Trotsky is right about this. The wealthy welcome technological innovation because it means new investment opportunities and thus profits, and new markets.
The lower class welcomes technologies that make their drudgery lives better.
The middle class fears technological change because they're social climbers and upwardly mobile, which is how they become middle class, and therefore the middle class has a tenuous position on its attempted climb up the mountain and is always worried about things that can cause it to slide downward. Change in general is seen as dangerous, not something to be welcomed.
Hence it's the middle class which is anti-progress and eras when the middle class holds unusually strong sway are eras of stagnation. Eras dominated by the upper class, or when the lower class organizes and gets some influence, see much more rapid progress.
The middle class are trying to win the game as it exists and don't like the game regularly changing. Hence fascism finds its support among the middle class, and elites go along with it for aid against lower class socialism when bourgeois traditional conservatism is no longer tenable.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm
>The rapid growth of German capitalism prior to the First World War by no means signified a simple destruction of the middle classes. Although it ruined some layers of the petty bourgeoisie it created others anew: around the factories, artisans and shopkeepers; within the factories, technicians and executives. But while preserving themselves and even growing numerically – the old and the new petty bourgeoisie compose a little less than one-half of the German nation – the middle classes have lost the last shadow of independence. They live on the periphery of large-scale industry and the banking system, and they live off the crumbs from the table of the monopolies and cartels, and off the spiritual alms of their theorists and professional politicians.