this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
696 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
78511 readers
3023 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This year, it is no longer Consumer Electronics Show... it's now Corporate Electronics Show.
๐๐จโ๐๐ซ๐จโ๐
What?
It's a reference to the "Always has been" meme.
A consumer is just the opposite side of the same coin. Corporations exist because of customers and customers exist because of corporations.
Companies are always chasing stupid ideas. The AI fridge is the Twitter fridge of this decade, a stupid idea some business person was genius. We've always been this dumb.
Inclusion of AI isn't meant to be a selling point to product buying customers but to convince retail investors who throw money at anything with AI into buying up shares of stock.
And some companies like NVIDIA and micron have reached a point where retail customer revenue is a rounding error compared to direct corporate sales, so there's no need to cater them and for some no need to even sell to retail customers anymore.
As things get more expensive it helps create a rental economy, so people having to rent leads to companies able to make money selling to companies that are making money providing subscription services to consumers who have been priced out.
Kind of like the housing market in a way.
Exactly right.
As such, any bleating about markets being driven by "consumer choice" is either hopelessly out of date / embarrassingly naive - or malicious.
Just as consumer sales are a rounding error, so is consumer choice - it's a direct relationship.
This extends a lot farther than the AI bubble, we have allowed corporations to merge and monopolize, and "investors" to gamble on it all, to where they completely invert the relationship.
They shape our experience by constraining choice, dictating only options with profit margins and heinous licensing terms that work exclusively and overwhelmingly in their favor.