 10% that represents the average US citizen, their actual democratic agency in the state or in their job is vanishingly low.