Many of the conflict minerals required to produce modern computers, as I understand it, are not currently possible to source ethically. Is this purely about abusive labor practices or are there cultural issues which make the extraction itself the problem? Are there alternatives which could be more “sustainable”, but would make computers slower?
I worry that the idea of “we establish communism and then the exploitation stops” may ignore various microeconomic issues or make invalid assumptions about the cultures of the people who would still be doing that extraction.
And if you don’t give a shit about cell phones or the internet or whatever, what about things like MRI machines? Those supply chains are inherently global. The materials for them do not exist in any single region.
I'll ignore planned obsolescence even though it's a massive part of the problem, since others addressed.
It's definitely possible to have fair compensation and not slavery and sentencing people to brutal lifelong health complications for mining and handling in manufacturing the kinds of minerals necessary for modern microprocessors and other electronic components. It's also definitely possible to recycle components and materials to build newer electronics, but all of this adds to the cost. Ultimately the reduced expenses from slavery and exploitation account for why it's done this way. Nobody could realistically compete on cost while ethically producing microelectronics, if everything from supply chain to factory assembly to shipping were devoid of slavery or things worse than slavery you'd see a $1000,USD laptop today at least quadruple in price, and honestly I'd expect that to be more like a ten-fold increase because every company and paid off bureaucrat along the way needs to grift some off the top (efficiencies of capitalism yada yada). With neoliberal markets being entirely transnational, except when sanctions divide them and create proxies and the need for misdirection, any national attempts to regulate supply chains to discourage exploitation will just make your economy less productive. Every "service" economy needs microprocessors, kneecapping your domestic information industry will just shift the demand elsewhere, but the demand will never slow down. We need more and more software developers to write more and more highly abstracted code, which runs worse and requires more memory and processing power to crunch, so that the boss gets paid and the shareholders are happy. The server farm can move to anywhere that fiber optics and relatively reliable electricity are available. The states managing the mines and factories have little interest in reducing exploitation, for a lot of reasons. Multinationals use their power and money and their influence over states they control like the US to weaken the regulatory capacity of those places that are rich in mineral and human resources, specifically so that they can exploit them.
For context, I've designed and manufactured PCBs for various projects, like FrankenPads, with a friend from Guangdong and a friend from Finland. These are older (10-11 years) IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads that we repurpose and equip with modern engineering sample CPUs like i5-10500U, DDR4 memory, NVMe hard drives, and even displays from Microsoft Surface tablets. And we're doing this with recycled components, prototype boards, engineering samples of components that would otherwise just end up in the ocean or landfills.
The downsides are mostly cost. We're still able to make these cheaper than equivalent modern Lenovo products because we don't suck and there's such an abundance of components... But their origin was unethical to begin with so accounting for that I'm certain the prices would skyrocket if people digging it up and processing weren't dying destitute at 40.