What's a disruptive toy?

In 2010, Chris Dixon famously wrote: The next big thing will start out looking like a toy.

His point was this: breakthrough technologies are easily dismissed at first because they can't do everything people expect right off the bat. But they tend to improve much faster than expectations rise, so they often surprise us by quickly catching up and displacing products that once seemed untouchable.

But what if you find yourself at the starting point, like we seem to with many technologies today? The front end of an exponential curve can feel surprisingly flat. And the fact that something might change the world doesn't help us while it remains impractical.

Why not play around with it in the meantime? It's here, ready to try now. Someone could be pulling the future forward and dropping it in our hands.

Sure, we can wait patiently with an open mind, keeping tabs on how things develop. But then we won't know what the future feels like until it's already the present. For us and for everyone else at the same time. Where is the fun in that?

So I actively seek out products built around new, unorthodox ideas with a subversive edge. They're too early, sometimes way too early, for widespread adoption, but ready to give us a peek into the future. These are what I call disruptive toys.

This site is where I catalog the ones I can get my hands on, with field notes on what it feels like to use them and what they might tell us about where things are headed.

I hope you find them thought-provoking, and most importantly, disruptive.