This post was derived from a Twitter thread I did a few months ago. It’s been lightly edited for clarity, with a new introduction and conclusion. It moves a little fast for a blog post…

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.”