The Quiet Heist Nobody's Talking About
Music. Movies. Software. Now hardware. The "own nothing" playbook has been running for decades — and 2026 may be the year the math finally stops working in their favor. Here's why the quiet heist might be over.
The pattern is simple. It just took decades to notice.
First they made it convenient. Then they made it cheap. Then they made it the only option. Music did it first — CDs became downloads became Spotify. Movies followed. Software followed that. And now, quietly, the same playbook is coming for the hardware you actually own.
This isn't conspiracy. It's just math dressed up as progress.
Michael Feyrer Jr. lays it out plainly: RAM suppliers like Micron and Corsair are abandoning the consumer market entirely — not because demand disappeared, but because AI data centers pay better. Graphics card makers are shrinking their budget lineups. The next logical step, he argues, isn't cheaper hardware. It's hardware as a service — pay monthly to rent compute time on someone else's card, so you can play the game you used to buy.
The uncomfortable part? We've already accepted this deal three times over.
But here's where it gets interesting.
The companies executing this squeeze are betting on a product — AI — that hasn't yet made a single one of them money. Not one profitable consumer-facing AI product exists at scale. The billion-dollar data centers are running on Wall Street faith, not revenue. And the same consumers being hollowed out by subscription creep are the ones these companies ultimately need to stay solvent.
That's not a business model. That's a structural vulnerability.
2026 may be the year the math stops working in their favor — not because of regulation or revolution, but because the people who built the PC market in the first place stop playing along.
The freedom angle isn't abstract here. If you're building something location-independent, time-flexible, and genuinely yours — the "own nothing" trajectory is the quiet tax on everything you're working toward. Awareness is the first tool. Selective refusal is the second.
This piece draws from Michael Feyrer Jr.'s video essay on the future of gaming and consumer hardware. Michael Feyrer Jr. is a tech content creator and livestreamer examining how corporate strategy is reshaping what consumers actually own. Watch the full breakdown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVYrmYQMyKY
