Cute Authoritarianism | Hacker News Reader

Cute Authoritarianism

areomagazine.com

27 pointsthinkingemote11 comments

This kind of reminds me of a modern version of Scarfolk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarfolk) although real.

> As in communist kitsch, rainbow identity activism’s deliberate use of cuteness blurs the distinction between childhood and adulthood. This can be valuable when consenting adults do this in order to play with identity and challenge the predetermined rules of adulthood. But it is more sinister when the purpose is to influence children.

Wow what a place to end up.

As we all know children would never dream of playing with identity or challenging predetermined rules - their poor innocent pure naieve minds could never conceive of such adult matters, and could never consent to that kind of play. Surely any instances that seem to show the opposite are the result of insidious indoctrination into the cult of rainbow identity activism.

It’s pretty telling that this article takes real human behavior 101 insights and chooses to build up to “queers are communists and I should know I used to be a queer communist.” This is pretty gross overall. “queer rights is just a smokescreen for leftist authoritarianism” is such a tired 4chan troll strat, it’s hard to believe anyone would even bother posting it at this point.

Good thing we doesn't have "cute authoritarianism", just "cool authoritarianism" like Ring, Palantir, CoD and Top Gun. How insightful.

Little heavy on the conspirational thinking.

Partway through the article the author reveals they are primarily angry about vaccines and masking, not surveillance. They also quote Ian Miles Cheong. This is an entrance to a far-right pipeline, whether the author intends that or not.

I find the complaint hypocritical, they're trying to "nudge" the readers themselves. Though I do agree with parts, the conspiratorial thinking made me lose interest in reading the whole thing.

Yeah I don’t like seeing this article posted here. This is pretty trash.

There are some more images of "Cute Authoritarianism" that the author is collecting: https://twitter.com/MrEwanMorrison/status/163649977964663193...

What I find more fascinating is that anyone would believe this is a recent phenomena.

Propaganda has always been a part of civilization, and "cuteness" is just as old of a tactic as using fear, honor, opportunity, etc.

Great essay. Has there been any serious research on the origin and history of Alegria? It was created at some specific time by some specific person but I can never seem to find that information. It feels like it just appeared out of nowhere one day and all the world's ruling institutions just adopted it as their aesthetic.

Not sure where you’ve been looking, but the origins seem well-documented (as linked to from Wikipedia): https://webflow.com/blog/corporate-memphis

Yeah I've read that. I think the connections to Memphis are vastly overstated, and the data on its origins is still not enough for me. Okay, so a particular design company created it in 2017. But which individual humans are responsible for it? And who at Facebook is responsible for the initial idea of commissioning the design work and what it should look like?

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