Future Cat Lady

The argument Pinto makes is that the story and the doll normalize 24-hour surveillance in the mind of a child, which makes them susceptible to more passively accept police-state surveillance as adults.

“I don’t think the elf is a conspiracy and I realize we’re talking about a toy,” Pinto told The Post. “It sounds humorous, but we argue that if a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted.”

It’s based in a theory that was developed by Jeremy Bentham and popularized by Michel Foucault in which students, prisoners, factory workers and others were thought to function better (for whatever value of better) in a system called a panopticon, in which an individual is potentially under surveillance 24-hours a day, but never actually KNOWS whether or not he or she is being surveilled. 

Pinto said she’s not the first person to be troubled by Elf on the Shelf’s surveilling. She’s said parents routinely contact her to say they changed the rules of the game after it made their families uneasy. And many kids, she said, often intuitively feel like spying and being a tattletale is wrong.

“A mom e-mailed me and told me that the first day they read the elf book and put the elf out, her daughter woke up crying because she was being watched by the elf,” Pinto recounted. “They changed the game so it wouldn’t scare the child.”

In addition to the problem of normalizing surveillance in the mind of a child, this also forces the child into a situation where they never feel like they are free to simply be themselves; they are forced to be “on their best behavior” at all times, unable to relax and make mistakes and do the job of growing up and being a child, because they never know if the elf is spying on them, ready and waiting to report back to Santa Claus that they’ve been bad.

the creators of this monstrosity are exactly what you would expect

So instead of writing the essay this is exactly what I'm talking about. This shit reduces your capacity for empathy. If you can't understand why people are hurt by a simple joke, nay, think that's the whole point... How the hell are you supposed to feel for someone when they come to you complaining of ACTUAL oppression? It's the foot in the door phenomenon. A little oppression isn't too bad, cuz it's funny, right? It hardens your heart against others

Somebody actually wrote this essay already. It's a Twitter thread about how the alt right recruits teenage boys by getting them to post slightly offensive memes... And then when they get called out and don't understand why the alt right channels their anger at feminists and women and people of color and liberals. According to this thread, boys are being "set up"

Read the whole thread at the link above this is just a snip

Forget-Me-Nots  -    Karoliina Hellberg: , 2017

Finnish, b.1987-