The tech industry, hovering constantly one buzzword away from self-parody, is a hostile environment for mockery. So why are tech companies such zealous April Fools participants, second only perhaps to my cousin, who once pranked my grandmother by snail mail because she’d been warned not to believe anything he said on the phone on 1 April?

This year’s tech industry April Fools’ pranks started sliding out a day in advance. Maybe companies couldn’t bear to keep their jokes under wraps, or maybe they thought they’d sucker more people with a 31 March-dated press release. How else do you explain that, one day before 1 April, we already had Google Panda (a huggable version of Siri), the Samsung Galaxy BLADE edge (which turns your phone into a cleaver), and PACMaps, which merges PacMan with Google Maps. As usual, tech companies are falling all over each other to roll out a gag product, though this is the first time I’ve noticed them being so eager that they bring them out a day early. As usual the offerings are mildly funny, mildly annoying and only barely distinguishable from actual real-life products offered for sale.

Take the Amazon Dash button, also announced the day before April Fools’. I thought this one was a prank too – and I wasn’t alone – but Amazon has pinky-sworn that it’s real. The Dash button is a one-click ordering device for household necessities, which can be mounted wherever you’re likely to be standing when you discover that you’re out of paper towels or detergent. No more walking to the fridge and laboriously moving a pencil up and down on your shopping list – as if anyone uses pencils or goes to stores anymore! You no longer even have to whip out the automatic ordering device you carry around with you 24/7 anyway – getting paper towels on Amazon Prime that way could take as many as several taps.

Or take Nixie, the wearable selfie drone – that is, a small flying camera you can wear on your wrist and then set aloft to take pictures of you. This one is not a bad idea, in the sense that people in a William Gibson novel would probably find it unremarkable. But it’s so clearly a mashup of tech nonsense-speak that I still fact-checked its press blurbs, lest I find out I’d been duped by a singularly slick bit of fun. Wearable selfie drone? What’s next, a scalable viral biotracker? A curated cloud-computing smartwatch?

Tech’s embrace of April Fools’ is partly a way of signaling self-awareness, a winky “we know” that shows consumers that you’re cool and down. But it’s also sort of an exegesis on desire. Companies like Google and Amazon play off desire, but they also create it; they respond to demand, but their real mandate is to fulfill needs you didn’t know you had. The ridiculous April Fools’ products, which aim to be just outlandish enough that they stand out a tiny bit from the Dashes and Nixies, reflect the state of consumer demands in a slightly exaggerated alternate universe – but they could also be the marketing hooks of a slightly exaggerated future. “Look what you could make us do,” the products say, and also “look what we could make you want.”

Behind the light-heartedness of today’s jokes is a tiny blip of menace: today’s satire is often tomorrow’s reality. On April Fools’ Day we look disconcertingly into our secret cravings and into the future of consumerism, and what we see isn’t all that implausible. No wonder nobody laughs all that hard.