Flip, click, repeat
It tears through the problem space of ecommerce like it is a supplement company dressed as a hypebeast drop. It is neither. They sell fidget toys. Fidget toys are a cult now? It is from New Zealand, which as we all know is the fidget toy capital of Earth.
How much do you think a fidget toy is worth? Remember that you exist within apocalypse, and your anxiety generates enough power to replace the sun. You are on calls with sacks of diminished consciousness every day, and they all have the power to both ruin & eat you. Everyone you know badly needs therapy, and only 5% of your social graph is able to afford it. Healthcare. Housing. War. I will repeat the question. How much do you think a fidget toy is worth?
Feels reasonable now, doesn’t it? It is a sort of jewelry, a precision timepiece of ADHD dread.
It is not the cup. The cup exists for those who are calmly incentivized to ruin you. They are the foot soldiers of a broken world. They drink children’s blood out of it at sundown.
It is not the tiny tool tote, either. The tiny tool tote is for the person who wants to be defined by the constraint of tiny tools. The tiny tool tote is refreshed for – not unlike these, but it really does feel like you buy only one.
It is, you must admit, actually useful, distinctive enough to exist as a category of one. There are other fidget toys, sure, but none like it. And if you fidget, you fidget all the time, every day. The fidgeter gains intimacy with the fidgetee. Working with something all the time inflates its value. I have a rule in my home: if I use something every day, I can & should invest in a really good version of it.
Are these collected? You pray for no fidget whales anywhere on Earth. Imagine: this is my Tuesday fidget toy, they say, accursedly. It’s sandblasted steel. My Friday fidget toy is rhodium-plated. Oh, cool, you’re in that world now, one where rhodium plating is normal. How many people on Earth even know what rhodium is?
Is the rhodium person better or worse than the whiskey man? You already know the answer. It resides deep inside your spirit, prodding at a question that nobody ever wanted to conceive of, let alone ask.
Look back at the website. It is clearly trying. These things sell out all the time, it seems. There are drops. There are multiple countdown timers. You sense your behavior curdling into something conditioned by the creator, knowing they have their own thing going on and you have no plan B. Do you wait, then strike? Do they just make only a few? They leave the sold-out models in plain view of everything, in defiance of god, which actually feels like a shrewd move.
The typography is a disaster. You wonder whether to trust them. A shady-looking man emerges from a city alley at night, wearing a trenchcoat. Wanna buy a fidget slider?, he asks. You kind of don’t, but you also never bothered to ask the question.
It comes in two halves that separate easily. You pray, against all hope, that you never lose one of them.