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.

The top is not just one of the oldest toys, it is also one of the oldest artifacts of human civilization. Along with the earliest wheels, tops have been unearthed in ancient Mesopotamia dating back 5,500 years or more. The Egyptians had tops, too, some of which were found in the tomb of King Tut. Normally, a top is a toy requiring collaboration with the material world. It requires a substrate on which to spin, be it the hard earth of ancient Iraq or the molded-plastic IKEA table in a modern flat. As a toy, the top grounds physics, like a lightning rod grounds electricity. And in this collaboration, the material world always wins. Eventually, the top falls, succumbing to gravity, laying prone on the dirt.

Not so, the fidget spinner. 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.

In this context, a top that spins in the hand is like a pocket orrery—a mechanical model of the heavens. The fidget spinner quietly attests that the solitary, individual body who spins it is sufficient to hold a universe. That’s not a counterpoint to the ideology of the smartphone, but an affirmation of that device’s worldview. What is real, and good, and interesting is what can be contained and manipulated in the hand, directly.