Episode 153 - Cuteness Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:19] David: The Podcast, where two philosophers get cute with ideas and everyday life.

[00:00:24] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:26] David: And I'm David Pena Guzman, to support the show and get access to extended ad-free episodes, lives, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

[00:00:35] Ellie: Recently, the hottest commodity around has been a Labubu.

I didn't really understand what a Labubu was other than it was like this cute sort of gremlin looking doll. So I read about it and it turns out that these originated as storybook characters created by the artist Kasing Lung, a Hong Kong born and Netherlands based artist. And Lung was inspired by Nordic folklore, especially elves, in creating these cute little creatures who are known as kindhearted and eager to help.

If you know anything about a Labubu, you know about the toy version of them because they have absolutely popped off both in their plushy form and in their like bag accessory form. This happened starting in 2019 when Lung partnered with the Chinese toy company Pop Mart, and the dolls are sold in blind boxes.

So you basically don't see them until you open them, which has created all kinds of hype because you wanna get a rare Labubu. You don't know what you're gonna,

[00:01:37] David: oh, it's like the adult kinder egg. You won't choke on it though, so it's not.

[00:01:45] Ellie: Yeah. So you know, these cute little dolls, right? Do you think they're cute?

[00:01:48] David: I think they're hideous. And I am sick of Labubus. I am over the Labubu era. The gays went crazy for the Labubus. And one of the volleyball teams in my league, in my competitive league is called the Lafufus.

[00:02:03] Ellie: Okay. Which I learned in my research about this are fake labubus.

[00:02:06] David: Yeah. They're fake labubus. Yeah. So it's like copy labubus that are cheaper and more accessible. And so yeah, I think they're really ugly, but in a cute way. It's like the ugly-cute category. You know, like a chihuahua, like I think chihuahuas are ugly-cute.

[00:02:22] Ellie: Yeah. I wonder actually to what extent many things that we consider cute could be considered ugly-cute. I think it depends on obviously how we're defining the cute, which we will be

[00:02:31] David: and the ugly

[00:02:32] Ellie: talking about quite a bit. Yeah. And the ugly, right. And I think Labubus have been compared to Beanie Babies and Furbies which are cult toys that are more from our era. Right. Yeah. Like our childhood, I definitely had a lot of Beanie Babies.

There was the idea that you had to keep the Beanie Baby tag on so it wouldn't lose its value. But then like Beanie Babies just basically ended up having no value anyway, at least 99% of them. So none of us needed to worry about keeping those tags on, which we were so careful.

[00:03:02] David: Do you still have any of them?

[00:03:04] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:03:04] David: Oh, you do?

[00:03:05] Ellie: Straight up. I think there's some in my garage right now.

[00:03:07] David: Why didn't you bring it? Like your Beanie Baby should have been front and center during this episode.

[00:03:12] Ellie: That's actually a really good point, but I have to say. I feel like they're, maybe there. If they're there, which I do think they are, but I think they're really deeply buried somewhere.

So I'm not sure we'd be able to find them. But my favorite one was my cat, beanie Baby. I'm forgetting her name right now. But I used to full on like play Beanie Babies with my cousin Alex. Then we would have all of these elaborate love stories, whereas the Furby, my sister, and I would just throw it at the wall so it would start speaking gibberish.

[00:03:39] David: Yeah. So the Furby, I think there is something really repulsive about it because of the gibberish. And so it does also fit for me into the ugly-cute category. I see why people think both of them are cute just like the labubus. But I don't think any of these toys compete in the least with the queen of cuteness: Hello Kitty. Hands down

[00:04:00] Ellie: I'm really with you on that.

[00:04:02] David: But I wanted to say, did you know that Hello Kitty is not a cat?

[00:04:06] Ellie: What?

[00:04:07] David: Yeah, it's a human girl. It is a human girl. Zoomorphisized or zoomorphed into a cat rather than a cat anthropomorphized as a girl.

[00:04:21] Ellie: Okay, so it's a drawing that looks like a cat, and her name is Kitty. And you're telling me she's not a cat?

[00:04:26] David: No, she's not a cat. She's a human who is represented as a cat and more importantly, little detail. She is British. She was born in Europe on November 1st.

[00:04:39] Ellie: Guys even before we get into the theory. We're coming, we're coming in hot with the research on our toys. You know, I was more of a keroppi girl myself.

[00:04:46] David: What is that?

[00:04:47] Ellie: It's a frog.

[00:04:48] David: Oh, okay.

[00:04:48] Ellie: You're probably about to tell me it's like a human boy who's shaped like a frog.

[00:04:52] David: No, I think that was, that one was a cat pretending to be a llama dressed as a frog specifically.

[00:04:58] Ellie: Okay. But I think Hello Kitty is important here because SanRio is a Japanese company, even if Hello Kitty's British. The parent company is Japanese, and Japanese culture is known for the importance of the Kawaii aesthetic. Kauai meaning cute. So like cuteness. Has an important role to play in contemporary Japanese culture, especially the exports of Japanese culture.

Aesthetically to, yeah. You know, other places like Hello Kitty being a central part of growing up as a kid in the nineties and two thousands, hopefully still today, hopefully. Hello Kitty is not irrelevant.

[00:05:32] David: No. Hello Kitty is eternal and timeless. Yeah, she is the perennial cute object, but the Japanese term, Kawaii is translated often into English as you said, as cute, although I read that the etymological roots of the term are in the ancient word kawayushi which literally means kawa for face and hayushi for flushing. And an additional little detail about Hello Kitty is that she has a government name.

First name. Kitty. Last name White.

[00:06:08] Ellie: Kitty White.

[00:06:09] David: Kitty White is her full legal name.

[00:06:12] Ellie: Oh my God. I mean, there's a lot to say about the role of the white in Kawaii culture, However, I will say in this case, like. Hello Kitty is a white cat. Oh no. A white girl?

[00:06:20] David: No, a white girl.

[00:06:21] Ellie: She's a white girl who looks like a cat, so I guess that makes sense as her last name.

[00:06:26] David: Yeah. And you know, I've been reading, I got obsessed with a Hello Kitty and I came upon this philosopher Dylan Wittkower, who writes about aesthetics, including the aesthetic category of the cute. And he writes about Hello Kitty, and points out that the reason that Hello Kitty, in particular has been so successful internationally, both as a commodity, but also as a symbol of cuteness, is because she is everything to everybody at once in a sense.

So she is appealing to young kids because she is very cute. Right? Like kids love a cute toy. But then adolescence still experience Hello Kitty as cool. So she has a coolness factor of like, yeah. Oh look, I'm still into these toys in a kind of like distanced way

[00:07:12] Ellie: for the characters, if not the toys.

[00:07:13] David: Yeah, exactly. The character. And for adults. Hello Kitty is now Campy. So she is cute. She is cool. And she's campy, which means that there isn't a single person in the world who has any reason to dislike Hello Kitty. Today we are talking about cuteness.

[00:07:35] Ellie: How has the cute become a dominant aesthetic in our present age?

[00:07:39] David: Why are babies and animals the epitome of cuteness?

[00:07:42] Ellie: And why is cuteness so important in internet culture?

The most influential analysis of cuteness is certainly that of the contemporary literary critic, Sianne Ngai. So I think her account is a good place to start. She writes about cuteness in a book called Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting. And she thinks that these three categories have arisen as dominant in our culture today in different areas.

So zany is the aesthetic category of production. I think of like a zany film director as the genius of our time. The interesting is a category of circulation as when a film or exhibit comes out and we say, Ooh, that's interesting. Without like having any more developed thought on the matter. And cuteness is the aesthetic category of consumption.

[00:08:45] David: So the cute is how you perceive things that have been produced and circulated?

[00:08:49] Ellie: Sure. For now. We'll get into it moment.

[00:08:52] David: Okay. Let's, I mean, maybe let's get into it kind of now. Let's dive into the features of cuteness directly because when I think about something that is cute, my mind immediately goes to questions of size and magnitude. The cute is something small. And also when we use the term cute to describe an object or a person, it's always used positively. So to be cute is to be appealing and attractive. And so maybe the appeal of the thing is also related to the smallness. When I think about the cute, it's also somewhat like compact and graspable and precious that you just can take into your hands, but not in the same way that like a precious stone, like a diamond is small. 'Cause that's hard. And that has sharp edges. Like the cute has to be small, but also squishy and soft. Hence a stuffed animal.

[00:09:43] Ellie: Yeah. A plushy, labubu plushy. Yeah.

And what you're saying about the cute being a positive thing is right. That doesn't always mean that it's a compliment to call somebody or something. Cute, right?

[00:09:56] David: Correct.

[00:09:57] Ellie: So it can be seen as, well, why did you call me cute instead of beautiful? It can be seen as condescending for reasons that I think will get into, and one place to start here is that Ngai notes that we think things are cuter when they're sleepy, like a baby is already so cute, but when it's cuddling up to you and nodding off, it's even cuter. And this relates to Ngai's theory of cuteness. Because she argues that cuteness is an aestheticization of powerlessness.

So when you call something cute. You're essentially calling it powerless, which of course is definitely not always a compliment. And the bottom line here is that there's always an asymmetrical power dynamic in relation to what we consider cute.

[00:10:42] David: Yeah. And so let's think about that in relation to what we usually consider cute because babies sure, like they're sleepy and they're cute, therefore, and they are powerless.

[00:10:53] Ellie: Right. Like it's not offensive to a baby to be like, you're, you don't have any power.

[00:10:58] David: No. But I also think this highlights the problem with calling elderly people cute which is a very common practice.

[00:11:05] Ellie: Exactly.

[00:11:05] David: Like, Oh my God. Look at that old lady like walking very slowly with her cane. How cute is that? And it's infantalizing, because when we say that an old person is skewed in that way, I think there is already the introduction of a hierarchy and it's a hierarchy of power for sure. That starts bringing us a little bit into the domain of pity, I would say.

At least based on this definition of the cute as the aestheticization of powerlessness.

[00:11:31] Ellie: Yeah. It's like a flex to call somebody or something cute. Yeah. Is to imply that you have. Power over it.

[00:11:37] David: Yeah, that was such a cute point, Ellie,

[00:11:42] Ellie: Yeah. Nobody wants to hear that at the philosophy conference. I wonder though, so I said somebody or something. Is it just really somebody, or is it also something, so that is to say, I wonder what we might say about cute items like toys. So when I describe a Labubu as cute, am I saying that I have power over it?

[00:12:05] David: Well. Yes, but I think maybe a different way to articulate it is not so much that we have power over them, but rather that we perceive them as powerless and therefore vulnerable. And I do think that we perceive a Labubu and Hello Kitty and a Beanie Baby as powerless because they are characters that have those features of like a cute baby that just make you wanna take care of it. And that is a top-down relationship.

[00:12:31] Ellie: Sure. And maybe though, if we did wanna hold onto the slightly narrower sense of having power over someone or somebody rather than just that, they're like kind of powerless, irrespective of a relation to another being.

What we might draw attention to is the fact that cute things are usually anthropomorphized. So, there's like a bush in Silver Lake that the owners have put googly eyes on. It's like near the reservoir at the end of the reservoir, really close to where I used to live. And it's like a cute bush suddenly because it has these googly eyes on it.

And. I think too, the Labubus obviously are anthropomorphized, Hello Kitty, it turns out's, not even anthropomorphized, she's just like straight up a girl. She doesn't pass as a human. I'll say that.

That makes me think of the fact that Ngai suggests that cuteness evokes a desire to, as she describes it, lovingly molest what we find cute.

[00:13:27] David: Oh my gosh.

[00:13:28] Ellie: Yeah. Not in like,

[00:13:29] David: that's quite the phrase.

[00:13:30] Ellie: No, I know, I know. Because the word molest has like very obviously sexual connotations now, but technically that's not, it doesn't imply that, you know, it's just like, as in, you're so cute, I could eat you up.

You know, just like, oh, I wanna cuddle with you. Ah, and, and maybe there is like a little bit. Of a undertone of aggression though? 'cause she says there's

[00:13:47] David: aggressively,

[00:13:48] Ellie: yeah,

[00:13:48] David: aggressively molest.

[00:13:49] Ellie: Yeah. Well, no, she puts it in terms of lovingly molest.

[00:13:53] David: Oh, okay. Okay.

[00:13:53] Ellie: Versus aggressively protect the cute.

And there's, both of those are happening at once because the cute is assumed to be innocent and vulnerable. And so you want to, on the one hand, kind of be like, Ugh, I could just eat you up. And also to protect that same entity that you are lovingly molesting from outside forces of aggression

[00:14:13] David: like I'll kill for you because you're so cute.

[00:14:15] Ellie: Exactly. And you're so innocent and vulnerable. And you can also think about how the cute is so often feminized, right? Or associated with the domestic sphere. It involves our private sphere of intimacy and care, which is a sphere that needs to be protected from the cold outside world. It is powerless and therefore requires protection.

[00:14:35] David: Yeah. So I wanna sit with this phrase. I think it's so cute. Like, I wanna eat you up because you're so cute. Because I do think this captures something unique to the category of the cute. So think about related categories like the beautiful or the sublime. We don't wanna eat the sublime. That sounds like blasphemy.

The same thing would apply to the beautiful, right? Like, you don't eat up, you don't destroy the beautiful, you appreciate it, you wanna be sort of surrounded by beautiful things.

You wanna be enveloped by the sublime or in the presence of the sublime. So it's a different kind of relationship, but. With the cute, it's like we wanna smother it. Like we wanna be so close to it that we bring it into close contact with our bodies and in fact, we incorporate it into our bodies.

 Like it, it becomes part of us, like we want to ingest the cute. , Whereas with the beautiful and the sublime, there's a sense of distance and aesthetic appreciation.

[00:15:33] Ellie: I think that also suggests why somebody wants to be called beautiful rather than cute because beautiful is compatible with power in a way that cuteness isn't, and it's not offensive. Like when you're in middle school and you have a crush on somebody, you call them cute regardless of what gender they are. But then as you become an adult, yeah, it seems like kind of weird. I mean, you might say like, oh yeah, that person's cute, but that would probably just be shorthand for like they're hot or they're cool or they're

[00:16:01] David: Yeah, an adult in an adult that judges other people only on the category of the cute is sus. It's like really weird. Like you're like, oh my God, I'm going on a date with somebody and they're cute and only that like you don't say anything else. Then it's like your categories are off in that space.

[00:16:19] Ellie: Yeah. Or like, if I want you to set me up with one of your friends and I say, oh yeah, like, I think he's cute, then okay, that's fine. And then if you're in a relationship with somebody and they do something that you think is like really sweet and adorable, you might say like, oh my God, you're so cute.

But that would then very much need to be counterbalanced by, you're hot, you're beautiful.

[00:16:40] David: Interesting you're zany.

[00:16:42] Ellie: Well, I was just focusing on sort of,, aesthetically, well, I guess, and those are aesthetic categories too, but I was just focusing on sort of like superficial categories.

But even for that, I think you wanna be more than cute.

[00:16:53] David: Yeah. But tell me more about why she argues that the cute is specifically tied, you said earlier to consumption.

[00:17:01] Ellie: Yeah. So Ngai thinks that we relate to commodities today mainly in terms of cuteness and I think what we've been talking about so far is just so interesting, to use another aesthetic category that really doesn't mean much, but I think that is a helpful lead up to sort of this point, and I'm not gonna be able to canvas her entire argument here by any means. It is fascinating. Her whole analysis is just great and I won't have a chance to explain it all, but I can mention a few things.

So she thinks first that the commodity form itself may already imply cuteness.

[00:17:38] David: Oh wow.

[00:17:38] Ellie: So you package something up into being a commodity, even if it's something much larger than yourself, you know? And maybe it's not like plush. There's a sort of packaging of it that may already imply cuteness,

[00:17:52] David: just like marketing in general.

[00:17:54] Ellie: Yeah. And that even beyond that, commodities become cuter and cuter in the contemporary world. Even if you think about the difference between a Labubu and the Nordic elf that maybe inspired the Labubu from hundreds of years ago, the Labubu is like, you know, perfectly calibrated to cuteness anytime we

[00:18:13] David: late stage capitalism, labubu.

[00:18:15] Ellie: Yeah, exactly. We're probably not the first people to say that. We almost certainly are not. So anytime we aestheticize something, she thinks we objectify it and cuteification is sort of the ultimate endpoint of objectification. Objects are passive, but cute objects are even more passive. And in addition, cuteness constricts the gap between consumer and commodity.

So it's an object of our desire, the cute thing, but it's one that feels very close to us. And so as our culture becomes more and more immediate, the cute can be seen as one symptom of that. So even though commodities themselves may already be cute, they're just becoming cuter and cuter over time.

And this also pertains to our sort of relation to them where there's less of a gap between consumer and commodity. So think about the clickbait titles of articles. Or the increasing demand for short overviews of texts rather than actually reading the texts themselves. A big pet peeve of ours.

For Ngai, these are symptoms of cuteification, even though they're not things like typical

[00:19:15] David: Oh interesting, they're getting smaller. And plushy.

[00:19:18] Ellie: Right. And TikTok videos for sure would count here as well. The increasing demand for short form content. But she doesn't just discuss lowbrow phenomena such as, you know, social media or these like digest of text 'cause her main focus in the analysis of cuteness is actually avant-garde poetry.

[00:19:38] David: Oh, whoa.

[00:19:39] Ellie: She writes that the 20th century witnesses the rise of the cute avant-garde with poetry in particular, increasingly taking the form of these cute and small sentences in stanza. So think about, you know, a modern or contemporary, not to confuse our categories, contemporary work of poetry is very likely to maybe have all lowercase, very short stanzas, very short lines, and also even she notes to concern matters of the cute, like these sweet little objects like plums or pocket charms or cafeteria plates with neatly compartmentalized food.

[00:20:17] David: Okay. And so cuteification is not just like a visual category, although this kind of touches on that a little bit in terms of size, but it really is about something that you can more easily, again, ingest or consume, which is why it has this connection to commodities and commodification logics. And so I want to bring into this discussion once again, which, by the way, I think this is really fascinating.

I will need to read that book in its entirety after this episode. 'cause it sounds really, really great. The philosopher that I mentioned, Dylan Wittkower, he talks about the cute and says that one of the defining features of the cute is that it encourages a dual mode of appreciation.

So when we experience something that is cute, we don't just have one reaction to it, we always have this double-sided reaction to it. On the one hand, we have a serious reaction to it where we truly seriously believe that it is cute. We like the shape, we like the feel, the color, whatever the case might be.

But then alongside that reaction, there is always this almost absurd reaction that comes with it and I think the phrase that we were talking about, you're so cute, I want to eat you. It captures the absurdity. Right? That you like it, but you want to destroy it. You want to, like, what was the molest phrase?

[00:21:38] Ellie: Lovingly molest.

[00:21:39] David: Yeah. And he uses a different phrase of his own to capture this duality. He uses the phrase, and I wanna just get it correct 'cause it's so good. That's so cute, it makes me wanna vomit where there is an aesthetic judgment and it's serious, but then it touches on the absurd by pointing to this exorbitant reaction, which would be,

[00:22:00] Ellie: I should've laughed, you know, I have a phobia of vomit, so I'm just like, no, I can't even hear it.

[00:22:07] David: And he also says that the cute is the dominant aesthetic category of the present moment, specifically because it is tied to new media, such as internet culture. So like if you wanna find cute things, go to the internet, you know, like cat videos, dog videos. So on and so forth.

[00:22:24] Ellie: We'll talk more about that later too.

[00:22:26] David: We will. But the core of his analysis, which I think maybe can compliment a little bit, this kind of like neo Marxist reading of cuteification as commodification and vice versa is that he has this critique where cuteness is an inherently anti-intellectual category and the bridge between those two, between the analysis you mentioned, and this one is the category of immediacy.

So when we are confronted with something cute, we just smile and don't know what else to say. We're like, it's so cute. But we don't think or reflect about why it's cute. We're not expected to have a deep thought about it. You just consume it and spit it out and move on to the next thing.

And so that's why it's perfect for internet culture because the internet favors that kind of rapid consumption without thinking. Right. Like almost like being in a hypnotic trance and you're just moving from one thing to the other one only appreciating things of high immediacy.

And he has a really interesting kind of historical account of this, where he says, if you look at the history of aesthetic categories, you see this increasing immediacy in what is valued. So think about initially the Baroque. You know, like baroque things are really complex. They are theatrical, whether it's painting or architecture, you know, I think of like the Baroque as something that is full of Arabesques, for example. When you look at something baroque, it really makes you think, you know, like, what am I looking at?

How do I make sense of it? It triggers a cognitive response. The Baroque then became or was replaced by the romantic, which is much more about having these intense feelings that are not translatable into reason, and then afterwards, especially in the early 20th century. the romantic then gave way to the cute, and just like the romantic was more immediate than the baroque and less rational and less thought provoking. The cute is sort of like taking that to the extreme, where there is no thinking whatsoever. It's pure effective reaction.

[00:24:32] Ellie: I might even wanna start the trajectory a beat earlier and be baroque to Renaissance. Because I, I think you could say that that involved more thinking, right? Yeah. And with the rise of the Baroque and I think the place where I know the most about this trajectory is actually art history.

And so I feel like there are a lot of movements we skipped over in going from Baroque to romantic, but in the movement from Renaissance to Baroque, there was actually a lot of criticism about this as being overblown and insufficiently deep because it's just, yeah,

[00:25:03] David: it's sensorial.

[00:25:04] Ellie: The Baroque. Yeah. The baroque is superficial, relative to the Renaissance's more restrained approach, aesthetically speaking. I also think that some of this though, would work well with Ngai's account of the interesting too, because that's basically her view is things like. Deep criticism has increasingly become replaced by just remarks on something as being interesting.

It's the easiest thing to do and I find myself doing this on the show even being like, that's so interesting and since reading this, I'm taking a second look at that and trying to resist simply reaching for that word because even though she thinks that that is a different category from the cute, I think your analysis of Wittkower makes me think about how those two are both symptomatic of an anti-intellectual tendency in our culture.

[00:25:54] David: According to evolutionary psychologists before being an aesthetic category, the cute was a psychological module that increased our fitness as a species. So it's something that we share with our ancestors from the Pleistocene period or anti-intellectual Pleistocene era. Yeah, ancestors loved only immediacy and commodification And Hello Kitty.

And the basic idea behind this evolutionary theory of cuteness is that we all carry within us this tendency to interpret certain stimuli in a particular way. Now, the idea was originally proposed by the fathers of ethology and Nobel Prize winners, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. This was first proposed by Lorenz in 1943, but then it was taken up by a bunch of other people who specialize in animal behavior, and they use the term baby schema or in German Kindchenschema to refer to this cognitive module that we have that responds to a particular set of physical features that make up the face of a baby. So every time we see a visual configuration that is the face of a baby or that resembles the face of a baby. That configuration releases this parenting drive that we all have within us, presumably by virtue of our human nature, and it makes us bond with the baby.

It makes us think that the baby's super adorable and it encourages affiliative behaviors at the same time as it generates a feeling of joy and pleasure. So you see cute baby face and you love it. And that's the origin of the experience of cuteness from this evolutionary perspective.

[00:27:44] Ellie: I dunno about a parenting drive, but at least a caretaking drive. I can say for myself, I love, love babies. Nothing like a, yeah, there are a few things I love more than a cute baby. Or a baby that which is by definition cute. According to this theory. So the idea then is we've got these instincts kind of locked up inside us that are waiting to be activated by an external stimulus.

And if the right stimulus appears this, you know, baby face or,

[00:28:09] David: Kindchenschema

[00:28:10] Ellie: like, yeah, hello Kitty, definitely fits the Kindchenschema. Then we innately respond by caring for it. And according to this theory, this is something that we all have simply in virtue of being human. This kind of receptivity to things that are cute, like baby faces. We cannot help but respond to them with care, affection, and love.

[00:28:31] David: Yeah. We cannot not have that reaction. That's exactly right. And the schema itself has very specific features. So these are the defining characteristics of the cute. So what makes something cute? Relatively large, head and forehead. Large and deep eyes.

Short, thick extremities, generally rounded body shapes, soft, elastic surface texture, and round chubby cheeks.

[00:29:00] Ellie: So now we're doing like physionomy of baby.

[00:29:02] David: Yeah, you have to really make sure you check all the boxes if you want to be considered cute.

[00:29:08] Ellie: Yeah. Well, and I mean, think about the Disney characters who are engineered to provoke a maximally cute or caretaking response, they're engineered to be maximally cute. Maybe that's a better way of putting it. These aren't beauty standards, they're cuteness standards. But you know, these evolutionary psychologists certainly think that there is a universal ability there.

Because the cute has these features on this theory, a lot of research in evolutionary psychology treats the cute as an objective category, right? There's literally pictures with babies and arrows and measurements to see how objectively cute they are in this subfield.

[00:29:49] David: Yeah, so when I was doing the research, I read a bunch of articles on evolutionary psychology, and this was what was really disconcerting, that it looked like cranial metrics and phrenology for babies. Like, look at this baby picture. Look at how wide its eyes are apart. Look at its forehead measurements. The mouth is only so many centimeters and it was giving kind of like torturous scientific mad man.

[00:30:15] Ellie: Yeah, I'm looking it up. Hello Kitty giant forehead. So I guess she perfectly fits the bill there.

[00:30:20] David: I think she has a big head, but not necessarily a forehead because she doesn't have a hairline.

[00:30:24] Ellie: Yeah, she has fur.

[00:30:24] David: Yeah, she doesn't have an hairline. But anyways. So this is one of the things that does worry me, now, on a more serious point about a lot of this evolutionary literature, one of the articles that I read really uncritically used the category of the cute with all of these kind of metrics around it, this logic of objectivity and measurement to argue that that's how we can expand our moral circle.

And that is by using the cute, like bring babies into our circle of moral concern and make them members of the moral community.

[00:30:58] Ellie: Oh, David, no, no.

[00:31:00] David: And so like, here's a quote from that article. Any cute infant is automatically granted membership to the moral community, and cuteness can then be extended to other people or objects.

 And so I was like, okay, so cute babies are automatically protected. But what about fugly babies? It's like, you know, are they not morally worthy?

[00:31:23] Ellie: Oh my God. Well, okay. This also speaks to a confusion I think, that I even found myself kind of falling into and then trying to work my way out of just a couple moments ago in conversation.

 Are we saying that the traits we associate with babies are the traits we associate with cuteness or are we saying there are cute traits that most babies have? And if so, then do some babies not have that? And honestly, even if they all have that, I still don't think that's a good basis for expanding our moral circle in that way because like there might be non-human animals that we don't typically associate as cute, but we should still include in our moral circle, there are plenty of adult humans we might not call cute and should definitely be in our moral circle.

[00:32:03] David: And there are a lot of adults who are cute who should not be a member of the moral community. No, but I think you're right to point to that ambiguity. And I think it's probably the latter that there are these features that tend to be associated with baby. Like baby faces tend to meet those conditions most frequently. But one of the things that I found really horrific in some of this research is when they would point to things like having a cleft palate, and it's like that baby does not meet the conditions objectively, because it breaches the schema. And I was like, so what are you saying about our treatment of that baby. I'm not really sure. I think they would say, oh, I'm just being descriptive. I'm just describing what is and what is not cute. But I thought it was really troublesome and really gross in general.

[00:32:48] Ellie: Well, especially if, and maybe that's happening in a different article, but especially if the implication is that we should expand our moral circle to the cute, and actually, not even just the implication, but like the actual conclusion of the argument. So that's very strange to me. I think it's fair to say that we generally tend to think of babies as cute, but we also accept that there are cuter babies than others.

And something that comes to mind for me here is in Indian culture, there's a tradition of putting a black mark on your baby's forehead in order to avert the evil eye because babies are so cute, they're gonna attract the evil eye. And so you need to avert the evil eye by putting a black mark. You make the baby less cute by putting a black mark on its forehead.

[00:33:31] David: Oh my God. We shared the Kindchenschema with like evil forces. We're members of the same species.

[00:33:38] Ellie: But here's where I think it gets especially interesting. The cuter your baby is in Indian culture, the bigger a black mark you put on it.

And so like my, so my brother-in-law's, baby photos, he was a cutest baby. They just had these like giant black marks, he has like giant black mark on his forehead and all his baby photos. But I was telling him about how, I was thinking about mentioning this in our cuteness episode and he was like, yeah, you know, there was like a family friend or something who had a baby that was universally not considered cute, but that family, friend's, parents like, or sorry, the family friend put a giant black mark on the baby's forehead. And so then there was kind of some gossip around like, you know that baby really didn't need such a big black mark on his forehead.

[00:34:21] David: Your baby is fine. Trust me. Oh, that's really funny. Like with families, just like low key bragging about the cuteness of their babies by virtue of the size of the dot.

[00:34:32] Ellie: But I think also, I mean, the forehead is maybe an interesting case here, not the black mark on the forehead, but the idea of the big forehead or something like that.

Because there are of course all kinds of prejudices that have historically prevented babies from certain groups, from being seen as cute. And I think as much as these evolutionary psychologists might be pointing to certain universal features of babies that make them cute, I think that. It's very unlikely that those are like actually quite so universalizable given the difference of human physionomy and different cultures. And so I think we would wanna maybe be careful to ask about whether there are racial biases in our judgments about baby cuteness, I think, you know, we mentioned in passing like the question of white earlier. And the fact that like the palor a baby is the more valuable aesthetically it's often demmed to be.

[00:35:20] David: I didn't even get a dot at all as a baby. No, that's right. And so we do need a racial perspective and we definitely need a disability perspective. You know, when we think about the quote unquote ugly side of cute, I think we also can think about that from an animal ethics angle.

Obviously as you mentioned, you know, we judge some animals to be cuter than others because they come closer to that baby schema like dogs and cats, and so we incorporate them into our family lives. But birds and reptiles, they don't really fit that. And so the problem there is that we end up using aesthetic categories to do moral work, and that's a category mistake.

But, there is a really interesting article that I read from the animal welfare scholar, Sarah Wolfen-sohn, who argues that cuteness is a horrible category for animals, but not just the animals who fall short of it. It's also really bad for the animals that meet the conditions for cuteness. So if you're an animal that is seen by humans as cute you actually might be in for a rough ride. And the reason for that is remember that we defined earlier the cute as an aestheticization of powerlessness and vulnerability. And so it might be the case that. Sometimes when we're dealing with acute animal, like a cute dog or a cute cat, we are so mesmerized by their cuteness that we actually miss signs that they are indeed vulnerable.

That they are indeed in pain. And so we experience their vulnerability as like wonderful for us because we have these positive feelings of cuteness, but in fact, we should be intervening and trying to whatever, resolve the problem at hand. So it can be a cognitive and perceptual distraction for making a fair assessment of animal welfare.

[00:37:17] Ellie: It's like the opposite of pretty privilege, but for animals. It's like ignoring their distress because they seem too cute.

[00:37:25] David: Yeah. Like they're suffering. From cuteness, essentially. That's horrific.

[00:37:29] Ellie: They're just, they're suffering and we don't recognize it because they're, cute.

[00:37:34] David: Yeah, because we're, well, because we're just like, oh, this is so cute. Look at it. It's crying.

[00:37:39] Ellie: So they're suffering already, but then they're additionally suffering from their cuteness.

[00:37:42] David: Yeah, exactly. And another example to bring into this discussion is the fact that we know that some animals have been bred for cuteness, especially to fit that baby schema. So think about pugs and bulldogs, right?

Like with the flat face and the round head. Those dogs are called brachycephalic. Brachy means short. Cephalic means head. So they have this like flat humanoid face. And that's purely for aesthetic reasons. It's because we like that look, right? Like they have no business looking like that like normally. And the problem is that those dogs come with a lot of health problems. They come with breathing problems, eye problems, skin problems, dental issues. They suffer the vast majority of them from chronic pain,

[00:38:31] Ellie: Chronic pain? No.

[00:38:33] David: No. Like this is a really serious issue.

[00:38:35] Ellie: Oh wow.

[00:38:36] David: But because we experience them as baby, like with their flat faces and big eyes, we continue to breed them for human pleasure.

[00:38:45] Ellie: Yeah. I've certainly known a few people who have spent thousands of dollars, not only on dogs such as this, but also in keeping them well and alive and it's like, ah, I haven't really seen that go well because keeping them well and alive is very challenging. And I didn't even know there was the chronic pain part. That makes it even worse.

[00:39:06] David: Yeah. Not all of them, but many of them do have that. And it highlights the extent to which so many animals have been artificially selected rather than naturally as commodities.

[00:39:16] Ellie: I mean, it also brings this back to the Ngai.

[00:39:17] David: Yeah, exactly. And they have paid the price literally in their very. Anatomy, physiology and in their health

[00:39:27] Ellie: for the aesthetic preferences of humans.

Our student assistant, Aaron, was helping us do some research for this episode and introduced this book to us that he said, we have to discuss cute accelerationism. It is absolutely wild and the time has come to talk about it.

[00:39:51] David: Wild is the operative term in your description. This book, honestly, I would say it's unhinged a little bit and I say that in a way that I think the authors would say thank you. Like I think they would love to hear that their book is unhinged. So for our listeners, just to get a sense of what I mean by this, the book is cuteness on steroids, It's a pink book. It has a really cute, pastel pink cover with really round letters for the font, like even the letters are cute.

It has illustrations all over the place. It's extremely experimental. So the text itself, the main body of the book is only 40 pages long, but then it has 150 pages of footnotes. So it's like an inverted book, if you wanna think about it that way. And the authors describe the book as more like a hyper pop song than a scholarly text.

And honestly, I think they're right about that.

[00:40:49] Ellie: Yeah. And before we get into what Cute accelerationism is, we should briefly discuss accelerationism in case our listeners are unfamiliar. Accelerationism has a bunch of niche varieties, which we also discuss in our episode on intensity and acceleration is generally speaking.

However, you know, aside from these different varieties, think that the future is inevitably leading in a certain direction and we only need to propel it toward that direction faster and faster, whether that's toward the end of capitalism or some darker more right wing fantasy. There's a lot of accelerationist right now in the AI space.

For the authors of this book, what is that future towards which we are heading? Cuteness. The future is getting cuter.

[00:41:37] David: Cuter, and cuter and cuter. Maybe all the way to infinity. But apparently the book originally started as a bit of a joke because the authors wanted to make fun of this macho masculinity that is very clearly at work honestly in both left wing and right wing versions of Accelerationism where all these colors call for, you know, like stepping on the gas of capitalism to either reach hyper capitalism or to bring about the collapse of capital. But either way, there is this masculine obsession with speed and acceleration, and they have this really great quote in the book where they say that quote.

The future isn't sending robots to hunt us down and kill us. It's already inside us. Turning us into cute objects as we tumble inexorably toward the great asymptotic kitten outside history.

[00:42:32] Ellie: So wild.

[00:42:32] David: End quote.

[00:42:34] Ellie: So wild.

[00:42:35] David: It's so unhinged.

[00:42:36] Ellie: Yeah. And so even if it had this kind of jokey origin, it turns into this genuine book of theory with some interesting claims about cuteness.

And the key thesis in some ways resembles what Ngai says about cuteness, which is that. Our society is becoming cuter and cuter, but they have a slightly different take on that. Their claim is that we are all in this giant process of getting cuter or cuteification, and this means first and foremost, that cuteness is not a property of objects.

This is really what distinguishes their view from somebody like Ngai who talks about cuteness in terms of commodification. They argue that this is a classic metaphysical error to associate cuteness with objects, particularly as a property of them. We make this mistake when we just critique cute objects based on their aesthetic features like kitchiness. We also have an episode on that.

[00:43:33] David: Yeah, I think the best way to say it maybe is. We're not talking about cute things, we're talking about cuteification or cuteness as a phenomenon, as a thing that happens. And the way they describe this process is that it has this inherently viral quality to it. So again, cuteness is not just a property of humans or animals or toys, rather, it is a logic of contagion.

It's something that spreads by touch, essentially. So. If you think about cute things, the closer you bring them into your life, the more they infect you with their cuteness. So when you hold a baby, so if we go back to that evolutionary narrative about the baby schema, when you hold a baby that is cute you yourself start acting like a baby and you start talking in baby noises and you're like, goo goo goo goo gaga. And so the cuteness and the babyness of the baby spread to you like a virus or like a pathogen of sorts. And you also can see this, for example, with cute clothes, right? The reason that we wear cute clothes is not because we want people to perceive our clothes as cute.

We want people to perceive us as cute. And we become cute by a logic of virality or contagion. And that's cuteness, right? It's this spread.

[00:44:55] Ellie: Yeah. I actually find, I feel like my style when I am teaching is like, resolutely not cute. Like, I'm still into fashion, but I don't wanna be seen as too cute.

And then it's like. When I'm on my own time, it's like cute little mini skirt, like the boots and stuff like that. And then I don't mind being, you know, considered cute. And in fact I feel like, like recognizes like when I'm walking around in LA there's like another cute fashion girl, you know? I love that.

And the authors of this text say that you can't interact with something cute without involuntarily becoming cute yourself, as you suggested with the baby noises. So it makes it almost a kind of demonic possession. So it's not as though you encounter something cute and you think to yourself, oh wow, that's cute.

Maybe I should be more like that, right? As though I'm seeing somebody's cute socks and saying, oh, I wanna get those cute socks too. This is something slightly different.

[00:45:48] David: Yeah, no, there's something greater than the objects and the individuals involved because cuteness certainly spreads from person to person, like from a baby to an adult or from the clothes to the human. Or like, maybe I've been infected by your cuteness, Ellie, and now I'm cute by extension. Who knows?

[00:46:03] Ellie: You were already cute before.

[00:46:05] David: I already had the baby schema. I projected this.

[00:46:09] Ellie: The first time I met you, you were an adult with braces, and so you definitely, you had, you had at least like an adolescent schema.

[00:46:14] David: Yeah. Oh my God. I was not a member of your moral community because of the braces. But the book argues that aside from being this intersubjective way of affecting one another, cuteness is also this grand historical power that is accelerating over historical time. So there is a historical dimension to it as well.

And so they're kind of really serious about this idea that the asymptotic end toward which we're all heading is this like kitten outside of history, right? Like this cute object that is ultimately going to transcend all historical principles and historical periods.

[00:46:53] Ellie: Deleuze and Guattari's God is a lobster walked so that the cute accelerationist kitten could run.

[00:47:00] David: Yeah, God has Hello Kitty.

[00:47:03] Ellie: Yeah, and they introduced a historical framework to understand this acceleration that they call the three circuits of cuteness. They're described as circuits rather than as stages because they feed back into each other, but they generally map out an intensifying story of cuteness across time.

The first circuit here is nature, and that's where the baby schema, right, comes in. The evolutionary story of the baby schema that we discussed earlier. You know, somewhat randomly humans become receptive to a set of cute signs like big eyes and round cheeks and the evolutionary psychologist

[00:47:35] David: and gigantic foreheads.

[00:47:35] Ellie: Yeah. Evolutionary psychologists might say that that's not so random, but that for them is this first circuit of cuteness and I think they don't hold to the fact that there's like this. Necessary universal realizable, you know, criteria of cuteness that was evolutionarily developed. But anyway, we got this first circuit nature.

[00:47:52] David: Yeah. And so once you have that biological circuit, which is the first one, you then move to the second one for the authors, which is the market. So at some point in history, we go from perceiving the cute by virtue of our nature to producing the cute, right? Like this is where markets commodities kick in.

It connects to Ngai's theory of cuteness and aesthetics and these cute signs that now the market starts generating by its own logic. They are abstracted from biology, right? They're not reducible. It's not the same kind of cuteness as just the cuteness that was originally working at a biological level because they are intensified.

Those features are intensified in the process of capitalist production. So that's the second stage the market.

[00:48:41] Ellie: Yes. And then beyond that, we've got this final third circuit of cuteness. This is what they call the database. The database is specific to the age of cybernetics and networks. And so they argue that new communication technologies, especially the internet, change how cuteness works as an aesthetic. So we mentioned earlier, very briefly, the connection between the internet and cuteness, and this is really where they articulate that, and I think this is our place to talk about it.

Unsurprisingly, it is accelerating social media and other kinds of digital communities and platforms make the signifiers of cuteness circulate and combine in new ways even faster. And they say that E Girls and tea girls operate as an informal r and d department testing ever evermore pecan formulations on the pink market that will later enter general circulation. So we all know that tumblr girls have had a big effect on culture. But according to these theorists, they are leading to the kitten at the end of history.

[00:49:44] David: Well, and one thing that I saw in some of the research that I did is just how important the formation of new communities was in the development of a, like a new stage of cuteness historically, especially with the internet, because suddenly you could form entire communities around like. I don't know, being like a cat lady online by finding other cat ladies.

And it was a new form of subjectivity that was made possible not just by biology or the market, but specifically by what they are calling the database.

[00:50:16] Ellie: Yeah, I mean, the Cat ladies preexisted the internet, but they were able to find each other and able to create some delightful content to share with one another via the internet.

And cuteness here is not only circulated more quickly, but it's also broken down into smaller, more viral, dare we say, cuter components. And they give the example of anime and what they call moé-elements. So in Japanese, the term moé is related to cuteness and it refers to a kind of affection for anime characters.

Moé elements are the graphic elements of anime characters that can be added to make things cute. So you can just add cat ears to anything, and then you'll become cute and you can see if you take a look at the cover, I think you see some of this itself. There's like the big eyes and, and that sort of thing.

There's like a really cute little face on the cover, but they get a big list of these moé- elements and here are a few of them saggy socks, bells, fluffy tales, made, costumes a little fang. Softness, smoothness, roundness, sleepiness, shy personality. Those are some of the moé elements.

[00:51:24] David: Yeah. This is the new baby schema, but no longer tied to babies. Right. These are the new categories of the cute and well, we are now for sure living primarily in the circuit of the database as laid out in this kind of genealogy of the acute. The author suggest that there might even be a fourth circuit on the horizon, like this is the next stage of where the cute is heading in this accelerationist process, and that is cute AI.

This is where I just didn't know what to think about the book, the cute ai. And I mean, I think this is so on the nose to be honest, because cuteness is basically the aesthetic mode of AI generated art, right? Like when you think about the kind of arthat's AI generated. A lot of it really ought to be understood through the lens of the cute, so you've got the studio Ghibli filters, for example, that even Trump was using at some point.

You've got the bunnies jumping on trampolines, really random, cute AI art all over the place. And so they suggest that we might be moving now to this kind of artificial intelligence that is incurred in cuteness and taking cuteness to the next level.

[00:52:39] Ellie: Yeah. And as we discussed recently in our AI chat bots episode, AI replicates what's on the internet already to generate quote unquote new text or images. And I think one reason why we might think that AI cute is like the next frontier is actually because the stuff on the internet is already overwhelmingly cute. There's a fun anecdote about this that the authors tell.

Tim Berners-Lee, who's basically the inventor of the internet. He's credited with creating the worldwide web, HTML and URLs, among other contributions to computer science was asked, what's the one thing that's truly unpredictable that you couldn't possibly imagine was going to happen through the power of the internet? And his answer was kittens.

[00:53:28] David: What?

[00:53:31] Ellie: his answer was just kittens. And so it doesn't seem like AI cute is something new, but rather that it is the compilation of what we see already on the internet.

And that's not certainly the only thing we see already on the internet. There's a lot of darker stuff, but like the fun stuff is the cute stuff.

[00:53:48] David: Well, the funny thing about all these accelerationist rhetoric that informs this book, cute accelerationism, is that there are competing ways of describing the phenomena that's being described.

So for example, you know, like the sudden rise of kittens in online culture that he could not have predicted. They read that here as like the next stage after the market. That's the database. And then eventually we're gonna move to AI generated kittens. But still, we remain this like we retain this obsession specifically with cute kittens.

And I think you can describe that as a forward motion, like we're accelerating to new things, but you could theoretically also describe it as a backwards motion if you wanted to, because even as technology is increasing and changing and transforming itself, we as human users of computers and AI, we keep regressing to that biological evolutionary background of being fully drawn in to cute things that resemble baby faces. And so maybe it's not so much that we're moving forward, it's actually that we cannot move beyond this evolutionary heritage that presumably we carry in the form of a psychological module.

[00:55:02] Ellie: And our intellectual tendencies are just declining further and further with the anti-intellectual, neatly packaged objects, and not just objects, but processes and even identities of cuteness.

[00:55:18] David: But in all of this, there's only one saving grace, and that is Kitty White born November 1st in the UK.

[00:55:29] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

[00:55:31] David: Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended episodes, community chats, and other additional overthink content to connect with us.

[00:55:38] Ellie: To find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations to our student workers, please check out our website, overthinkpodcast.com.

[00:55:47] David: You can also check us out on YouTube as well as our TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts at Overthink_pod.

[00:55:53] Ellie: We'd like to thank our student employees, Aaron Morgan, Kristen Taylor, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene, and Yuhang Xie, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music.

[00:56:02] David: And to our listeners, thank you so much for overthinking with us.