Cute Accelerationism

by Amy Ireland, Maya B. Kronic

An impassioned philosophical celebration of the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness.Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realize that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realize that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art, Theory

232 pages, Paperback

Published May 7, 2024

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hot mess of techno-orientalism and cult theory, sometimes very enjoyable indeed and sometimes an elaborate philosophical injoke.

[Sergio Segura · Rating 3 out of 5]

High-tier shitpost. Nothing uncute makes it out of the near future.

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tiny, weird text surrounded by a massive defensive fortification of notes. Both are worth reading with some care. In what follows, I highlight a few key points in each. Overall judgment, in case you want to skip the fine print: cuteness is an equilibrium point of the systems described by the book, though the text never explores how cuteness coexists with stupefaction.

After an introduction of how the authors came to the topic and a quick etymological excursion, we arrive at the claim that cuteness is subversive: "Cute will remain cryptic so long as the phallus insists on continuing to view everything from its pushy, one-eyed perspective." Instead of a phallic topology of external and internal we find a world of flattened, sugar-coated cuddles, which "have no interiority." The text proceeds to vindicate cuteness through an odd but intoxicating series of interventions into everything from data science to biology, by way of playful twists on a vast array of Continental philosophers. If nothing else, it's charming.

The notes go into much greater detail, shedding the provocative style of a manifesto in favor of more familiar academic writing. Some of the citations are a bit dodgier than I'd like, like the alarmingly uncritical reference to Nick Land. Then again, this text never pretends to belong exclusively to the Left. The text does claim a Marxian heritage, the tradition of Lyotard's 'little girl Marx'. Unlike Marx the bearded prosecutor, little girl Marx is immersed in a market where she is "continuously structurally raped" and yearns for a more natural relationship to the world. Lyotard suggests that the two tendencies cannot be reconciled, since the longed for unalienated existence outside the market is fleeting at best. The cute accelerationists go one step further - perhaps the little girl no longer has any use for the anti-capitalist litany and finds her enjoyment in becoming a commodity. Although the market is only one of three circuits that produce cuteness, unlike biology and information technology it is the claims about the market that are most challenging to the received wisdom of the Left. The authors don't spell out the transformation of gender in conditions of financialization, so it's useful to contextualize their argument in light of theories of the autonomy of pricing.

The argument that there is something ontologically significant about finance can be traced to Elie Ayache. The claim that "money is more important than time" is a consequence of an alternative formalism where probability is defined in game theoretical rather than measure theoretical terms:

"We usually think of price after probability, and more or less identify the price of a contingent payoff with its expected value... financial markets are the real proof that random generators do not exist."

This line of thinking can be taken even further, beyond Ayache. Consider the concept of preference, a natural way of formalizing decisions and by extension markets. Compare the preferences expressed in Fordism to those we find in financialized settings. The sharpest difference emerges in the phenomenon of preference creating new markets. Fictitious capital is easily explainable in these terms. Finally, consider the role of markets in identifying equilibria. This is a clear example of the market as productive, and even autonomous rather than a mere snapshot of behavior. If the ultimate commodity is the cute woman, and her cuteness is produced by market pressures, then the dynamics of the market tell us something about cuteness.

"Cuteness induces shamelessness, which is the beginning of transformation." Insofar as cuteness is political, it is as a visceral manifestation of the autonomy of finance. If HFT could talk, it would sound adorable, like the cartoonish synths in PC Music. This is a different, more formal and less heroic politics than the Left is used to. Perhaps it is time to pay it greater attention.

[Frobisher Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this, I will never think about cuteness or 'cuteification' the same way at all. Within the power of the cute is a dark, flattening power that is shedding all greebly-grundos and transmuting what is left into datapoints within the 2D database of cuteness, to be extracted and reformed as needed. The power of mere cartoon lines to attract and command the hearts of millions is just the beginning. Image a world where the supercomputer AI is also just the cutest 'lil thing anyone has ever seen? Cute/acc is suggesting this is not just a possibility, but the main trend everything is leading to. Cute can, and should, be understood as something potentially quite scary. Or, if not scary, something that should not be underrated as merely some kind of secondary aesthetic feature seen only in frivolous pop art, or the drive to mascot-ize all of corporate consumerism's exigencies. In fact, it could be quite possible that soon, only the cute will survive.

[Borgia Barton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Went in expecting to hate this, and I think I did! But through all the instantly dated and intentionally pretentious memespeak, I have to admit there were quite a few clever sections with coherent arguments. Even still, the highlights for me (the “waifu”/object of an internet-age sexual obsession being more of a mutable archetype/database than an actual identity, for the most straightforward example) never developed anywhere past “something interesting to consider”. Not sure I would say any of the breakdowns in here amount to anything meaningful. I’m sure this book was fun to write, but it’s more of a bizarre poetry exercise that loops back around to a meaningful argument occasionally. I’m sincerely horrified at how easily I could understand the bulk of this slop at face value though - my strongest takeaway is that it’s time to get some distance from internet culture

[luzextinguido · Rating 3 out of 5]

top tier brainrot, smol/shy acceleration, nothing to complain, omw to flatmaxxx

[Esther]

Simultaneously a god-tier shitpost and the most earnest work of theory I’ve ever read.

[Jo]

denne boka ga ikke mening for meg. Jeg frastår å gi den en vurdering

[sim s · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the scholarship present there is something like a key to j-culture and the global cyberspace inseparable from its influence. What mjaow's little dittle pink makes of cute seems solid to me. But what does the text actually say beyond these endnotes? So little that its more productive to look at what it doesn't, or where it rails off. (The production-of-nature mod doesn't work, let's just leave trendlines to empiricism for now).

It overestimates the subversivity in culture, and follows a long lineage of valorization of commodity phenomenas for their perceived subversive power. Because the affinities of the writers attest to such effects, because it feels good ( -to cute about while on ethico-metaphysical solid ground), and because no-one has a longer view of radical politics anymore. The triumphant current of this ambiguous prophetizing of accelleration is thus uninterested in destructive effects, and is incapable of articulating positive biopolitics outside the vorticle. What is actually wrong with the Last Man in his Outpost? Isn't his isolation already a delink from the Enemy, the overcoding?

It's not a shitpost (malmö syndies: heller enn utforskende, den er en stripet tese, forøvrig - takk), comments on the text's form simply sense faults in a tract that wants to be serious. Unintelligibility masking identity markers. It's just too busy as a signifying machine, marking the ins and outs, hiding behind playfulness (would be better if they dropped mille plateaux from the start). What other than in-signifying writing allows for such screed against the detractors? The authors are g-e-n-u-i-n-e-l-y getting off when constructing their cosmo-reader. Cute goes into the circuitry, but when it's research subsedes for the desire of conflict and marking territory, why shouldn't we presume the same to apply globally? Here I am, mind flooded with great, new perspectives on cute and digiculture, yet pursuing an unrelated hangup. Conflict/acc over cute/acc, Girard wins out. cyberfascism and Thielgoebbels. Instead of pink blobs, Swans.

[Joey Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

One person’s theory is another’s praxis.

This book is basically an engineering manual for being annoying and is full of elaborate in-jokes that aren’t exactly “in” in any meaningful sense. This is because cute defies interiority. It is a smooth pink blob filled with jelly dotted by large eyes and a lil smirk. It’s all surface baby. It’s all sweet. A sweet surface covered in powdered sugar because granulated sugar was just not cute enough.

One thing I was surprised by was how cute the book was. When I bought it, I thought it would be much larger in size, but it is barely the size of my hand (which is also tiny). It’s not even 50 pages of actual content, and the majority of the book is the notes which I have not read except to check some of their sources. No I did not look at the page count before purchasing, no I didn’t look at the dimensions, no I actually already own a maid outfit and cat ears. This book is an accessory at best, and it is a cute one at that.

One of the few things I actually learned was that ‘cute’ comes from a shortening of “acute” which was used to mean “smart and sassy.” If you have actually read the relevantly cited literature, you probably are already there, bubbling profundities from the cosmic boba tea to your surface. How sweet.

One of the more interesting things is that if you are actually interested in cuteness as a transformative cultural practice, this book is ultimately meaningless bc you were too eepy to actually read it.

But for those who are interested in reading it and have the relevant background in continental philosophy, it’s absolutely not awful, but it is awwwfully fun, light, trivial and sweet :)

I made you a review but I eated it :(

[vr reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

get booped by the transcendental circuitry of cute. a flatmaxxed accelerationism that's also heckin smol and a little shy.

read this to your cats.

[Er Yáñez · Rating 4 out of 5]

no sé si pueda describir esta experiencia

[Violeta Gómez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plantea conceptos muy interesantes para reclamar el aceleracionismo de la ultra derecha reaccionaria y de la izquierda anquilosada. Con un lenguaje muy chronically online, entiende las dinámicas de la identidad sublimada en esta era disuelta en flujos de caos post internet, post verdad, post democracia, post género, post capitalismo.

[effie allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

i feel like i've always resisted cuteness. this book explores it in strange directions-- particularly interesting was this sort of idea of cuteness as melting both identity and shame in favor of submission to the illogical cute which both fuels and is in a way divorced from the forces that drive capitalism/patriarchy. entangles cuteness with facets of life i hadn't previously imagined. i feel like this sort of ultracute ultragirly-postgirl philosophy is kinda the future 💖

[mewmewmew]

why does the left eat this stuff up? sure, let’s embrace the subjectivities spawned by our interactions with capitalist algorithms and machines—without a shred of self-critique or boundaries. It’s like maya and amy are sneakily cheering for all of land’s delusions while pretending otherwise. a kawaii facade for what’s basically surrender.

[Maty Candelaria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cuteness is not the “thing-itself” but a process of cutificatuon. Surrender to the process. Become squishy.

“Nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human” (41).

[a____ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cute cannot be resisted by reason or understanding.

[renato · Rating 4 out of 5]

a smol glazy smooth surface protected by notes upon notes. if cute means regression to a simpler form let us return monkee

[Catarina Lopes · Rating 5 out of 5]

idk it was pretty cute ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡

[Josh L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some quotes:

"The skirtz gradient descends through a dense jungle of forking tributaries and unfolding vistas that never even offer the occasion to stop and look downriver at Man. Or, if so, only to see a pile of dust, since Man amounted to nothing more than desperately trying to stop anything from happening."

"Sweet Saint-Hilaire understands the plane of composition of nature machinically—in terms of materials and their connections, not organs and their functions. There are no rigid sealed compartments, no aborifying branches, as in Cuvier, who traces his map of nature from the 'empirical distribution of differences and resemblances.' According to Geoffroy's subtle and humorous diagram, all models of the animal are solutions to 'relations between differential elements', quasibiological particles beyond anything even the keenest microscope can discern...animal bodies are material results of the reciprocal determination of virtual, refunctionable organisational abstracta."

"Cute runs a tangent to sex (or tangentialises it), travelling near but always passing alongside."

"All is folding, becoming, production, construction, contagion, performance. And there is no freedom or exit from the process, only greater or lesser counteractualisations (the actual is the brake)—agonising, euphoric withdrawals from the drabness of the present-being to which you were allotted, awakenings, transformations, and infoldings, therio-typical swerves, 'strains and displacements which mobilise and compromise the whole body','systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them.'"

"Cute is not a cute thing; cute objects may be trivial but cuting is not; the error consists in mistaking the product for the process."

There are indeed 'stationary', 'dead', 'passive' commodity objects. As it moves, any process of cultural intensification deposits in its path a cooling crust of inert overproduction. But Cute arrested, placed on the shelf and seen from a distance, can only be a parodic residue of stalled participation in the process: a clinical cutie 'produced as an entirely separate and independent entity.' No-one ever glomped a funkopop. Understanding Cute in terms of existing objects, ownership, and power, rather than as a transformative force that runs through subjects and objects, the critic satisfies their suspicions by ending up exactly where they started."

"The productive forces of human sexuality greatly overflow the role they may play in reproductive function, fuelling acceleration and differentiation rather than supporting repetition of the same, especially when hyperplasticised and supernormalised. Therefore positive investment in the future cannot be the sole preserve of a 'reproductive futurism' that seeks a redemptive horizon in the reassurance of biological posterity. Such a conservative monopoly on futurity in the name of reproductive patrimony need not be mirrored in negative by a 'no-futurism' on the part of the queer lives it oppresses, nor countenanced by the parents of the children it consecrates, who—as will be the case for perhaps a few generations more—have only delivered fresh bio-environments for memetic mutation, technohormonal experimentation, cute surrogacy, and AI pollination. Parents are not organisers, they are merely stimuli, inducers...The rug rats are not interested in reiterating the sociohistorical infrastructure of Man. And then the ecto-uterine escape pods arrive."

"To those lost in melancholic nostalgia for the good old days when only Nature was natural and reality was the only Real, those who see in all of this nothing but incorrigible decadence, those who lack the fortitude and creativity of the moé otaku, whose experiments have opened up whole new terrains of desire—do not forget that it was this same feedback loop that coded the 'natural' drives in the first place...Animals evolve in adaptive responsiveness to their environments, so that their physiology, behaviour, and perception correlate with and correspond to changes in those environments. This is the basic programmability of nature, and nature is programmable because it is elastic—there is always a mutant surplus that ensures the contingency of every adaptation."

" From one point of view, erring is simply what evolution does, and this errancy suggests neither a dead end nor an empty space, but terra incognita, boasting an entire variegated landscape of untapped virtual affect. What from the perspective of an evolutionary psychologist constitutes a mating error, for the consumers of manga and anime culture becomes a productive process in which there are no preconstituted subjects to be led astray, just a concatenation of partial objects and drives, configurations of sensations—textures, intensities, aesthetics, and vibes."

[Jay Bennett · Rating 1 out of 5]

It starts with a genuinely intriguing premise: that cuteness can be pried away from its evolutionary reproductive function. That’s solid theory material which realistically could have been a study in its own right about how cultural vectors hijack biological drives (like Baudrillard’s “sign-value” consuming use-value).

Hell even the vector of humour being used to disguise real beliefs as simple cute shitposts is thoroughly disgusting.

instead of staying in an analytical register, the book turns into a confessional/theoretical shield for a very specific demographic, online MTF subcultures. who want their pathology wrapped in philosophical legitimacy.
I’ve outlined several major problems I have with this work below.


• The Marxian gesture without Marxist teeth: They’ll name-drop Marx but won’t interrogate how capital mass-produces cuteness (Hello Kitty, VTubers, infantilised idols) precisely as a tool of depoliticisation and consumption. If you actually pushed Marxist analysis, you’d end up talking about how “cuteness” itself is a fetish commodity, not liberation.

• Total silence on pedophilia and commodified childhood: not even attempting to explore this is glaring weakness. To decouple cuteness from biology without looking at how global elites weaponise infantilisation (pedophile scandals, sexualisation of minors, media cycles of teen idols, capitalist “forever-child” aesthetics) is intellectual cowardice. Even if the authors were to simply say “and that’s a good thing” it would be more intellectual honest and brave than simply ignoring how capitalism propagates pedophillia through cuteness aesthetics and infantilisation. By dismissing evolutionary psych’s role outright, the book neuters its own capacity to talk about the most dangerous intersections of cuteness, power, and desire.

• Contradictory moralising about Eros: They want cuteness to be asexual aesthetic praxis, while simultaneously insisting it’s infused with Eros and only truly grasped by those who “embrace” it. To me that signifies that the whole project is fetish denial disguised as philosophy.

• From theory to transhumanist catechism: By the later chapters, the book isn’t about cuteness anymore. It mutates into a justification of dysphoria-as-aspiration. Positioning gender dysphoria as not something to treat, but something to universalise. The endgame of this sentiment was stated to be a collapse of what it means to be human. And as humanity collapses into a body-as-plastic resource, capitalist commodities (surgery, hormones, cosmetic products, prosthetics) become the real drivers of “becoming-cute.” The book positions a Marxian system while being fully unable understand the integral elements of cute-capital and how unattainable cosmetic disfiguring of the human form is without it. Nor does it understand or even attempt to explore the wholescale incorporation of cuteness into financial capital despite acknowledging that entire countries are propped up by it.



What They Could Have Addressed

If it wanted to be rigorous, the book should have confronted:
• Cuteness as capitalist overreach: Commodification of childhood and sterilisation of reproductive drives dovetail with consumerism and falling birth rates.

• Cuteness + pedophilia: How infantilisation culture provides cover for predatory systems.

• Cuteness as discipline: Not liberation, but a form of social control. Your “magical girl” uniform isn’t emancipation t’s another marketable, consumable identity.

• Feminist angle: How cuteness locks women (and increasingly men) into scripts of docility, infantilisation, and self-erasure. Instead, they wrote it as if cuteness is a secret knowledge that only trans bodies can unlock.



So, what you’re left with is not a book about cuteness or capital at all. This book is closer to a Trojan horse. The theory gets discarded after a few chapters, and what’s smuggled in is a sermon of body-dysmorphic utopianism, using “cuteness” as a sugar coating.

[Tvrtko Balić · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. First of all, I just like Amy Ireland's style, it seems like she is one of those people where even if I don't understand or agree with her I can at least "vibe" with the text. But then the text itself is at parts either full of great insight or it is a great shitpost or it is an insane celebration of cuteness which is treated as a demonic force or a pagan god which is worshiped in this book. All of that is great. But there is also a deeper point here. The concept of cuteness is used to explore accelerationism in a new and yet old way. The concept has basically become a meme, watered down and mixed with various ideologies. The concept of cuteness explored here is connected with Deleuzian concepts, feminist ideas etc. This means that the book is not just explaining cuteness through accelerationism, but also accelerationism through cuteness, using the approach to bring back accelerationism to some of the philosophy that gave birth to it in the 90s. Other aspects of the book can be viewed in a similar way. In the 90s the CCRU was obsessed with the Internet. The meme language of the book that make it a kind of a shitpost does risk making it dated fast, but it also brings the spirit of the 90s closer to home by making itself obsessed with today's Internet just as the CCRU was obsessed with Internet and different trends of their own day which later seem dated or a miss. And of course there was the Lovecraftian aspect of the CCRU where it treated its work as a way of summoning demonic forces and eldritch gods. And this aspect is brought to new light with the devotional nature of the book where it seems like the worship of cuteness. Only instead of images of Cthulhu and Skynet it presents an aspect of the Internet which seems very innocent, but which seduces countless people and is thus extremely powerful and frightening in its own right while also always being present, even before the Internet. And if all of that doesn't convince you to check this book out at least for shits and giggles, I am also going to point out that it is a lot shorter than I expected it to be. It is about 50 pages of text and then more than twice as much notes and then there's the bibliography and references. So give it a try, you can just breeze through it and then go back if something catches your interest.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard the podcast that the authors did with Taylor Adkins and Cooper Cherry on the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour, and immediately bought the book (https://www.urbanomic.com/book/cute-a... ). Now that I have read it (it traveled to Europe and back with me, but I was more interested in movies than reading on the flight), I am truly delighted, all the more so since the book connects with some recently revived (generous for myself) interests in the Warwick/Nick Land form of accelerationism. First, this book as the 'Bobbliography' to live for! Next, its chapter titles may somehow be familiar to a reader somewhat familiar with 'A Thousand Plateaus'. Next, the authors do a thor0ughly remarkable dive into Deleuze and Guattari's thought, together and separately.

But what is 'cute'. Here are some cogent excerpts: 'the predominant accounts of cuteness understand it in terms of cute object, or power differentials between subject and objects, rather than an as-yet-unknown problematic X for which objects and subject are vehicles or conduits. Cute is not a cute thing; cute objects may be trivial but cuting is not; the error consists in mistaking the product for the process' (42). And what is this process? 'The principal methodological decision of this book is to regard Cute as a virtual idea or a problem which humanity has stumbled upon and which it is gradualy feeling out, but which is irreducible to what humans might make of it at any given moment, refractory to the objects that might be produced in the wake of their fumbling relations with it. More precisely, the "Cute process" is the interference pattern between the human sensorium and some Thing (Cute "itself") that is complex, consistent and attractive, and which is undoing us to the extent that we refine our access to it'. 'Cute', eh?

[Daisy]

This book is like, 20% strange Internet manifesto about voluntary surrender to postmodern anti-meaning, and 80% assorted footnotes about eggs.

I've never thought of cute as "anticlimactic" before, but it has the ring of truth to it. Definitely one of the weirdest books I've read this year (and I've read a lot), and challenging to my tendency to take things very seriously. This book feels very meta in taking its own topic with serious academic rigor, but still not taking itself too seriously. Cuteness has a way of collapsing everything into irrelevance, whether it's gender binaries or the purpose of sex decoupled from reproduction, and that is a vision of the future that I have been ignoring because I have mistaken the desire to be taken seriously with the desire to see the truth. And the search for truth is so much weirder (and, at times, deeply humbling) than anyone expects it to be. We want to believe that we're too cool to be cute, but "cool" is detachment, and cuteness is excessive, desperate attachment that is unsubtle and deeply uncool... but also far truer to the core of our human experience.

[Corentin Xa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but intense book. More than half are annotations. I understood only 40% I think. My takeaways are that cute is a new phenomenon (there was no cute 100 years ago), it's spreading akin to a virus (acceleration) and it throws out a lot of the ways of the world: politics, status, capital, deep thoughts, social norms, and anything uncute. It's also about desire but not sex. It's regressive, but regression is desirable for society, it's re-imagination. Cute signals unseriousness. Cute triggers aggression and caretaking at the same time, disarming and creating strong feelings, overstimulated then frustrated desires.
Interesting quote "What does it mean to love a database?" where the database is elements of cuteness.

[⏺ · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those contemporary phil books where language is so overwrought that the writing is an excercise in braggadocio. In this case, it kind of works though, the playfulness and chaos goes hand in hand with the theme, and for once being chronically online helped me get it better. The text proper is a joy to read and very stimulating (even if I can't comment on how much of it is actually thoughtful thinking rather than just jest, or is there no difference?) – the notes less so, I wish they had been reworked into an essay with thematic paragraphs, which would have been more accessible and easier to follow.

[jiik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure I understood it. It frequently references Deleuze and Guattari's "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" which I haven't read. I think it's discussing "cuteness" as a response to postmodernism and the postmodern society of late capitalism, where instead of fighting against it with tradition or religion, you give in and give up to anime, porn, "nyaa~"-ing, gender transition(?), and cute animals.

[Isa Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had a lot of potential to speak to the community it was addressing. It totally missed that opportunity and chose to be ultra niche and honestly unoriginal in its copy and past D&G references (I enjoy D&G, but I’d like to hear the authors voices outside their constant D&G references and ironic writing style). This should have been an internet article.

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

You will never be cute and you only have yourself to blame. You are too slow and it is already too late. The stars beyond the horizon recede far faster than you could ever try to chase them. They are forever beyond your reach, reduced to the flat contour of the limit, that virtual 2-sphere in which all tragic desires live.

[Fey · Rating 5 out of 5]

learnt alot about moeself tysm 🩷
I am an aegyolk evolving through market principles
I simultaneously gobble up and spawn kawaii in an anticlimactic shoujo-stage-stuck cycle
my future is flatmaxxing 🫡