Please Stop Building Stocking-Stuffer Tech
The holidays have come and gone, and I’ve again been reminded of what I call stocking-stuffer tech: gadgets that are, without question, impressive. The kind of thing anyone ages 10-80 would be happy to unwrap and play with for a week or two. Think smart glasses and VR headsets.
This isn’t to say these products aren’t good, or clever, or the result of serious engineering. They often are. They just also tend to make great gifts because no one you know found a compelling reason to buy one in the previous eleven months of the year.
Consider instead the 2016 holiday release of AirPods. They were literally a stocking stuffer that year, but not stocking-stuffer tech. AirPods changed how people listen to music, work out, and take calls. They nudged aesthetics toward minimalism and normalized a kind of ambient, always-available audio layer.
Wireless headphones weren’t new. None of the underlying technology was particularly novel. What was new was the packaging, the delivery, the integration. Do you see a world where someone puts in their AirPods, then their smart glasses?
To stop building stocking-stuffer tech, you need to start building things people want. Things people are happy to receive are not the same as things people actually want.
I Don't Want a Chatbot in My Stocking
2025 has been a year of enormous AI progress, much of which has arrived the way bad gifts do.
I am writing and posting this on an internet in the middle of an aggressive enshittification, not just through ads and tracking, but through the spread of bad, contextless, conversational layers pasted onto things that did not ask for them.
We are not getting smarter tools so much as we are getting the same tool everywhere, regardless of whether it belongs there.
Every product has become a chatbot. Every interface is suddenly “AI-powered.” And this shift has felt less like a genuine inflection point and more like a spectacle: a heavily-marketed phenomenon I'm told to be impressed by, told to care about, told to want. Something that's shouting at me with the fervor of the Wicked-branded Tide Pods at Walmart, rather than something I've naturally invited into my life.
I don’t want social platforms made entirely of AI content. I don't want AI-generated music (except maybe as satire). I don't want to DM an AI bowl of cereal. I don't want a chatbot in my stocking!
I'm not saying don't press forward. I'm not saying that AI will not be useful for society, or won't radically change it. I'm just not convinced it will do so in the form of one chatbot, everywhere.
As with AirPods, packaging the technology is the hard, important part. The difference between stocking-stuffer tech and something that actually sticks comes down to taste.
This does not mean taste only in the end-form, but also taste in ideas, taste in process, taste in execution. Taste is one of those fuzzy, hard-to-nail down words, but part of it is a commitment to a state of attention. And part of it is also a statement, a reflection on how the creator experiences the world, how they see it to be, and what they want to see it become.
Tech leaders and engineers aren’t just building products; they’re fabricating culture. That’s a role closer to a pop star than an appliance manufacturer. I can forgive generic, assembly-line music playing in a Target. There are lots of people making music! But there are comparatively few people making the tools the rest of us live inside.
I think often of Neil Postman's 1993 talk at Apple. He said:
"...television should be the last technology we will allow to have been invented and promoted mindlessly. Ok, we just didn't know that much, so we got television and it changed our culture, but that's it, from now on every technology we have to think about."
We clearly didn't do this with the iPhone. We didn’t do it with social media. We’re certainly not doing it with AI.
Anyway, cheers to 2025. Times said the people of the year were the "Architects of AI". I implore them, going into 2026, to think a little harder about the things they're making.