The latest cultural trend is a perfect fossil of human life in the immediate present.

There’s a new, dumb trend: the fidget spinner. It’s a toy like a top, but spun in the hand rather than on a surface. The user holds a pad at the center, and flicks one of three rounded blades. The spinner rotates around a bearing at the center. The light weight of the device and the low friction of the bearing allows it to spin for a long time.

What is it for? The fidget spinner has been framed as just a toy—but also as a stress-relief tool, a classroom menace, a treatment for ADHD, and a possible salve to smartphone addiction, among other things.

Fidget spinners might or might not be any of those things, but at their core they are something more, and something stranger: the perfect material metaphor for everyday life in early 2017, for good and for ill.

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Toys similar to fidget spinners have been around for years, but over the last month or so the current incarnation has reached fever pitch. As with other cultural trends, like Flappy Bird and Pokémon Go, kids adopted the gadgets first. Since the winter, fidget spinners have invaded classrooms, causing teachers to confiscate them as contraband. They’ve become ubiquitous impulse purchases at mobile-phone shops and bodegas. And as I write this, fidget spinners dominate the Amazon.com bestsellers in toys and games.

As with any trend worthy of the name, fidget spinners have also produced both delight and moral panic. Classroom distraction became a concern and mental health an opportunity. Many spinners are explicitly marketed as stress relievers or even as self-care therapy for non-neurotypical conditions like ADHD and autism. There’s no scientific evidence to suggest that the toys offer legitimate treatment, but that hasn’t stopped people from using them that way—or issuing rejoinders to those who would try to stop them. Others have celebrated the tool as a salve for smartphone addiction—a doodad to keep the fingers busy so that they aren’t tempted to reach for that whimpering glass rectangle.

The devices have also inspired economic anxiety. An ordinary fidget spinner costs pennies to make and a couple dollars to buy, but some have tried to capitalize on the trend with luxury spinners costing hundreds of dollars or more. Affront erupted over the possibility that the toy’s inventor—an unassuming, 62-year-old, down-on-her-luck Florida inventor—has been cut out of the short-lived profits. Then subsequent affront erupted over the likelihood that those origin stories were misleading anyway.

All these signals merely trace the deeper meaning of the fidget spinner. It is a rich, dense fossil of the immediate present.

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