The Emperor’s New Tech: Hype, Utility, and Social Reactions

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We were talking about Zoom the other day, specifically their new Center Stage feature. You know, the one that automatically keeps your face in the middle of the frame while you move around. I said, “Who asked for this?” and my colleague shrugged, “Literally no one.”

And then there’s the fun part: trying to figure out how to make it go away once you’ve discovered it’s not useful to you. And that got me thinking: how much tech actually solves real problems, and how much is just tech for tech’s sake?

It turns out, this isn’t just about Zoom. There’s a whole category of tools, gadgets, and AI features that make you pause and ask, “Who asked for this?”

Don’t Believe the Hype

Some tech launches with big promises, bold marketing, and lots of fanfare, but the reality rarely matches the hype. A few favorites:

• Zoom Center Stage, auto-centering your face while you move around. Revolutionary? Maybe. Needed? Debatable.
• Microsoft Teams auto-reactions or AI meeting summaries, summarizing what you just said, sometimes incorrectly. Thanks, I think?
• Slack Huddles, live audio chats in an app built for async messaging. Sometimes helpful, is just confusing.

Artificial Intelligence, Real Headaches

• AI-generated emails that all read like spam
• Smart fridges that text you when you’re out of milk. Because checking yourself is so 2020.
• AI fashion or art that lands somewhere between futuristic and slightly unsettling

Hype often drives adoption more than actual need. Marketing departments and corporate teams love to show off, and engineers like to experiment. Sometimes they just want to see if they can.

Much Ado About Minimal

Once the initial hype fades, the question becomes: does the tech actually do something useful, or is it solving a problem nobody really had?

• Zoom Center Stage keeps you centered, but for most users it’s more novelty than necessity. The “floaty effect” as it tracks your movement can be distracting.
• Minor AI tools, like scheduling assistants, auto-generated emails, or smart home gadgets, may have some utility, but they rarely transform how we work or live.
• Over-innovated gadgets, like smart mirrors tracking workouts, VR headsets for virtual offices nobody uses, or internet-connected trash cans: Functional? Sometimes. Game-changing? Hardly.

Tech that sticks is usually the tech that genuinely solves a pain point, not the tech that simply makes headlines.

The Meme Factory

Even when tech exists, people respond in ways that reveal much about culture, adoption, and social expectations.

My Zoom conversation about Center Stage reminded me of Tressie McMillan Cottom, a writer, sociologist, and MacArthur Fellow whose work blends cultural analysis, lived experience, and sharp insight into how technology and society intersect. She observes that much of the current AI craze is “nobody wants this.” Tools promise grand transformation but mostly automate mundane tasks like drafting emails or scheduling calls, which may have some utility, but don’t bring big change (tressiemc.com).

Critics including Cottom note that technology, especially algorithmic systems and data-heavy innovations, can exacerbate inequality and bias and raise questions about whose interests these systems serve. If you want a deeper dive into the cultural and ethical concerns around AI, The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes (The New York Times Opinion, March 29, 2025) is a thoughtful place to start.

Some cultural reactions we see:

• Instagram Reels algorithm updates that leave everyone frustrated
• Twitter audio tweets or video-first features that almost nobody adopts
• The new iPhone keyboard update, where folks are big mad, tweeting and posting memes after accidentally sounding dumb in the group chat because they misspelled “cat”

Cultural reactions often determine whether a product succeeds, fails, or becomes a punchline. Memes, social media chatter, and user complaints are just as telling as usage metrics.

The TL;DR of Over-Innovation

• Hype gets attention, but utility wins loyalty
• Tech that actually solves problems matters more than over-innovation
• Cultural reactions reveal the real value or absurdity of new tech
• Ethical and social consequences matter too — AI and other data-heavy innovations can exacerbate inequality or bias, and raise questions about whose interests are served

Not all tech that makes us roll our eyes is bad. Some of it is genuinely cool, some is ahead of its time, and some is a little ridiculous. But it’s worth noticing when technology exists in search of a problem, instead of the other way around.

So next time a new feature appears, and you think, “Who asked for this?” remember probably the engineers did. The rest of us? We’ll just stay in gallery view.