Part of this is the normal gadget cycle: invent a &#x27;labour-saving&#x27; gizmo, market it to people, who buy it and use it once, then leave it at the back of a kitchen cupboard next to the sandwich toaster and the veg spiraliser. Slightly bad for the environment, good for employment, otherwise harmless.<p>Part of it is the adveillance business model: get people hooked on a technology so you can sell their personal info to marketers. The smart fridge compiling your shopping list knows even more about you than your supermarket loyalty card.<p>Part of it is ownership-to-rent: rather than let people buy an appliance and keep it for a decade, turn them into a revenue stream with mandatory updates, planned obsolecence, incompatibility, and so on.<p>And part of it is an attempt to automate away the awkward middleman in consumerism, the consumer: let devices spend money on their own behalf. This is HP&#x27;s &quot;instant ink&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;instantink.hpconnected.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;instantink.hpconnected.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en</a>), a service where you let your printer order the most expensive liquid in the world on its own initiative.