Electronics are an interesting case. In our capitalist global economy we use extortion and threats to secure rare earth metals so we can use them for critical green technology and warfare while also using them to pump out televisions and phones for people to buy to replace ones that work fine (or could be kept working fine if we avoided software bloat).

Plastics are similar, they’re essential for medical applications but we also use our limited fossil fuel resources for cars and to wrap bananas at the store.

You could ask the question of how we could afford to let capitalism distribute these resources.

Working in the software industry I see tremendous waste, absurdly inefficient technologies being used because they’re cheap, etc.

We could all work less, work on the more important things, and make better use of our resources if not for the unnecessary inefficiencies introduced by duplicating effort, hiding technological advances from one another. We should be moving towards a cooperative rather than competitive economy.