29
Yes, Kids, Cookie Monster is a Psyop (squamuglia.wordpress.com)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by mechwarrior2@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

Sesame Street was created by veteran officers of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Office with the goal of blunting the force of social-justice radicalism in the United States by promoting the liberal ideology that oppression not a structural economic injustice, but a matter of poor individual character or bad social skills. In a 1970’s state-directed project to determine how humans establish cathexis with military hardware, computer engineer Alan Kay leveraged the graphical capabilities of highly-advanced prototype personal computers to display animations of one of Sesame Street’s most popular characters, Cookie Monster, because he felt this would help children see personal computers not as technological artifacts derived from Air Force weapons, but as friendly and even “magical” helpers in their lives.

Kay, who developed the PARC Alto computer and Smalltalk programming language concurrently with Xerox funding the creation of Sesame Street, 
is very clear about this in his “Early History of Smalltalk.” Building the Sesame Street characters in to the design of the Alto’s user 
interface was an evolutionary step in ARPA’s 20 year study on “Human-Computer Symbiosis.”

all 14 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thought classes in OOP were conceptually very similar to Plato's forms. Also, apparently OOP is bourgeois, as if I didn't have enough reasons to hate it.

[-] enkifish@hexbear.net 11 points 8 months ago

Long live the lambda-calculus of the proletariat

[-] CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 8 months ago

Does this mean procedural programming is feudal?

[-] casskaydee@hexbear.net 5 points 8 months ago

GOTO considered reactionary

[-] plinky@hexbear.net 2 points 8 months ago

Could it not be called fordist as well? thonk-cri

[-] WithoutFurtherBelay@hexbear.net 5 points 8 months ago

implying Godot is bourgoisie

Ok, I’m sorry, we’re going to have to purge you

[-] SkingradGuard@hexbear.net 2 points 8 months ago

All software is bourgeois. Programmers are all reactionary.

Sorry I don't make up the rules stalin-shining

[-] D61@hexbear.net 9 points 8 months ago

I rate this a 5 out of 10 on the black-mold-futures scale.

[-] plinky@hexbear.net 6 points 8 months ago

I feel like this assigns more motive than it is just self perpetuation of the systems

[-] Great_Leader_Is_Dead@hexbear.net 3 points 8 months ago

Cookie Monster is a psyop by Nabisco to sell more cookies

[-] WithoutFurtherBelay@hexbear.net 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

what the actual fuck i feel sick, programming janky oop code was my lasts refuge from this cold, dark world how could you do this to me /j

this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
29 points (100.0% liked)

chapotraphouse

13465 readers
936 users here now

Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.

No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer

Vaush posts go in the_dunk_tank

Dunk posts in general go in the_dunk_tank, not here

Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from the_dunk_tank

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS