Billionaires ultimately go hand in hand with fascists (Ford, Musk, ...) and the only threat to democracy and freedom that competes with those is communism.

https://www.jaztime.com/audemars-piguet-royal-oak-quartz-33m...

https://www.vacheron-constantin.com/ww/en/collections/overse...

They all include quartz watches.

"renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option". This also didn't happen in a vacuum. The place where they are evolving the most is in China, where government policies have been a huge incentive, with huge government investments made in the sector.

In my own country, Portugal, the adoption of renewal energy, was largely the result of government policies that kicked off the market. Now, it seems to have become self-sustaining in the sense that the market is now carrying on regardless of any incentives. I suspect that we might be reaching a point of no-return, if we haven't reached it already. We're still very far away from becoming energy independent, but we're much better than a couple of decades ago.

Moreover, the internet itself didn't just happen because the market led to its creation. It was a result of the cold war. The IP protocol was born in DARPA.

Still, the previous examples I gave were about the government (which is a form of us "as a collective society") spawning new tech or its adoption. Going in the reverse direction, here are examples where it required collective society to "tame" a technology:

- CFCs: It required an international agreement for us to tame the issue with ozone layer destroying chemicals, a huge problem in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

- DDT: This was an incredibly efficient tech (pesticidies), but came with big externalities (highly toxic to people and nature), so a convention was required to tame it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis...

- Nuclear weapons: Eventually the most dangerous tech ever invented by mankind. Maybe the reason we're still here is because of the numerous treaties we've been making to curb them. The SALT agreements, the START agreements, and so on.

- TV, Radio and the printing press: All of these are technologies, which we tend to see as forces for good (well, I at least still do), but also with incredible potential for destruction - radio was used by the guys running Germany in the 30s. It required very careful rule making to strike a balance (and the balance varies a lot from democracy to democracy) between freedom of speech and the misuse of this tech for unethical purposes like defamation, intentional misinformation and so on.

- Car Safety: While seat belts were the invention of the market, governments have been regulating cars to make them safer, not only for occupants, but for pedestrians.

The list just goes on and on.

Having that said, I half agree with you concerning nuclear. I don't think we should have bet on nuclear as an alternative to renewable energy. In the long run, renewable energy will be more sustainable. For one, nuclear fuel is a limited resource, so we'll eventually run out of it. (Yes, kicking the can down the road sometimes is actually the best solution, but still). For another, since Portugal isn't uranium rich, we'd be trading one set of external dependencies for another. However, I am completely against the ideologically driven anti-nuclear political attitude that have and the fact that we've downright refused to accept any kind of nuclear energy projects whatsoever, regardless of whether those projects would be competing with renewable energy projects for investment. In fact I think that nuclear is the perfect companion to renewable energy, not a competitor. The more renewable energy we have, the less uranium we'd be importing, thus shrinking external dependency. Yet, at the same time, nuclear power plants would be a cheap, carbon-zero, solution to renewable energy's greatest problem, intermittency.

Just one final point. Unlike, for instance, Germany, with a large amount of territory with very low seismic risk, we would need to be very careful with where we'd build the plants. It would be complete recklessness to build a nuclear plant in Lisbon, for instance.