Death in Your Hands

If you picked up a dystopian 19th century novel, paged through it, and found the plot-point where the fictional city’s children were scrambling to get to toy stores to buy a robotic egg that was unable to hatch or reproduce, you would put the novel down. It would just be too painfully obvious a symbol for the dystopia’s shallowness and inability to produce past that generation of robot-egg crazed children, and you would know that the civilization was in downfall, and that a heroic character would attempt to save it through literature or art. There would probably be ritualistic book burnings. I can see Sue Bridehead boiling some of the eggs before the city’s children commit a mass suicide.

But the Tamagotchi wasn’t a symbol in a 19th century novel. It was an actual literal toy. I stood in line in three L.A. toy shops — Puzzle Zoo, Toys R’ Us, and the Imaginarium — to buy it, and when I got one at Toys R’ Us it was because Cody’s mom had called the stores ahead of time. The only ones left were purple with pink around the edges, which I didn’t like because I was a tomboy at the time — another symbol of our culture’s infertility, inability to reproduce, and my general shallowness. Who gave a fuck about purple and pink? Because supposedly, the point of the Tamagotchi was that you could raise, within its fingernail-sized screen, a little baby bird and watch the progress of its life.

Read the rest at Motherboard.