Are 'Geek Gifts' Becoming Their Own Demographic?

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland wonders if 'gifts for geeks' is the next big consumer demographic:

For this year's holiday celebrations, Hallmark made a special Christmas tree ornament, a tiny monitor displaying screens from the classic video game 'Oregon Trail.' ('Recall the fun of leading a team of oxen and a wagon loaded with provisions from Missouri to the West....') Top sites and major brands are now targeting the 'tech' demographic — including programmers, sysadmins and even vintage game enthusiasts — and when Hallmark and Amazon are chasing the same customers as GitHub and Copilot, you know there's been a strange yet meaningful shift in the culture...

While AI was conquering the world, GitHub published its 'Ultimate gift guide for the developer in your life' just as soon as doors opened on Black Friday. So if you're wondering, 'Should I push to production on New Year's Eve?' GitHub recommends their new 'GitHub Copilot Amazeball,' which it describes as 'GitHub's magical collectible ready to weigh in on your toughest calls!' Copilot isn't involved — questions are randomly matched to the answers printed on the side of a triangle-shaped die floating in water. '[Y]ou'll get answers straight from the repo of destiny with a simple shake,' GitHub promises — just like the Magic 8 Ball of yore. 'Get your hands on this must-have collectible and enjoy the cosmic guidance — no real context switching required!'
And GitHub's 'Gift Guide for Developers' also suggests GitHub-branded ugly holiday socks and keyboard keycaps with GitHub's mascots.

But GitHub isn't the only major tech site with a shopping page targeting the geek demographic. Firefox is selling merchandise with its new mascot. Even the Free Software Foundation has its own shop, with Emacs T-shirts, GNU beanies and a stuffed baby gnu ('One of our most sought-after items... '). Plus an FSF-branded antisurveillance webcam guard.

Maybe Dr. Seuss can write a new book: 'How the Geeks Stole Christmas.' Because this newfound interest in the geek demographic seems to have spread to the largest sites of all. Google searches on 'Gifts for Programmers' now point to a special page on Amazon with suggestions like Linux crossword puzzles. But what coder could resist a book called ' Cooking for Programmers? 'Each recipe is written as source code in a different programming language,' explains the book's description... The book is filled with colorful recipes — thanks to syntax highlighting, which turns the letters red, blue and green. There are also real cooking instructions, but presented as an array of strings, with both ingredients and instructions ultimately logged as messages to the console...
Some programmers might prefer their shirts from FreeWear.org, which donates part of the proceeds from every sale to its corresponding FOSS project or organization. (There are T-shirts for Linux, Gnome and the C programming language — and even one making a joke about how hard it is to exit Vim.)

But maybe it all proves that there's something for everybody. That's the real heartwarming message behind these extra-geeky Christmas gifts — that in the end, tech is, after all, still a community, with its own hallowed traditions and shared celebrations.
It's just that instead of singing Christmas carols, we make jokes about Vim.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.