What happens when cancel culture meets Adolf Hitler pareidolia? Amazon decides it needs a new app icon Adolf Hitler killed himself in 1945 after being responsible for the death of millions as the leader of Germany's Nazi party. He had a small rectangular mustache. Seventy-five years later, e-commerce giant Amazon has had to change its mobile app's new logo that featured its trademark smile and a jagged blue ribbon on top a …
Adolf Hitler killed himself in 1945 having been responsible for the death of millions as the leader of Germany's Nazi party. He had a small rectangular mustache.
What a bizarre way to start the article. you make it sound like the reason he killed himself was because he was "responsible for the death of millions". I think the reason he killed himself is he was petrified at what the Russians would do to him if caught alive.
I read on the Internet that after building a moonbase he went to live out his days there.
There's even a film and its mentioned in a few games so it must be true.
Huh....whats that? Frog pills again? But I just had them next Wednesday.... Oh alright Napoleon, you always did make a firm point...
I think the reason he killed himself is he was petrified at what the Russians would do to him if caught alive.
Which, of course, had nothing to do with the death of millions of Russians.
If the Americans had reached the middle of Berlin first, he would have been frightened of them too. Remind me again why they were after him? Was it something to do with people dying? In their millions?
As a result of the German Reich? Led by Hitler?
Words fail me.
While not entirely in disagreement with your sentiment.
Corporations generally pay a lot for logo designs, in the hope that it gives a positive message and not a negative one.
A logo that looks, however vaguely like a possible Hitler emoji would very definitely fall in the latter category.
I'm not surprised they quickly changed it. Clearly they didn't check how it would be perceived by the public.
While it doesn't look to me much like Hitler (the tache is too far above the "smile"), I can see why it might be construed as such. And, in a commercially sensitive environment such as the one Amazon operates in, you can easily weigh up the costs of the change (miniscule) versus the potential damage to the image of trying to sit it out.
This kind of sensibility is older than Twitter. Don't forget that, in America, many buildings don't a have a thirteenth floor because enough people are superstitious so that it makes business sense to pander to them… Palm never released the Palm IV because of Asian sensibilities. But Fiat pushed ahead with the Punto and London 2012 doggedly stuck with Bart / Lisa logo.
>This is the work of dedicated offence takers.
Definitely. And delusional: can't think of a single Hilter picture that in any way resembles the Amazon logo. To my knowledge Hitler never had a saw tooth moustache, it was always straight cut along the bottom edge - neither did he have a big smile.
It would be interesting to see a demographic of those who saw this meaning in the logo, as I suspect you need to be a big fan of Hitler to see a Hitler symbolism in this. (Just as you need to be a big fan of a particular christ, virgin mary icon/image to see 'christ' or the 'virgin mother' in odd object arrangements.)
"This is the work of dedicated offence takers. Their ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. If only it could be directed to productive ends."
I would totally contradict that. I might not have noticed, but once I heard someone write "looks like Hitler", it looked an awful lot like Hitler to me. And I would have told Amazon to get rid, not because I'm offended, but because it makes them look very stupid.
The mind is weird like that. We are super good (actually, too good) at pattern matching. And once an association has been made, if there is a significant emotional aspect to it, it can be almost impossible to break. I can see 88 and 1312 being banned from math text books for the same reason.
Still, given the built-in smile, I would have been sorely tempted to run a add campaign associating Charlie Chaplain to the icon instead--we need to reclaim the 'stache!
> Nooooo! Not my piano!
Fun fact: International Piano Day is celebrated on the 88th day of the year, which is 29th March this year.
It is a truly awful logo. Is is some kind of a joke?
Mind you... if they'd asked me I would have submitted one identical to their previous one but at a slightly inflated price. I mean... if they liked the one they had bought before, surely they'd like the same again?
"Clearly they didn't check how it would be perceived by the public."
I think that the answer is somewhat simpler:
A logo was designed.
Nobody percieved anything negative about it.
Logo was released.
Somebody found a funny but unflattering inerpretation of logo.
Interpretation went viral because once you know what to look for, you see it (London olympics logo anyone?).
Amazon now had 2 choises:
1: Live with it
2: Tweak it so that viral interpretation no longer fits.
London olympics chose #1, Amazon chose #2.
No cancel culture, no ill meaning, you just cannot win them all.
There exist objections to when an app is 15% loaded from the App Store, that it resembles Hitler's moustache with haircut.
"That being said, blue box tape looks about as much like a toothbrush moustache as a dead rat resembles a tampon."
Oh, sticky tape, is that what it is supposed to be? (And I kind of assumed that people were seeing it as the hairline (although that was more sort of sloped than straight across) but also inferring the (not visible) moustache from the jagged edge.)
I honestly wouldn't have worked that out if you hadn't mentioned it. Insufficiently skeuomorphic. Admittedly, the article describing it as "ribbon" was a further confusion and sidetrack, but it's also too broad and not overhanging the side quite enough to register as "sticky tape" for me. Also, sticky tape is usually clear(ish), or perhaps best represented by a different shade of beige or brown. Is blue tape actually a thing somewhere?
Yup. Amazon use blue packing tape on their boxes (where tape is needed - some small boxes are self-sealing). It usually has logos and promotional guff on it, so it's an Amazon branded thing. I guess it makes their brown cardboard boxes stand out a little more.
For me, as the ragged end of a piece of packing tape over the top folds of the box and running down the side, I can't see it as anything else, particularly an exemplar of Hitlerian hirsutism.
Either my colourblindness has got much worse recently, or the use of blue tape isn't consistent across the Amazon empire - all the packages I get here that need assistance in staying closed are held together with what looks like very dark brown/black tape, so the only thing about this logo that says Amazon to me is the smiley swoosh.
For a real logo "fail", look no further than:
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/b-c-ferries-mask-image-will-be-replaced-after-everyone-has-their-laugh
Although I have to applaud the reaction of BC Ferries to the media frenzy:
“If it draws their attention to the seriousness of wearing a mask and the need to wear a mask, I’m OK with that.”
There is also this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1901656/OGC-unveils-new-logo-to-red-faces.html
"So tell me, Mr Rorsach, what does this ink blot look like to you?"
Dog carcass in alley this morning. Tire tread on burst stomach. This city's afraid of me. I've seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters, and the gutters are full of blood, and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"
And I'll whisper "No."
Way back on usenet we had a guy with a huge case of pareidolia. He saw numbers and letters in rocks claiming they were all messages from aliens. He would post these pictures trying to convince us and we simply could not see it.
Then he started posting pictures of standing stones etc here in Scotland. He was going on about a number by the yellow and I thought ‘yellow? on Scottish Granite?’ and I realised, no stone, not even concrete which has been in the weather fails to host algae, lichens and mosses. He was reading the biology.
Most rocks exposed to daylight have algae on them, often a black variety and often under the quartz grains where the light gets concentrated. I realised this as a child in NZ, there’s this long high hill behind Dunedin and at the top is a rounded outcrop of weathered rocks. You can go underneath them on the downhill side and I noticed the rock in the shade was a different colour from the rock which saw direct sunlight.
It’s why geologists carry hammers, to crack the rocks to see an unaltered aspect. Even rocks in dry deserts have weathered, biology covered surfaces.
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Here's a good collection of them.
Incidentally, the Junior Dance Classes one about half way down - there is no way that one is an accident.
This offensive app icon perfectly captures Hitler's whimsical, playful smile and brown skin, even if the hair tone is a little les blue than it was in reality. It's uncanny. How on earth did Amazon think that they could slip this one past us. They honestly couldn't have done a more convincing representation of him in any way. Thank goodness for the perpetually vigilant Twitterati for alerting us to yet another thing all Right^H^H^H^H^HCorrect-Thinking People should be offended by.
(Icon. Just in case this flies over anyone's head --->)
This is why the cancel Culture is so damned dangerous, when they are cancelling something you don't like then it's fine but when it touches you directly it's a whole other story.
Amazon have the power and the money to escape from this, this time. But now the guns are pointing at them and eventually someone will find a silly little thing like this again and it will be all guns blazing against them, with absolutely no recourse possible... Its a terrible thing, fuelled by the social media platforms themselves.
Some people are now just starting to realise how fragile all of us are with this stupid craze. Its obvious that the snake will eventually bite it's own tail but the damage in the meantime will be colossal.
It's a craze perpetuated by bored keyboard warriors that prefer destruction to construction. They don't really care who falls, all that it is important is that their target falls, and then they can give themselves a pat on the back with the righteous stick. It's very ephemeral, childish and will establish a very unstable base for these future adults upon which to build their lives.
I remain to be convinced that cancel culture is actually anything more that another deranged conspiracy theory. Sure, a few statues have been toppled (but usually because the person commemorated was a dodgy geezer, and since said dodgy geezer is dead anyway I shouldn’t think that they’re in a position to take much offence). Other than that though, how has cancel culture affected you, personally?
Seriously, give me the evidence on this - so far all I’ve heard so support cancel culture is hearsay, statue takedowns and… well… not a lot else. The extremes of politics are still spewing vitriol (so, despite having claimed to have been cancelled, they very clearly haven’t been), trolls are still trolling. As far as I can see, absolutely nothing has been cancelled.
Or could it be that the books weren’t selling, and this is a convenient way to get some free publicity for other works by Dr. Seuss? If you think of Dr. Seuss, you think of The Lorax, The Cat in the Hat, The Fox in Socks, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. You know, the books that people actually buy. None of those popular books have been ‘cancelled’. The books which have been withdrawn are:
If I Ran the Zoo
And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street
Scrambled Eggs Super
McElligot's Pool
On Beyond Zebra!
The Cat's Quizzer
And honestly, I hadn’t previously heard of any of them. This isn’t cancel culture - this is throwing out the rubbish, to make space for the books which people actually buy and read.
This came straight from the Washington Times ( I don't know if it's a partisan paper or not)
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/26/loudoun-county-schools-cancel-dr-seuss-racial-unde/
"Last year, Burbank Unified School District in California banned five classic novels from being taught in their curriculum: Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Theodore Taylor’s “The Cay” and Mildred D. Taylor’s Newbery Medal-winning young-adult classic “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”"
Do you also consider the above books as "rubbish" or "bad sellers" that need to be thrown out in order to make space ?
No - I consider it just the usual nonsense that happens all the time in schools, and which has happened ever since I was a small boy. It’s not a left or right thing either - both sides like to muck around. Consider, for example, school districts which demand that evolution or sex education isn’t taught, or that Harry Potter is prohibited. People don’t shout about cancel-culture in these cases - sure they get riled, and that’s fine. But there’s no point in calling it what it isn’t.
As for why those books aren’t taught (and ‘aren’t being taught’ is very different from ‘have been banned’ - I don’t know what the truth of it is), could it be that there are newer, and perhaps more relevant books to teach instead? These books, it must be noted, are still being sold, they’re still in libraries, they haven’t been cancelled in any way.
"This came straight from the Washington Times ( I don't know if it's a partisan paper or not)
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/feb/26/loudoun-county-schools-cancel-dr-seuss-racial-unde/ "
Well, from the above article: the paper's banner tagline is "The Right Opinion" (hmmm), and the "Top Stories" beneath the article include "Biden’s plan to ingrain abortion even more deeply into American culture" and "Liberals only follow the science when it benefits them", so I think I can take a wild guess at its political leaning from those slightly too shrill headlines…
And Wikipedia says: The Washington Times was founded on May 17, 1982, by Unification movement leader Sun Myung Moon… Throughout its history, The Washington Times has been known for its conservative political stance… The Washington Times has published many columns which reject the scientific consensus on climate change, on ozone depletion, and on the harmful effects of second-hand smoke…
I think it's fair to assume that, regardless of its general political alignment, it's not a paper of the calibre of The Washington Post (where, even there, like most newspapers, we always have to pause and be aware of whether its ownership may influence its output).
@Khaptain
You are missing the point, as the right wingers always do - the Seuss books weren't "cancelled", the family themselves decided to withdraw them from sale as they were perpetuating racial stereotypes that were unacceptable in modern times. You may bemoan the fact that referring to people with a different skin colour by those delightful names from the 19th century is no longer seen as a good thing, or that cheap shorthand drawings of those people are not socially acceptable, but the point remains that nobody forced anyone to stop publishing those books.
Dr Seuss Enterprises canceled those books and actually planned it last year, the "loony commie lefties" had nothing to do with it. People and times evolve, and there is no shame in rethinking things. Look how long it took for the Washington Football Team to finally agree to change it's patently racist name.
"Look how long it took for the Washington Football Team to finally agree to change it's patently racist name."
On behalf of the rest of the world, can we be equally offended that a sportsball team playing a sport that very rarely actually involves kicking a ball has the temerity to call itself "Football Team"? ;-P
The most recent example that springs to mind would be the reaction to J K Rowling's most recent Robert Galbraith novel, where some bookshops decided to boycott the book because it was allegedly "transphobic". It isn't – there is a murderer who occasionally cross dresses, not least to gain victim's trust – but the possibility seems to upset more people than the graphic descriptions torture, rape and murder…
But I think this logo is just a gaff.
But iz u get troll pointz for iz get celeb f1r3d or iz corp embarass, yes?
That's the driving force behind this shit, idiots trying to out-idiot each other.
Amazon are, very sensibly, going with the policy for this situation laid down by Samuel Langhorne Clemens; "Never get involved in an argument with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.".
I think I've got it, with regard to the cancel culture, every time I see the word I can see a picture of a Mary Whitehouse type of character.
Someone who wants to impose their prejudices onto everyone else and bask in the sense of power from having screwed successfully with people.
I say ban people who try to ban things!
Errrm...except for me.
Ahh yes, the great British obsession. Get a ****ing life people. The war ended 75 years ago and he's been dead for 75 years, no matter how many idiot conspiracy theories the obsessives dream up. Move the **** on already!
What's next? The BP logo makes me think of the Sun and the Sun burns me. BAN IT! The BMW logo reminds me of Stuka dive bombers. BAN IT!
Given the article author's location (SF), I'm reasonbly (though, admittedly not 100%) confident we British had nothing to do with this situation.
Amazon came up with a new logo, then decided to go full-bore cancel-culture on itself and euthanased the new design before the offendotrons got the chance.
Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Johnson, Duda, the list of national leaders who are moving their countries further and further to the right seems to be sadly growing, and persecution of minorities, and those who do not follow the political views of their leaders is on the rise across the world.
I don't think the post was even that well thought-out and it's just down to the, wholly apocryphal, tale of the BMW logo representing a running aircraft prop.
Incidently, the original Focke-Wulf 190 came with a BMW radial engine. That didn't get the Junckers-Jumo until the G variant (which is why you get an aircraft sporting both a radial cowl and a line of exhausts down the side).
People weren't threatening to boycott Amazon. People on social media pointed out (mostly laughing) that their logo looks a bit Hitler. Like all publicity Amazon had two choices: keep it, ride the wave and try and make "light of it" (perhaps not possible given the connection) or change it and the story goes away. That's not "cancel culture".
I'm not convinced Amazon slightly modifying its app logo is the perfect example of the Terror of Cancel Culture the article's author appears to believe it is.
Unless the US Supreme Court recently decided that apps are people too, and their freedom of putting money in politics^W^W^W^Wexpression can't be curtailed?
Pareidolia is a "feature" not a "bug", in the sense that it is a hard-wired evolved part of our visual system. I believe the consensus understanding is that is a predator-avoidance system. Better to run away from something that looks like a pair of eyes in the bushes than be eaten by a lion. We therefore pick out things that look like faces (human or animal) and interpret them as those first, before we have had a better look.
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Actually if you look at the full logo, as seen for example in the top-left corner of their main page... the arrow goes from A to Z.
Which I thought was clever when I spotted it, but then I’m a sucker for hidden elements in logos, like the Toblerone bear or the FedEx arrow.
IMNSHO, the new logo is worse, because it reminds me the way Hitler's haircut. And the brown color like the brown shirts... If Amazon gets 1 or 2 millions $ it doesn't know what to do with, I can design them a new, not offending logo. Just contact me.
Thank you Tom, I rate Sparks but never followed them so that was nice. Have an irrelevant anecdote in return.
I've assembled and disassembled three lawnmowers for my parents since lockdown. One parent has been diagnosed with dementia, and the other hasn't, been diagnosed. Their lawn is so small that scissors would be easier. But they have an Amazon account and aren't afraid to use it.
I lived in a country cottage with an untameable wild garden that broke both me and my lawnmower. I just wanted somewhere to lie down in the few hours of sun we get here, so I carved out a me shaped hole in the long grass much to my neighbours amusement.
I used to chuck in sheep from the neighbouring field in to help civilise the grass. I considered taking down the fence but then the cows would get in too.
I know a guy, actually from Austria, who wears an exact Hitler mustache. He seems like a lovely person. But his haircut is very short and he's Austrian and with the mustache, it gives a certain . . . aura. When he visits where I live, I keep thinking, surely someone has told him to get rid of the damn thing? Or grow it differently? But it never goes away. Really hoping he's not a full-fledged Nazi.
I can't believe that no-one's talking about this.
Amazon's arrow logo looks like a penis. It's always looked like a penis. A long, erect penis, with a distinct but not unusual curve, as seen from below.
When the logo was introduced, everyone in the Slough office said "but it looks like a penis". Management kept it anyway.
How are they removing hitler tape, but they're keeping the penis?
And how come no-one's talking about this?
The Amazon logo has never looked anything like Hitler. This noise is really an expression of our culture of ignorance, an enormous cultural fatberg of people who know little and shout a lot, hyper enabled by an Internet echo chamber.
Like anyone else in history, Hitler by himself was "mostly harmless". As a vegetarian, a resolute non-smoker and general health nut he'd fit in quite well in modern society. His ideas are also quite reasonable sounding, you can find them being voiced by many people today, including many Republican politicians and (with the MAGA crew making a very good impression of Brownshirts). We swim in this environment oblivious to the danger it poses because for many -- most -- of us Hitler is just a cartoon, a cartoon of on 'evil', so as long as we don't go around in a designer uniform sporting a toothbrush mustache we're all good with nothing to worry about. After all, it can't happen here, can it?
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