Walk into a box store like Toys R Us or Costco and you will see that toys today constitute an overwrought universe, a shrink-wrapped house of affliction parallel to our own. The tall aisles are packed with violent pinks and piercing reds and hard, mean yellows, all clashing like brass cymbals. You are quickly overcome by their frantic urgency and charmless glitz.

The toys glare out at you from their blister packs and window boxes, demanding that you stroke their fireproof furry tummies to produce a negligible burp, or wiggle their horns to extract a tinny roar. They’re immune to feeling, hard packed as proof against shipping error, “shrinkage” and kiddy-traffic.

There are too many boxes. And besides, your kid wants the CheeDor or HyenaGor, and according to the geeky clerk you’ve finally managed to find, these were sold out months ago. Why? Cuz they dint makinuff, he mumbles through his wad of Extra gum as he restocks a 9-foot shelf of greenish Star Wars fighters.

He looks greenish himself in the jittery store-lights. Working in a toy store, and he’s exhausted. A toy store is anything but fun.

Why are toys such hard work today? Why are kids involved in endless schoolyard Ponzi schemes with their Pokemon cards, trading scores and codes from Lego’s Baraka at recess as if were so much black market currency? What are China’s endless pastel boxcars doing here anyway? Full of action figures bound for suburban box-stores the year round — toys that roar and bleep and refuse to budge from blister packs that will cut your hand badly if you’re not careful? And that’s the real thing.

(“These counterfeits are dangerous,” says a cop whose team has just seized another shipment of fakes from Hong Kong, “They’ve got lead in them.”)

I hold just such an Action Figure in my hand. It is my son’s battery-operated grey camel robot from Star Wars. It’s called Hoth, with guns where its eyes and mouth should be, and a little white starship trooper hiding in his plastic trap-door hump. For Game Theorists, this is closed toy as opposed to an open toy, like Barbie.

Barbie belongs to the old world of dolls—and teddy bears, bats and balls, red wagons, cowboy guns — the kit of the child-narrator, who scripts his own story. Hoth is a closed toy, part of an Operating System external to a player’s life. Hoth’s O/S is free of child’s rule in two ways.

First, Hoth belong to a collection; and as the Star Wars catalogue itself smugly reminds us, “No collection is complete!” without the rest of the collection. This promise of completion is never delivered, because these toy manufacturers sell incompleteness.

Why should they? The real money’s in need. The catalogue begins by seducing kids with coy offers of role deception:

“Your friends will think you are… a gaming mastermind — but only you will know for sure (we won’t tell).”

So secondly, Hoth isn’t really a toy at all, but a component, part of a System; and it’s the System who allows the kid to pretend he’s a warrior or gaming mastermind — not the toy.

No, the toy is beside the point. The player quickly understands this, too. He or she understands by age eight that action figures in blister packs are of necessity always incomplete, even when freshly purchased and still boxed. And that his purchase completes nothing but a provisional entry into an anxious system of commercial craving.

Is this stuff any different from the imported silks that threatened ancient Rome with bankruptcy? Or the costly teas that wrenched the British Empire apart? The Chinese have always specialized in providing the West with its pretty addictions; this thrill is more profound and dangerous. It’s a metaphysical hit.

For if the player’s position relative to this unknowable System is vague and subservient, the toy continually reminds the child that he himself is incomplete, too. Hoth requires batteries: a wire plugged into his anus connects him to a power pack, external yet essential. The routinized, jerky movements that follow deny Descartes, disprove Aquinas.

Free will in the West? Forget it. Unlike the wind-up robot of a generation ago, Hoth’s got no autonomy, no place to go. Press On, and he agitates humpily around his grey lump.

The third part of this toy-system, and more important than the camelbot or the anus-battery, is the stand — complete with a moon crater and embedded footprints.

This device keeps the player out of the loop, distancing him as the spectator who “won’t believe the incredible detail!” Even if the kid tries, his attempt is frustrated. The little warrior can’t stand up by himself; he keeps falling down unless his gun his positioned straight over his head, as if surrendering. The player soon learns it’s better to leave the little fellow where he is, lying on his back like a foetus, inside his camel hump.

Some warrior!

The message in the Blister Pack is that futility and powerlessness attaches to any purchaser who attempts to add narrative elements to the program envisioned by the System. This futility quickly makes itself known to every young player, no matter how imaginative. The toy figure arrests and frustrates efforts to produce alternative scripts, refusing them under the totalitarian motto, Resistance is futile, and proving it in his fumbling. His ineptitude (and that of his parents’) is caused by ignorance of the codes of animatism. Arresting the action is the job of action figures.

Why should this cheapo plastic stuff be so important today? The meta-life of objects is now widely felt to be growing out of control: objects have a complete life of their own. What are Edward Burtynsky’s photos of Machine China, but shots of Ground Zero where the old world of artifacts is dematerialized into a bar-coded chimera?

[Edward Burtynsky: Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Jilin Province]

Our anxiety about the secret life of globalization is anxiety about the death of the organic world. Our familiar world is losing its parts.

We once believed that Technology opposed Nature, that technology offered us hope of controlling the bad weather of history. It turns out that technology is exactly like weather. It, too, is subject to fits of pique and catastrophe — as system crashes, software glitches, and chronic metal fatigue constantly remind us. The causes remain mysterious long after power is restored. The lights go on again, but we are still in the dark.

Artists seized on the issue in the 19^th Century. The German painter Max Klinger did a series on the misadventures of a lady’s lost glove in 1881. In 1909 the Italian futurist and artist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti coined the phrase “animatic” for his view that inanimate things are alive. As the output of box-store stuff continues to mount, we can only experience it referentially, and passively. Forget capitalists: nobody today really controls the means of production.

[Max Klinger, "Ein Handschuh" (A Glove), 1881]

The jumble of forever-incomplete toy “sets” littering the bedrooms of generations of children, never mind the slightly-defective printers and monitors and TVs littering landfill sites. My experience, like that of my child’s, is denied by the System that is deliberately creating a junkyard of the landscape. Here’s a summary of just the past year, which I suggest is more important than God in its proofs of a terrible new metaphysic:

1. A week after I bought it, the $175 Panasonic portable phone slipped to the vinyl floor and died without visible injury.

2. Two weeks after my new $2500 PC system was installed by a “geek pro,” it fried itself in the middle of the night – sparks, smoke and everything.

3. The new “digital” answering machine gives such lo-res audio that it takes us multiple Repeats to figure out who called

4. The camcorder began erasing family videos as it played them.

5. The SLR camera freezes on nice days, but never when I take it back to the camera store; a new wireless mouse died at three weeks; the DVD portable player at one month.

I could go on, but whenever you do complain you get a clerk’s recorded answer: more consumption. Toys such as Hoth are here to teach us about this inhuman new world, about the fritzing and frying and freezing.

Don’t blame China for this defective stuff, for its glitches of mass production.

Take comfort from the toys, who offer their symbolic condolences for our loss of the World. The organic world we once knew can longer compete with the coded reality that produces this unending flow of immaculate novelty. Coming to terms with its triumph — the triumph of the arrested image over narrative will — is now a rite of passage for us all.