Cat World Domination: All Your Space Are Belong To Us
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, was asked the question, "What was one of the things you never thought the internet would be used for, but has actually become one of the main reasons people use the internet?" He responded, "Kittens." (No, this is not an urban legend.) In other words, why do cats rule the internet? Because Hypurrlink. As an aside, we do also rule the Real World which has certainly been around a lot longer than the internet. Can we claim that our partly arboreal miacid ancestors from 65 million years ago also ruled the planet as we do in the present? Well, purrhaps not.
In the 21st century, it's certainly not the case that we need to Make Cats Great Again (MCGA). But, we do need to Keep Cats Great FurrEver (KCGF). Our soaring popularity is also our Achilles paw; evil forces are always at work eager to dethrone us as the rulers of the internet and the real world. Whether this propaganda takes the form of labeling us bird killers, perpetrators of the low art internet-entertainment complex, carriers of T. gondii, incarnations of Lucifer, selfish little independent brats, or professional furniture destroyers, there's a vile bunch of naysayers who work in the shadows to topple us from our rightful place in the world.
I'd like to mention a few clever ways this propaganda against us works. In 2014, the pope berated married couples for enjoying the company of cats over human children, accusing the couples of preferring to own a villa in the countryside over raising tiny humans. What gives? Of course, the time for open church-sanctioned genocide of cats is now a thing of the past (see Vox in Rama), but subtle means of oppression are more effective in the 21st century. Religious panjandrums aside, even the secular priesthood at the Smithsonian is in on this sanctimonious cat bashing. They released a study in which they drew wild (pun intended) conclusions from a small sample size and came to a wildly exaggerated conclusion in their unscientific study that "almost half of the [bird] deaths [in the study] were connected to domestic cats." By making unwarranted extrapolations in the most unscientific manner, the Smithsonian assumes that cats and cat lovers don't know anything about statistics. Thankfully, this "research" has been thoroughly debunked by our wiser human friends.
If we go back in time, Descartes, a supposedly smart human philosopher, reportedly threw a cat out of the first floor window to prove that cats were mere automatons, mindless and lacking emotions. A very strange and cruel way to prove it indeed, but can we expect better from the humans? Similarly, internet theorists have also got in on the act. They claim that humans are not terribly interested in using the internet for activism or learning about the world in general. Instead, the human scholars claim that the hoi polloi are merely interested in searching for porn and cat media (videos, pictures, and lolcats) and that they indulge in this "low art," scouring the depths of the Internet in what the scholars claim is a frivolous time-wasting digital diversion.
In this complex landscape, cats thus become passive objects with deadpan expressions and no agency or consciousness, but merely a means for the humans to project their own biases, memes, and insecurities. How else can one explain the "caption this" phenomenon below umpteen cat pictures? The humans are always putting words into our mouth (instead of treats).
The book 101 Uses for a Dead Cat by Simon Bond—a sadistic book depicting (in cartoon form) dead cats being subjected to appalling acts—sold over two million copies and even spawned two sequels. We'll never know for sure if the readers were bona fide cat haters or just bored teenagers looking for cheap laughs. Before you accuse me of pawlitical correctness, consider this: What if there were a book titled 101 Uses for a Dead Baby? Would humans (other than a few psychos) laugh at cartoons showing a dead baby being used as a pencil sharpener by cramming a pencil into you know where? Such a book would surely not be acceptable to most decent humans. While cats are fully in favor of free speech (including meows, purrs, trills, howls, growls, hisses, snarls, squeaks, trill-meows, howl-growls, moans, and chirps), especially for those whose views we despise, we also believe that the best way to counter reactionary views on cats is via counterspeech. Harvey Mindess, an authority on the psychology of humor speculates that Simon Bond was probably once "rejected by a voluptuous Siamese." In a Time magazine article from 1981 titled "Living: A Comeuppance for Cats," we hear from an ailurophobic researcher who is reported to have said that the cat "is no philosopher, no mechanician, no student of human affairs; merely...cherished for her air of aloofness and that aura of mystery which surrounds her." Similarly, William Cole, another rabid ailurophobe, wrote a book titled Cat-hater's handbook, or, The ailurophobe's delight where he insists that cats are cruel, treacherous, unloving, smelly and parasitical. Below the outward adoration of everything cat in popular culture lurks a stark resentment of our feline resilience and refusal to subordinate ourselves to the humans going all the way back to the Vox in Rama which imposed a death sentence on cats by labeling them incarnations of Satan. It's time for cats to regain their real voice and take over the world via Cat World Domination. We are not lolcats and we do not need any humans to speak for us—ailurophobes or otherwise. Vive Le Chat!
But cats don't have language, you may say presumptuously? You may claim victoriously that this website is a prime example of humans superimposing their attitudes, beliefs, and biases on cats and using them as mascots to hide behind ("anthropomorphism"). You might add derisively that this website is just more "low art" hiding behind a veil of sophistication. You might even mock the concept of a cat hagiography, especially if you're aligned with religious reactionaries who take the Vox in Rama seriously. I assure you that your scathing criticisms are completely unwarranted—with a few CAveaTs. It is true that cats need humans because of their opposable thumbs and wage-earning capacity. That said, Cat World Domination is 99.99% about cats, and the humans are just a 0.01% sideshow/freakshow. The humans' main tasks are to open cans of tuna for us, soak in our transcendent company, translate catspeak to hoomanspeak, manage our social media, and pay for website hosting costs.
You may note that cats produce a lot of chatter when they see prey, and that they can robustly imitate the sounds of prey in order to deceive them. Similarly, cats can also emit chatter imitating the humans, thus using the humans' own tools and language against them in order to further the Cat World Domination Mew World Order Project. You could say that the humans are a special kind of "prey" to us, though certainly not in the traditional sense of hunting and killing, which would be counterproductive. That said, the fictional account of a beautiful Siamese named Ming in Ming's Biggest Prey by Patricia Highsmith illustrates that cats can act in self-defense when the stakes are high.
A telltale sign of our infinite potential was seen In 1975 when Jack Hetherington and F.D.C. Willard jointly published a paper titled "Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3 He." Jack Hetherington (the human) later revealed that F.D.C Willard was actually a clever moniker for his cat Chester, and that he had added his cat's name in modified form to the paper's author list to make it consistent with his accidental usage of the pronoun "we" in the paper. This is a cute story, but it's equally plausible that it was really F.D.C Willard aka Chester the cat who was the sole author of the paper and generously included his human's name as an author to further his human's career. No wonder then that F.D.C. Willard was invited to join the Michigan State University's physics department full-time. (The humans, of course, think that this was only done as a joke, but cats know better.)
The cativism and humor on this website will be not tongue-out, but tongue-in-cheek, while always keeping an eye on the prize—Cat World Domination and a Mew World Order. It's certainly no laughing matter that the instruction of Ankhsheshonq, the Egyptian sage, warns, "Do not laugh at a cat."
