File this one under “things that should make the planet stop turning because the stupidity has damaged the laws of physics.”
The new hot take from the left media? Fidget spinners are symbols of oppression and selfishness and all the horrible things EVER.
I’m sorry, did that totally woke hot take hurt you? Well, just listen to your intellectual betters. Here, Ian Bogost of the Atlantic tells us why the fidget spinner is the embodiment of everything wrong with 2017.
It is a toy for the hand alone—for the individual. Ours is not an era characterized by collaboration between humans and earth—or Earth, for that matter. Whether through libertarian self-reliance or autarchic writ, human effort is first seen as individual effort—especially in the West. Bootstraps-thinking pervades the upper echelons of contemporary American life, from Silicon Valley to the White House. But it also underwrites more marginal plights. When some non-neurotypical fidget spinners shun scientific verification of the device’s therapeutic value, they do so by affirming their individual ability—and right—to self-diagnose and self-treat.
If you can understand what he’s trying to say, please feel free to translate for the rest of humanity. But he goes on:
In the case of the fidget spinner, the temporary victory of joining in the commentary also offers succor. In an uncertain global environment biting its nails over new threats of economic precarity, global autocracy, nuclear war, planetary death, and all the rest, the fidget spinner offers the relief of a non-serious, content-free topic that harms no one. At a time when so many feel so threatened, aren’t handheld, low-friction tops the very thing we fight for?
Then commerce validates the spinner’s cultural status. For no cultural or social trend is valid without someone becoming wealthy, and someone else losing out. And soon enough, the fidget spinner will stand aside, its moment having been strip-mined for all its spoils at once. The only dream dreamed more often than the dream of individual knowledge and power is the dream of easy, immediate wealth, which now amounts to the same thing.
Honestly, I’d be afraid to let Ian Bogost near a sharp knife and a loaf of bread. But it gets better (worse?). Here’s the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead also turning up her nose at the fidget spinner. Because Trump.
After months of testimony, the grand jury in Cleveland has decided to not indict Officer Timothy Loehmann or Officer Frank Garmback in the death of Tamir Rice….
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