If you are not a parent of a middle-school-aged child, do not commute to work on public transportation, avoid the life-style section of the newspaper, and refrain from watching all television news, it is just about possible that you have yet to be exposed to fidget spinners. Not quite a toy, not exactly a gadget, nor precisely a therapeutic device—and yet, somehow, and infuriatingly, all of those things at once—a fidget spinner is a palm-sized, usually three-pronged object made from plastic or metal or a combination of the two, designed to be spun between finger and thumb. The fidget spinner has been touted as helpful for kids with A.D.H.D. or on the autism spectrum, and it’s not uncommon for educators and therapists to recommend hand-sized toys, like squishy balls or squeezy tubes, as a concentration aide for kids who have a hard time following classroom rules.
But the current explosion of popularity in fidget toys extends well beyond children with a diagnosis, as those teachers nationwide—nay, internationally—who have been banning them from their classrooms could surely attest; they have become a universally desirable accessory for tween-aged students. They function, in their seductive tactility, like cigarettes for kids who are still young enough to find smoking completely disgusting. The measure of the craze can be taken with a quick scan of Amazon rankings: a recent search revealed that forty-nine of the fifty best-selling toys were either fidget spinners or fidget cubes. (The only non-fidget-based toy in Amazon’s top fifty sellers was an obscene party card game for adults, with the uplifting name Cards Against Humanity.) No longer a fringe occupation, fidgeting is for all, not just for the few.
This marks a significant evolution—or devolution, if you prefer—in the cultural status of fidgeting. Until very recently, fidgeting was invariably an activity with a pejorative connotation. It was something kids were supposed to stop doing. The word came into use in the mid-eighteenth century, and since then it has been used in literature to characterize the small-minded person—like the irritating Mrs. Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” who, after being told that Lizzie and Darcy are to wed, begins “to fidget about in her chair, get up, sit down again, wonder, and bless herself”—or the annoyingly affected, like Undine Spragg in Edith Wharton’s “The Custom of the Country,” who, while looking at her reflection, “carried on her chat with an imaginary circle of admirers, twisting this way and that, fanning, fidgeting,” because “she thought it the correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity.”
Lately, however, fidgeting has been reconsidered and found by some scientists to be a useful activity. Last year, researchers at the University of Missouri published a study indicating that blood circulation in the legs of a sedentary person was significantly improved if she periodically tapped her foot. “To be honest, we were surprised by the magnitude of the difference,” Dr. Jaume Padilla, who led the study, told the Times. The results suggested that individuals who find it necessary to sit still for long periods of time—while driving, or on a plane, on a production line, or at a desk—might reap health benefits by wiggling their feet around, tapping their toes, or otherwise infuriating their neighbors with small, repetitive movements.
This reëvaluation of fidgeting certainly legitimizes the surge in popularity of the fidget spinner, but it does not entirely explain it. Why spinning? And why now? The invention of the spinner has been credited to Catherine Hettinger, described by the Guardian as “a Florida-based creator,” who registered a patent for a finger-spinning toy back in 1997 but was unable at the time to interest toy companies in its marketability. Unfortunately for Hettinger, she allowed the patent to lapse and, therefore, is not profiting from the current craze. (In truth, the spinners currently dominating the market—which are shaped like ergonomic ninja stars—bear only a conceptual resemblance to Hettinger’s prototype, which looks as if it might be a contraceptive diaphragm designed for a whale.)
At the time that Hettinger was floating her invention, a very different craze was making its first inroads into the handheld-toy marketplace. The Tamagotchi, which was launched first in Japan and then globally, was a so-called digital pet, which required certain attentions from its owner to thrive. “Pets are only cute 20 to 30 percent of the time, and the rest is a lot of trouble, a lot of work,” the Tamagotchi’s inventor, Akihiro Yokoi, told the Times twenty years ago, while explaining that his toy would cultivate in its owner the kind of care that a real animal requires. Compared with the fidget spinner, the Tamagotchi is a marvel of complexity, stimulating imagination and engendering empathy. Go back even further, to the nineteen-eighties, and you find the Rubik’s Cube, a toy that offers all the haptic satisfaction offered by a fidget spinner, and also combines it with a brainteaser of such sophistication that many of us are little closer to solving it than we were thirty-five years ago.
More recent fads compare favorably, in the cognitive-demand department, to the fidget spinner, too. The Rainbow Loom required considerable dexterity to produce those little bracelets worn by everyone who was between the ages of six and eleven in 2013. The inventors of Silly Bandz—those rubber bands shaped like stars or dinosaurs or dogs that second graders traded in 2010—had at least the self-awareness to implicate their toy in its name. It never pretended to be anything other than a silly band.
Fidget spinners, on the other hand, are masquerading as a helpful contribution to the common weal, while actually they are leading to whole new levels of stupid. YouTube is stuffed with people doing dumb things with spinners—deliberately cracking a smartphone screen with a turbo-charged one, for instance, or spinning them on their tongues. A few days ago, one YouTuber broadcast himself sitting in a chair and spinning a fidget spinner for twenty-four hours straight. By the final half hour—as he flicked the infernal spinner listlessly, like an addled victim of some exquisite form of torture—he had attracted a live audience of more than twenty thousand viewers; the video has since had more than two million views. (As if to underscore the rank idiocy of his enterprise, he occasionally leaned in to the camera to show off a row of stitches on his cheekbone—the consequence of another fidget-spinning video he had made a few days earlier.)
Will it be dismissed as an overreaction—as “pearl-clutching,” as the kids on the Internet like to say—to discern, in the contemporary popularity of the fidget spinner, evidence of cultural decline? (“In MY day we just picked at our cuticles. Kids today are spoiled rotten!” is how one wag on UrbanBaby, the parenting site, captured that impulse.) Perhaps, and yet the rise of the fidget spinner at this political moment cries out for interpretation. The fidget spinner, it could be argued, is the perfect toy for the age of Trump. Unlike the Tamagotchi, it does not encourage its owner to take anyone else’s feelings or needs into account. Rather, it enables and even encourages the setting of one’s own interests above everyone else’s. It induces solipsism, selfishness, and outright rudeness. It does not, as the Rubik’s Cube does, reward higher-level intellection. Rather, it encourages the abdication of thought, and promotes a proliferation of mindlessness, and it does so at a historical moment when the President has proved himself to be pathologically prone to distraction and incapable of formulating a coherent idea.
Is it any surprise that, given the topsy-turvy world in which we now live, spinning one’s wheels—formerly the very definition of a fruitless, frustrating activity that is best avoided—has been recast as a diverting recreation, and embraced by a mass audience? Last week, as the House voted to overturn the Affordable Care Act, millions of parents of children with special needs—those for whom the fidget spinner might arguably have a legitimate use—began to worry, once again, about their children becoming uninsured, or uninsurable, an outcome the President had promised on the campaign trail would not occur. This week, after summarily firing James Comey, the head of the F.B.I., while Comey was conducting an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, the President, with the help of his surrogates, issued a baffling series of contradictory explanations for what looks increasingly like the unapologetic gesture of a would-be despot. Each day, it becomes more apparent that Trump is toying with our democracy, shamelessly betting that the public will be too distracted and too stupefied to register that what he is spinning are lies.
