The interesting is a moving target, tracking along with the difference between norms and anomalies.

Cuteness lacks beauty’s novelty, singularity, and untouchability—and power. The cute can be handled and fondled. It is proximate to kitsch, to easy consumption, to the simulating of affect.

“Pop always retroactively rescues unpop from the prison of its admirers.”

The second is a historical transformation in the internet that began in the mid-nineties, which went from being military and scientific (with some creative subcultures on the side) to a vast commercial complex.115 This led to the waning of the early nineties internet subcultures, some of whom thought of it as a utopian or at least alternative media

The interesting also assembles the social, but what is sociologically interesting also has an aesthetic aspect. It measures the tension between understanding and wonder.

The cute: The word derives from the word acute. The word itself is a cute version of an edgier word. The zany is to be held at a distance; the cute is intimate, domestic. We have powers over cute things, and yet they still seem to make demands of us. The zany is about production; the cute is about consumption. The zany is about the worker; the cute

The zany: it’s a performative aesthetic that is hot and sweaty, anxious and excessive. It is physical and sometimes libidinal. It is about activities where play becomes a job or work gets too playful.

“The best explanation for why the zany, the interesting, and the cute are our most pervasive and significant categories is that they are about the increasingly intertwined ways in which late capitalist subjects labor, communicate and consume.”4 They are the material through which we can have perceptions and share judgments that seem most closely re

In my reading, all of these general intellects manage to generate out of their particular ways of working some concepts that can be connected or contrasted with others derived from other kinds of knowledge work. That to me is what a general intellect is: someone who generates concepts out of particular knowledge work in particular departments of th