

We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.
I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)
But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I’m literally typing on the older phone now.
I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.
Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.
I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.
But if we don’t start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we’re going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.
First of all, thank you. I don’t want to be telling developing nations to halt their progress. You underscore where my mindset could be prescriptive and harmful.
Second, my point is that we seem to only get infrastructure or ‘progress’ when it can be weaponized under capitalism to make someone money, the same way we can’t have meaningful recycling systems because it will never be profitable over virgin plastics and other single-use materials.
My attitude has been morphing into “nobody gets second until everybody gets first plates” but for housing, accessories, tools, etc – that plays directly into the kinds of capital equipment, network buildouts, and supply chains that deliver iPhones to us for $1,000 when the actual material, energy and human cost could be easily 30x that.
I’m saying the paths and lanes that deliver consumer goods and experiences are obscuring the waste therein, and that they drive copper crisis just like every other scarcity crisis.