Way back in 2020, following a brief exchange on the topic, Minority Report commissioned philosophers Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic to contribute a short text on the subject of cuteness. Over the months and then years to come, the deadline for this piece was pushed back repeatedly. Amy wrote to say they were beginning to doubt their level of control over it. It had “grown into a total beast,” and no deadline could be promised for their cute investigations. The min2.report commission took up permanent residence on the backburner. But the years of cutological research it had prompted eventually coalesced into a compact philosophical machine, a book as terminally cute as its problem: Cute Accelerationism (2024).
In this conversation with Günseli Yalcinkaya—their first interview about the book, conducted in November 2023 and previously unpublished—the authors discuss being demonically possessed by Cute, superficial philosophy, 2.5D culture, alien signals, and the bedroom as the control room for digital transformation. The accompanying instructional video, produced exclusively for Minority Report, charts the explosive acceleration of cuteness across the multiple circuits explored in Cute Accelerationism.
True to form, cute/acc couldn’t resist folding back into the circuit that set it in motion.
Günseli Yalcinkaya: How would you describe cute accelerationism?
Maya B. Kronic: If we use “acceleration” to describe the technological developments that are changing our conception of social interaction and what it means to be human, deranging our preconceived ideas, disrupting all attempts to consolidate tradition, identity, and recognisable social formations, then accelerationism is the idea that, rather than try to react against them, resist or decry them, we should welcome them as an adventure—especially in relation to the dissolution of what we call the human, since “human” itself has throughout history generally served as an exclusionary and reactive category. Accelerationism recommends participation in those elements of capitalist culture in which these vectors of mutation and intensification are most concentrated.
Amy Ireland: Deleuze and Guattari suggest that capitalism has two sides: one is the destructive aspect that systematically melts everything down and gets rid of old conventions and forms of organisation, and the other is the recuperative side, which gathers up all the bits and pieces the destructive side has blown apart and organises them into new forms that can be profited from. They argue that most of the methods we come up with for “resisting” capitalism actually operate in a way that reprise (in complex and not always evident ways) capitalism’s recuperative mechanisms, which is to say that “resistance” against capitalism is already built into capitalism’s operational logic. Accelerationism takes a different approach by identifying—and identifying with—that aspect of capitalism that rearranges matter and destroys conventions and codes.
MBK: It occurred to us at a certain point that cuteness was a prominent accelerating or intensifying vector, one of the things that’s altering our understanding of and relation to ourselves and to each other—our desires, our identities, our interactions, subjectivity, sexuality… Hence cute accelerationism. But we see Cute as a problem, an alien signal that humans have stumbled across, a vanishing point that we’re travelling towards.
AI: Which is to say, you have to understand it anastrophically. It rewrites what made it happen, backwards.
MBK: A convergent dynamic, something that will only make sense from the future. But we’re not at that point yet, we’re still just flirting with this thing called Cute. What we can do is to try to probe with some precision into cute phenomena and attempt to isolate the abstract qualities that are constitutive of it.
GY: It seems as if the problem of cuteness imposed itself on you, rather than you choosing it.
AI: Problems involve themselves in your life. Whether you like it or not, they demand your participation, and the philosophy they produce arises from the ordeal of living them. It’s a very different kind of operation to standing outside of something and coolly analysing it. You have to give in and let the problem take you where it wants.
MBK: In its content and form, the book exhibits a helpless absorption into Cute. To be objective about Cute is to fail to grasp it as a process. Cute messes up the barrier between subjects and objects, between wanting something and wanting to become something. This is evident on social media: today desire has become inextricably entangled with the ability to produce oneself as an image, to refine oneself into something that will play well on the available platforms. This in turn affects your perception of yourself. Making yourself cute is one of the ways in which this feedback loop starts to escape any regard for the “natural” or received notions of what’s real or what’s human and what’s not.
We also wrote the book against a certain moralistic legacy to do with identity and self-presentation: as we say, “cuteness begins with shamelessness, and shamelessness is the beginning of transformation.” We want to affirm that as something significant: it’s not just a “social media plague,” or, if so, let’s look at it from the virus’s point of view. Cute/acc is a big Fuck You to the “adult” judgement on contemporary extremely online culture, which is that it is merely trivial and superficial: you can’t change nature, you can’t change what gender is, you can’t change the type of person you are or choose an identity that doesn’t belong to the timeless default categories, social media isn’t real, you’re living in a fantasy world… But increasingly, collectivities of weird, shameless, online entities operating transformations on themselves are what is driving culture, and this in turn is fuelling the production of more technologically powerful ways of altering ourselves.
AI: Which is why we think Cute is an accelerationist vector. What else is going to drive the demand to build tools to change nature?
MBK: Cuteposting may only be a placeholder for forms of plasticity that are more difficult to achieve but its agency in the world is real and plays a part in enabling communities, techniques, and means for further transformations.
AI: There’s a big section on anime in the text because it’s been a longtime feature of manga and anime culture that there is not just a one-way relationship between products and the people consuming the products. Anime culture is synonymous with a consumer/producer loop—one that is deeply encoded in its language, formats, and conventions. Maybe you become obsessed with a character and that motivates you to start making your own doujinshi or maybe cosplaying, i.e. producing new products that other people then consume, remix, and make available to you to consume and remix, etc. When manga and anime culture got a lot of bad press in Japan during the 90s and early 2000s, a Japanese psychoanalyst named Saitō Tamaki made some compelling arguments in defence of its particular way of navigating and producing realities. In particular, he defends people with a “2D complex” or people who have anime girlfriends or boyfriends. This might seem to be the extreme of not being “in touch with reality,” but Saito argues that such a reading, which casts these relationships as pathological, relies on an interpretation of the relationship between reality and fiction that is at odds with what is actually happening in anime culture. Rather than a dysfunctional projection of “real” but unattainable desires into a “fake” fantasy world where they can be fulfilled, anime culture reads “reality” as just another kind of fiction, and operates with an evolved understanding of levels of fictionality that use fiction to produce new realities. It’s not irrelevant that the word for “normie” in Japanese means something like “person who is too hung up on reality.” You’ve got the 2D world of the characters, the 3D world of people who are living in normie “reality,” and then there’s the 2.5D, which is where these institutions and ideas from the 2D world get transposed into and combined with the 3D. Anyone who is online in any capacity today knows that this is the paradigm we are in now.
So anime is a really important site for exploring one of Cute’s key circuits: the circuit between the “real” world and the “fictional” world, where reality becomes immanent to fiction.
MBK: Today we’re seeing 2D fashion as well—pixelated garments, the big red boots. Flat reality is feeding back into the 3D world, creating a 2.5D culture.
GY: Isn’t it the case that cuteness can be something that is extremely innocent but can also harbour a certain violence, and can also be used for manipulative purposes?
MBK: We’re trying to crack open the Cute process at its most abstract level, and pare away the crust of object-residues it carries with it. Increasingly refined and extreme versions of cuteness appear on the cut(t)ing edge, while at the same time, spraying out on all sides, there’s a tonne of bullshit landfill-cute products, not particularly interesting cute plushies, plastic toys, desultory corporate mascots, and so on. All of that is just getting shot out the back of the rocket as it speeds towards Cute singularity. The objects are not the same thing as the process.
Yes, it’s obvious that humans can use cuteness in the same cynical and exploitative ways that humans tend to use anything. What is more significant and more novel is when Cute uses humans, makes them do things that they didn’t know they wanted to do. We see controlled, instrumentalised cuteness as an arrested, failed form of Cute.
AI: It can be weaponised. It can be completely benign. The interesting thing is that it can appear at all of these extremes.
MBK: Any one-sided reading of Cute is likely to fail, because Cute is inherently paradoxical or oxymoronic. “Cute aggression,” for example, is also a kind of surrender. This paradoxical or oxymoronic quality comes out most explicitly when we talk about eating, and the relation between Cute and vore.
AI: It’s also connected to its temporality. Cuteness is about the protraction or suspension of an anticipated consequence: you can snuggle it, you can slide infinitely across its surface, but you can’t penetrate it. Cute has no interior, there’s no way to get inside to find out what it’s really about, or to arrive via cuteness at some kind of ending or climax. It encapsulates a form of desire that has no resolution. We quote Mark Fisher and Sadie Plant in the text: they both talk about the way that orgasm is perceived in terms of gender politics. This comes from Luce Irigaray, the idea that trying to get to the goal of orgasm, to be oriented toward a preconceived result, typifies a masculine relationship to desire in a metaphorical way as well as in terms of actual sexual intimacy. The feminine version of it is more about generating intensity without worrying about the goal. And this non-teleological relationship to desire is much more risky and transformative. It’s building up the level and sustaining it. Or following a compulsion without knowing where it’s going to take you in advance. Cuteness brings these paradoxical impulses into play, like aggression and nurturing, because they counteract and regulate one another in a way that staves off resolution and sustains the kind of intensity that engenders transformations.
GY: What do you think is the driving force behind Cute?
MBK: We talk about it in terms of a series of circuits which intensify and refine Cute. The first circuit consists of the evolutionary developments that produce a very acute response to certain proportions and features—what the ethologist Konrad Lorenz identified as the Kindschenschema, one of the triggers that his colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen showed was subject to “supernormalisation.” The second circuit is capitalism, where you have a production regime that is like a kind of distributed ethological experiment in supernormalisation. It builds more and more artificially tweaked versions of cute, and therefore the range of response to them is also heightened beyond anything that could have occurred in the natural world, which builds more demand, and so on. And then what we call the “third circuit” is an assemblage in which yet more acute forms of cuteness are constructed on a smaller scale by small collectivities removed from macroeconomic pressures. Here cuteness is refined and accelerated by fan groups, moé addicts, influencers, memes, and so on, in cycles that operate tighter and quicker than the consumer market. It comes from small collectives who latch on to an idea and accelerate it, tweak it, make it more and more acute, and then it leaks back into the second circuit—into capitalism at large.
We also speculate about a fourth circuit, where AI will produce forms of cuteness that are beyond anything we can possibly imagine. Or, from another perspective, perhaps we could say that we are making ourselves cute for the algorithm, that its demands are leading us to transform ourselves into cuties, just as cats’ and dogs’ interaction with humans altered them into new, cuter forms. This AI-Cute interaction will feed back to the third circuit and then back into the second circuit. And all of it will feed back eventually into the first circuit—into nature—and change nature, as we begin to anatomically, hormonally, genetically engineer ourselves, along with cute critters with AI implants so they can talk to us; and maybe we’ll start to fall in love with them too.
AI: What keeps it moving is an aversion to hitting a state of equilibrium in each respective domain, because this stabilises and codifies production, and neutralises the transformative aspect of Cute.
This is all detailed in the diagram at the end of the book. We see it as part of an unfolding historical process where it moves through all of these different domains. It starts in the biological domain as something that is tied to evolution. It hits a point of stability, and then it has to move out of that and find a new sphere to keep building itself, which is where you get it starting to coincide with commodity culture and consumerism and especially the female consumer. And then the circuit jumps over to the world of social media and digital technology, decentralisation. Cute has an aversion to the sort of equilibrium point in the market where its metabolisation by the market actually stops it from finding new ways to develop. Then it moves on to the third circuit, which we called the schizo database, based on Hiroki Azuma’s theory of the database of moe elements in his book Otaku. Obviously, when it hits another stalling point, it’s going to jump over into a new circuit.
MBK: Perhaps the latest acceleration of Cute also has some relation to COVID lockdown, when so many people were able to withdraw, experiment with what they wanted to be, away from the eyes of others—and when also their relationships were increasingly conducted through social media and through the presentation of images of themselves. At home in your pyjamas with your cat scrolling Instagram all day every day for a year, it’s bound to have some kind of effect (can confirm).
AI: It’s definitely connected to the bedroom. When you’re a teenager, or living in a sharehouse situation, the bedroom is your space in the house and that’s where you do all your stuff. It’s the epicentre of contemporary digital cultural production. There’s a hikikomori neocities blog called Artificial Night Sky that has the perfect phrase, the “Endless Bedroom Dimension.”
MBK: Celebrating the bedroom as a site of production is an affirmation against the whole edifice of moral judgement of “You’re just doing trivial silly things in your bedroom, it doesn’t have anything to do with reality.” No, actually the bedroom is the control room, a roving mega-starship that opens up an infinite new dimension. One of the writers who has had the strongest influence on me is J.G. Ballard, who saw that the important zone for science fiction isn’t outer space, it’s inner space. And the bedroom is the construction site for inner space. That insight forms part of a broader reflection on contemporary technology: When we look at the contemporary scene, who do we think were the most prescient thinkers about the future of the technology-culture complex? I’d say Andy Warhol over Arthur C. Clarke, J.G. Ballard over Star Wars, inner space over outer space, terminally online cute girls over corporate visionaries and think tanks, the bedroom over the boardroom.
GY: I love the way that you both use writing. Taking all these very heavy ideas and distilling them in such a way that’s genuinely accessible but also, if you are philosophy-coded, then you can look deeper into the ideas.
MBK: A certain humour emerges out of trying to talk about these things with the weighty tools of philosophy, but at the same time it’s never less than serious, firstly because there’s no distance between us and the thing we’re talking about. That level of engagement actually was our guarantee that, however frivolous it might have seemed, we were writing about things that actually mattered.
AI: It’s an incarnation of the dynamic that is intrinsic to Cute: you can’t interact with a cute object without yourself becoming cute. In order for it to be really doing what it’s saying, which is participating in the problem of Cute, it had to also be a cute text. And the actual physical book is really cute too. One of the reasons we go crazy in the notes is because we wanted to make it both smol and thicc—a small but slim book isn’t cute. Is this a bimbofication of philosophy? Maybe philosophy doesn’t allow itself to be superficial enough?
MBK: There is an extreme density of little clues planted everywhere in the text. The alert reader will pick up on them and, even if they don’t immediately get it, will hopefully want to pursue some of them. In that sense we were aspiring to produce the kind of writing that had stimulated us and made us want to read more and to write—not books that explained philosophy clearly, but dense, convoluted, bizarre books like A Thousand Plateaus, to which Cute Accelerationism is a sort of twisted homage. There was also a more straightforward reason for the book having a lot of detailed footnotes, which was that we ourselves were trying to work out what exactly we had written.
AI: Yeah, we kind of started writing this thing before we really understood what it was or what was happening. Cute was a problem that we were both really living. We are being entirely serious in the book when we talk about demonic possession, because it was a bit like that, for real.