Here's an idea.
The internet loves cats, because the internet is cats.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The internet and cats, like Antony and Cleopatra, Fred
and Ginger, Troilus and Cressida, except I
guess without all the death.
The internet and cats are at once separate but inseparable,
distinct but intertwined.
Or, as the ancient Greeks might say, Super Bros 5eva.
Though we don't have any numbers to back up this claim,
it certainly feels uncontroversial to say
that cats are the most posted thing on the internet,
except for words, I guess.
YouTube videos, pictures, gifs, cats LOL, Nyan, Keyboard,
and Grumpy.
The cat is basically the internet's mascot or spirit
animal, maybe even its Patronus.
What I'm trying to say here is that the ship between cats
and the internet is our OTP.
And it's not just us.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Many people have had a great and intense love for the kitties.
The ancient Egyptians worshiped cats.
Their goddesses Mafdet and Bastet,
gods of execution and justice, motherhood and fertility,
respectively, even had cat heads.
In Russia, it's thought to be good luck
to let a cat loose in a new home.
The Norse god Freya, is towed around by cats on her chariot.
And you've probably seen this guy.
Maneki Neko, the beckoning or good luck cat,
is a Japanese cultural institution.
He's thought to bring his owners good luck
and welcome customers into businesses
with his slow, beckoning arm.
As a developed, intelligent, digital sovereign nation,
it only makes sense then that the internet eventually
found its way to kitty worship.
But beyond being a symbol, there is a spiritual connection
between the cat and the internet as well.
The cat might even be the internet's totem.
Totems can be all kinds of things like plants, animals,
acts of nature, spiritual beings, charming gray cubes.
And the communities which gather around them
view the totem as a kind of companion or inspiration,
protector, or respected force.
Given this, it could be said that the similarities
between cat and internet are not just incidental hogwash.
Both are fiercely independent.
The internet, much like cats, kind of just
does whatever it wants.
And wanting it to behave in one way
is a surefire guarantee that it will actually
behave in the opposite way.
Both are curious, with a keen survival instinct
and love of sharing new things.
In short, cats and the internet do
a lot more than just resemble one another.
In some corners of the web, there's
even a totemic ritual observance in Caturday,
meaning that the internet could derive some of its power
from cats.
They organize its activities but also its behaviors and belief
structures.
But, reciprocally, cats get much of their power
from being loved and shared so much by the internet.
They maintain a strong hold on internet users
everywhere, even ones who don't even like cats.
I love cat videos.
I hate cats.
They are just simply everywhere.
It's almost like cats are the internet.
No, really.
Bear with me here for a second.
I mean, we can all agree on one thing
and that's that the internet is people.
Everything about the internet exists
because a person at some possibly distant point
of reduction was involved.
Websites are made by people, servers
are made by people, Google search results, people.
Those two chat bots that talk to one another.
People, in there somewhere.
People built, maintain, and use the internet.
Now, let's agree that many people also love cats.
Some people really love cats, like a whole lot.
As a matter of fact, one out of every three people
carries a virus called toxoplasmosis, which could--
are you ready-- cause it's host to become
unnaturally fond of felines.
And if you don't believe me, check out this Ignite talk
that my friend, Kevin gave.
Link in the doobleedoo.
Toxoplasmosis creates in people a biological predisposition
towards the promotion of cats, which
gives the phrase viral media a whole new meaning.
According to Wikipedia, cats are also the primary source
of toxoplasmosis infection in humans,
which means that there was something that
was a part of a cat that is now part of us,
part of one third of all people.
So if cats are a part of us, and we
are the internet through the transitive property,
doesn't that mean that cats are the internet?
Or at least a part of it.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
If cats are the internet, because they are a part of us,
then doesn't that mean that stomach bacteria and skin
mites and all of the other things
that are in and within and between and upon our grill also
the internet?
Well, no.
And here we are back at and maybe moving beyond totemism.
We don't have that extra special meaningful relationship
with those wee beasties.
Practical and necessary, sure.
But microbes don't represent, a stand in for,
and comprise the internet.
Unlike cats they are not-- we might venture-- metonymic
for the internet.
So a metonym is when one thing is referred to
by the name of another thing that
is closely associated with it.
Hollywood is a metonym for the film industry.
Top brass is a metonym for people in charge.
Neck beard is a metonym for-- well, you get it.
And while we can say funny things like the internet is
cats, It is true that we never say cat when we mean internet,
though we probably could, at least in reference
to a certain part of the internet.
I might call our internet the cat web,
a term that I borrowed from Mr. Brian Droitcour,
but which I'm going to use pretty differently.
Link to his awesome piece in the description.
The internet that 99% of us interact
with every day, the one with pictures of kitties and Amazon
and social networks and that website where you can
wiggle the thing around, and then it gets all crazy,
that is the cat web.
The less accessible, less populist,
Dark Net or Deep Web, the text only web,
or the Onion Routing Network, that is a different web.
And though it was made by people,
some with toxoplasmosis, no doubt,
it is not similarly intertwined with felines.
Calling that part of the internet the cat web would
be like using Hollywood to refer to the, I don't know,
the deep sea diving instructional video industry.
Turtle
As metonym entails, the relationship
between our web and cats goes beyond the metaphorical.
Our web is, is like, and likes cats.
For instance, recently Google hooked up
a 16,000 computer neural network to our web, our proposed cat
web, fed millions of videos and images
and told basically to just figure it out.
What was the first thing that that 16,000-strong compu-army
did?
It taught itself to recognize cats.
If that ain't proof of cat web, I don't know what it is.
What do you guys think?
Is our web the cat web, and why does the internet love
cats so much?
Let us know in the comments.
And I have a virus that creates in me
a biological predisposition towards asking
you to subscribe.
Position comment in the center and pull the switch.
Position comment in the center and pull
the-- what you guys had to say about "Neon Genesis Evangelion"
and the death of the author.
[INAUDIBLE] makes a really great comparison between Evangelion
and role-playing games and saying
that in role-playing games you a lot of times
don't really have a plan, but a sort of sense
of what your character would do, and that this
seems to them like what Anno did with Evangelion.
This also makes me think about "Adventure Time,"
and I've heard that the way that they write "Adventure Time"
is to basically play "Dungeons and Dragons"
with the characters.
And that is another show that a lot of people
ascribe tons of meaning to.
I think there's something to this.
[INAUDIBLE] makes a really great distinction
between two different kinds of interpretation
and says that if you want to know
exactly what the author meant then, yes, of course
their input is valuable.
But if you're trying to just get meaning yourself,
then maybe not important.
But there are bigger questions at hand with that too.
[INAUDIBLE] brings up Gadamer's hermeneutics and kind
of describes a situation where the author's interpretation can
trap you when trying to have your own ideas about a work.
Some googling brings up really great results
if you've never heard of the stuff.
You should Google it.
Whoa.
Chuuka Onna, let's just stop the angry YouTube comment
train for just a sec.
If some of this was unclear, I apologize.
I want to make it clear.
First, I don't think Anno was a troll.
Maybe a tyrant, but not someone trying
to upset people on purpose.
Second, I don't think that we are
trying to interpret the meaning of Evangelion by Derrida,
but even if we were, Derrida doesn't necessarily
say you can't interpret a work by another work.
He just says that if you think you're
going to get some sort of objective meaning making
by doing that, you're going to have a bad time.
Congratulations Shinji.
No, but really, get in the robot.
To Tacticus Prime.
Yes, kind of like the Bible.
To radeadcool.
Yes, sort of like George Lucas.
And the ErrorToTheThrone, yes.
Just like John Green.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the meaningful work of these authors,
and the Tweet of the Week comes from Enoch Jacobus, who
points me towards a book on Japanese noise rock
that I'm going to read while listening to white noise.
Also a runner up Tweet of the Week from FUNimation.
Oh, and one more thing, thank you
so much for all of the poetry.
We are working on the thing that we're going to put it into.
So that'll be up to next week.
You should be very excited about it.
I am.
[MUSIC PLAYING]