I'll be straight with you.
The content that was supposed to be here was coverage of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. An event packed with lights, electronic music, suit-wearing executives rattling off megapixel counts, and a room full of journalists applauding like they were witnessing the Second Coming.
What I got instead was a Google cookie page.
Not a metaphor. That's literally what happened. The original source — a CNET article redirected through Google News — served me a wall of privacy policy instead of journalism. Forty languages available so you can choose how you'd like to be tracked. Zero useful information about the product it promised to cover.
And you know what that tells me about the tech market today?
Everything.
The Product Became a Pretext
Nassim Taleb has a line that keeps coming back to me: "Fragility is hidden behind complexity."
The Samsung Galaxy Unpacked has become a corporate ritual that exists primarily to move Samsung's stock price on the Korean exchange (KOSPI), generate free media coverage worldwide, and reassure Wall Street analysts that the company is still "relevant" in the premium segment.
The phone itself? An afterthought.
This isn't opinion. It's observable. Apple has been running the same playbook for years. The premium smartphone market has been saturated since 2019, with upgrade cycles stretching longer and longer — the average consumer now swaps phones every 3.5 years, versus 2 years a decade ago. Margins are getting squeezed. Real innovation stalled somewhere between the iPhone X and Samsung's first fold.
What's left is the spectacle.
The Circus Has a Line Out the Door
Think about it. An event like Unpacked mobilizes:
- Hundreds of tech journalists flying to Paris or San Francisco
- Eight-figure dollar marketing campaigns
- "Expert" analysis from people who never touched the device before writing about it
- Influencers receiving free units in exchange for "unbiased" reviews
And at the end of all that? A camera with one more optical zoom level. A screen that's 0.1 inches bigger. A processor that'll run slightly cooler during your tenth straight gaming session.
I'm not saying the product is bad. It's probably excellent. But the ritual surrounding it has grown bigger than the product itself. And when the ritual outgrows the substance, you're in bubble territory.
Benjamin Graham would call this Mr. Market in euphoria mode: pricing narrative, not value.
What Does Any of This Have to Do With Your Wallet?
Directly? Maybe nothing.
Indirectly? Quite a bit.
Samsung is one of the largest conglomerates on the planet. Semiconductors, OLED displays, home appliances, insurance, shipbuilding — the Samsung Group accounts for something around 20% of South Korea's GDP. It's not an exaggeration to say that when Samsung sneezes, the Korean stock market catches a cold.
And the premium smartphone segment is the storefront of that empire. It's what sustains the perception of technological innovation that, in turn, sustains the valuation of the semiconductor division — which is where the real money actually lives.
So when you see a "launch event" being covered like it's the Super Bowl of tech, remember: you're watching a piece of corporate theater engineered to keep valuation multiples high in an industry that has barely grown over the last five years.
The Lesson the Cookie Page Taught Me
Here's the irony: I went looking for information about technology and got a page asking permission to track me.
It's almost too on-the-nose to be an accident.
Google — which indexes the world, which "organizes global information" — walled me off behind a consent screen before letting me read an article about a phone.
This is the attention economy in 2025. You're not the consumer. You're the product. Samsung Unpacked exists to generate clicks. The clicks exist to generate data. The data exists to feed advertising algorithms. And the advertising algorithms exist so companies like Google and Meta can charge their advertisers more.
The phone? It's just the bait.
Taleb would say that anyone without skin in the game has no business giving you advice. The analyst covering Samsung who's never risked a dime on the stock isn't worth the time you spend reading them.
The next time you see a "can't-miss" tech event being treated like urgent financial news, ask yourself: who's making money off your attention?
And more importantly: are you getting anything in return?
