Web Fact: Cats RULE The Internet

(More Wednesday fun to distract you from work, deadlines and other midweek things. We’re a little shocked at ourselves for having a fun and distracting category on our blog for this long and not mentioning arguably the most fun and distracting internet residents – cats. We’re making up for it now…)

From the birth of the web, cats seem to have ruled the online roost from the off. A recent RatherGood video sets out to prove this and, while it may be riddled with slightly flawed science-facts, the truth remains that an incredible amount of the links we each get sent in the mail seem to feature four legged, curious and bewhiskered feline friends in various activities – many of them slightly humiliating – and without fail, they fill us with glee. It’s been this way ever since that kitten was chased by weird box-monsters and the resultant image first went viral and landed in our inboxes to much human hilarity and back-slapping.

Since first being domesticated in Ancient Egypt, these lap-sitters have been special creatures for we humans despite their complete indifference to our existence until feeding time. After being allowed to roam the house, the cat eventually took up God status for those ancient peoples, as well as being a convenient pest deterrent.

It all got so silly that, should a cat die in a household back then, the homeowner would shave off his eyebrows as a mark of respect and the cat’s cadaver itself would be mummified and preserved for eternity. Perhaps they were taking it a bit far – but still we seem to adore the little beasts, and the Internet is the perfect showcase for our fascination. Even if worship has, via online media, given way to subtle mockery.

The leaping off point, as ever, is Youtube, which features as many feline mp4s as you could infinitely shake a stick at. Cats versus printers, cats eating sweetcorn, cats riding hoovers and cats versus dogs – essentially, if you could think of a household item, there’ll be a video on the ‘tube of a cat interacting with it.

And they don’t even need to be interacting with anything. A huge swathe of the content on Youtube is cats simply being cats – and the funniest examples are generally the ones where they make idiots of themselves, despite their louche and svelte reputations. We’re now beyond the stage where compilations of the best clips are being made. We’ve reached the point of complete feline saturation.

This Youtube madness reached its apex with the recent keyboard cat phenomenon. In case you’re one of the few people who hasn’t heard of this strand of web ridiculousness, it involves a mash up of Charlie Schmidt’s ginger Tom, Fatso appearing to play the piano with any clip of some poor fool suffering a shock, You’ve Been Framed Style. Fatso has essentially become the embodiment of ‘fail’.

For example, you might see an idiot fall onto a treadmill and laugh – even if the video is probably faked – but to add to the hilarity, Fatso will emerge, playing his keyboard as the shot is looped in slow motion. And for some reason, it works. To the extent that there are now a thousand hundred million keyboard cat satellite sites, and inevitably a site selling Fatso T shirts.

Youtube’s not the only vector for all this cat-based silliness, however. Some bored intern in the West must one day have Googled ‘cat’ and ‘costume’ in the same search and come up with another modern phenomenon – the cats in costumes obsession, which appears to have started in Japan – itself a nation of cat-lovers.

Google image searching for humble-looking moggies in ill-fitting novelty outfits still keeps tired office-workers alive on hungover Friday afternoons, and probably will forever more. How could you fail to smile when looking at this? Or this? Or – especially – this?

We’re not even halfway done. Do you remember the cruel wave of cat-scanning that tail-ended the 90s? Thankfully that particular trend went out of fashion soon enough, but there can be no doubt that it spurred the beginning of multiple other trends.

Who can forget the remarkable Stuff On My Cat site (stuff + cats), that invited readers to put stuff on their cat, take a picture, then send it in? In principle, the idea is a stupid one. In practice, the idea is a stupid one. But for some reason, this entirely idiotic concept works, and only a corpse could get through the entire site without raising a single smile. It seems that, where the internet has bought us access to endless reams of complex information, it has equally bought us the ability to laugh at the most moronic of concepts without shame. Which can only be a good thing, right?

Speaking of moronic, imbecilic cat-laughter surely doesn’t get any sillier than the so-bizarre-it’s-great Cats In Sinks site – one to add to the madness of Stuff On My Cat, perhaps even pipping its precursor to the post of most inane use of internet bandwidth. Still, it’s a compulsive browse and for some reason, it just seems right. Perhaps it’s the familiarity of seeing a brazen cat relaxing in a spot it’s doubtless not allowed to be in that tickles the fancy.

And then we have Hitler Cats – those unfortunate felines born with markings that are remarkably similar to the facial hair of one infamous dictator, then forced to endure viral ridicule for the rest of their cat-years. Again, it’s a one-trick site – but it’s also an absolute pleasure to trawl its pages. Every single image brings delight along with it. Even when you’d thought you’d had your fill of evil, Nazi-resembling kittens, a click to the next page has you giggling like a loon all over again.

There are web comics devoted to them. There are elaborate hoaxes devoted to the grooming of miniature ones of them and there are further hoaxes devoted to the ingestion, via huffing, of their souls. But just when you thought the Internet was completely cat-saturated, along came I Can Haz Cheezburger, which proved we will seemingly never have our fill of pixellated cat action.

The genius of I Can Haz is that it incorporates user-generated captions for each image – usually as though that caption contains the words or thoughts of the pussy in the picture. The fact that these captions are written in LOLspeak – ie web abbreviations, only compounds the sense that we’re gaining an insight into the mind of a four-legged friend. The fact that the users manage to be witty about the most innocuous looking of pet-snaps is a real credit to a site which was once the most enormous high concept web presence imaginable. Even if by now it might have had its day, it’s still worth the occasional visit.

There are a billion other sites we haven’t covered, but even looking at the above, it’s fairly obvious that cats own the Internet. All we have to do as humans is worry about what they plan on doing with it. Or we could, instead, just while away our days laughing at them, and creating compilation sites that prove we mocked them, until the day that they take over the world and punish us for it.

Until that day, happy cat-mockery.

This post was written by Liam Tucker of the excellent Watch With Mothers. – Want to write for the BaseKit Blog? – Drop us an email.