The excess production of useless shit that nobody would need or want without the manipulation of advertising convincing us otherwise. Cell phones and such are nice, don’t get me wrong, but do we need thousands of factories around the world churning out cargo ships full of cheap plastic junk that’s designed to fail? No. It only exists because it makes some rich people even richer, and it’s burning our planet down. If all that productive capacity was bent to the purpose of meeting peoples’ actual needs/reasonable wants it would be a different matter.