Spotify’s blind spot goes platinum.

Valentin Hansen’s Crisis (The Worthless Album) was my favorite act of "malicious compliance" from last year. By making every track exactly 29 seconds long, he ensured Spotify would never have to pay him a single cent, effectively turning the streaming giant's own royalty math into a piece of performance art. It’s the ultimate "you can't fire me, I quit" of the digital age, proved by a man who decided that zero was a more honest number than a Spotify payout.

Love you so much I picture your death.

Life360’s decision to turn every parent’s intrusive thoughts into a Broadway-style musical about organ thieves and alligator attacks was easily the most ludicrous (yet relatable) marketing win of 2025. Instead of pretending the world is perfect, they leaned into the specific, frantic brand of insanity that only comes from loving someone you can’t constantly see on a GPS map. It’s rare to see a tech company acknowledge that their product primarily exists to keep us from spiraling into a medieval forest kidnapping fantasy.

How to overthink a volume button.

The Reddit design community’s descent into "volume control gore" was easily the most delightful act of digital sadism I saw all year. By replacing simple sliders with CAPTCHA puzzles and voice-activated knobs that required a perfectly pitched hum, these designers turned the humble volume button into a high-stakes obstacle course. It was a brilliant, sarcastic rebuttal to the tech industry’s compulsive need to "innovate" every functional object into oblivion.

Subconscious on instant replay.

Modem’s Dream Recorder was the rare piece of 2025 tech that felt like it had a soul, mostly because it refused to "optimize" anything. Instead of tracking your REM cycles to sell you a mattress, this bedside gadget simply listens to your half-awake ramblings and uses AI to generate lo-fi, impressionistic video loops of your dreams. It’s essentially YouTube from another dimension.

Adulting is hard. LEGO has instructions.

LEGO’s pivot into the "stressed-out adult" market remains one of the smartest cultural reads of the last few years. By trading open-ended play for massive, 4,000-piece architectural projects, they realized that while kids crave infinite possibilities, adults are mostly just drowning in vague deadlines and existential dread. We don’t want a bucket of random bricks; we want a clear path to a finished goal and the soothing permission to follow someone else's directions for a change.

Catch of the day: protein bar brand David sells fish now.

David’s pivot from selling "protein bomb" bars to $55 boxes of frozen cod was the most chaotic mic-drop of 2025. It was a brilliant piece of marketing performance art: by putting raw fish next to their bars, they essentially told their customers, "Look, if you want better macros than our bars, you literally have to eat boiled cod." It worked because it was so aggressively honest. In a world where every food brand is trying to hide processed ingredients behind health halos, David just leaned into the absurdity of our protein-obsessed culture.

Skip the swab, pop the gum.

Hero Gum was the most brilliant bit of "frictionless altruism" I saw all year. By turning the intimidating process of stem cell registry into a simple, flavorful piece of gum that collects DNA as you chew, they managed to strip away the clinical dread of medical donation. I keep coming back to this because it’s a masterclass in behavioral design: if you want people to save lives, don’t ask them to fill out a stack of forms at a hospital - just give them something to do while they’re walking to the train.

Rigged by design.

Uncommon’s "PAIN" installation, a SoHo claw machine containing a Hermès Birkin that is physically impossible to win, was a beautifully cruel piece of performance art that mocked the idea that we can all "claw" our way to the top if we just drop enough quarters into the system. It’s a witty, painful reminder that in the modern world, the most exclusive luxury isn't the bag itself. It's the realization that some games are designed specifically to make sure you never, ever win.

Walk the walk (or miss the ending).

The treadmill screening of The Long Walk was easily the most stressful movie night of 2025. By forcing the audience to maintain a 3 mph pace or face immediate ejection from the theater, the organizers turned a Stephen King horror story into a literal test of endurance. It was a brilliant, slightly sadistic experiment in immersive empathy, proving that sometimes the best way to get people to truly value a story is to make them sweat, pant, and fear for their hamstrings just to see the ending.

Art Basel’s billionaire robots.

A pack of $100,000 robot dogs wearing silicone masks of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos that literally defecate AI-generated "content" was the perfect fever dream to cap off 2025. The fact that wealthy collectors instantly bought out a series of robots designed to mock them is peak "meta" capitalism.