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