The baby is laughing. And now he is not. He’s seated in a high chair, dressed in a white suit and a large blue bib. His father is in the kitchen with him. In a high-pitched voice, Dad says, “Bing!” The baby laughs hysterically. Dad waits a few beats, until the baby is calm, and then, in a low voice, he says, “Dong.” This catches the baby by surprise. He laughs even harder. Dad hits him one more time with the high voice: “Bing!” The baby sputters, he wheezes, he can’t take it. He is helpless with laughter. And we love him for it.

The clip, titled “Hahaha,” is one of the most watched YouTube videos ever, with close to 100 million views since it went up, in 2006. It’s a classic of the form, so perfectly representative of the YouTube aesthetic that Google executives showed it to Queen Elizabeth during her visit to the company’s central-London headquarters. “Lovely little thing, isn’t it?,” Her Majesty said.

Lovely, indeed. But it’s also true that the “Hahaha” video is part of a broader cultural movement defined by a special fascination with all things cute—a movement that has sprung to life against a backdrop of war, economic breakdown, and more Wi-Fi.

Cootchie-coo behavior used to be reserved for private moments in the home. But now, with the Internet’s help, people feel free to wallow in cuteness en masse, in the company of strangers. The serious political blog Daily Kos, for instance, is awash in cute pictures of kittens and panda bears. The Web site Cute Overload, which gets 100,000 visits a day, is all photographs and videos of puppies (“puppehs” in the site’s own particular argot), kittens (“kittehs”), and baby rabbits (“bun-buns”), who are said to go nom-nom-nom as they munch their little meals.

“It’s part of our DNA to react to cute things,” says Meg Frost, who founded Cute Overload in 2005. “What makes me post certain pictures is if I have an audible reaction—a squeal—when I see the picture. I’m kind of annoyed at myself for having no control over thinking these things are so cute. It’s like ‘Oh, why don’t you just kill us with your fur?’”

The popularity of Cute Overload (and the more than 150 other cute-animal sites catalogued by the recommendation engine StumbleUpon, including Stuff on My Cat, Cute Things Falling Asleep, Kittenwar, and I Can Has Cheezburger) reflects a growing self-infantilization that is also in evidence at the social-networking site Facebook, where countless subscribers have posted photos of themselves as babies on their profile.

Vice, a hipster publication and Web site based in Brooklyn, has also gotten in on the cute act, with a Web channel called The Cute Show. With an un-ironic focus on cute animals, The Cute Show would not seem to belong in the company of other Vice programming, such as Inside Afghanistan and The Vice Guide to Sex.

It’s not just a digital thing. In this cuteness-crazed environment, Time Warner’s People magazine decided it was good business to shell out an estimated $6 million for photos of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony’s newborn twins. At the same time, Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Katie Holmes, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gwen Stefani have kept the supermarket tabloids afloat through the power of their spawn. And it’s no accident that the biggest tabloid saga of the year concerns Jon and Kate Gosselin, who rode to fame on the backs of their eight little cuties.