But notice how it doesn’t work at all if you should substitute turtle or chicken or cow for cat, here. Even the estimable dog doesn’t quite work in the subject passage, for dogs, while they may from time to time be noble in reason and express and admirable in form and moving, are not quite infinite in faculty, nor godlike in apprehension; dogs are in general simpler and more trusting, and lack the extra dimension of mystery that belongs to cats, and to ourselves. Cats share something more with us than mere creatureliness: they share, somehow, our central predicament. Beauty and panic, laziness and the potential for real idiocy. A certain predisposition to cruelty and indifference, mixed indiscriminately with a certain unaccountable warmth and gentleness. Each one different, unpredictable, full of surprises. What we can but dimly apprehend of our own condition, we can readily see and identify in cats.

“He thinks he’s a person,” people will say, when what they really mean is that they think so.

Return with me, then, to the dawn of the internet, to those days of wonder and delight before any of us had heard of Twitter or Facebook; before Anonymous, before the revelations of Edward Snowden, before BuzzFeed, before even Google. Before all the terrible things Adrian Chen wrote about at Wired in October of 2014.

At the close of the 20th Century, the dissemination of cat videos was but a distant dream, owing to the minute amount of bandwidth that even the fanciest computer systems could provide to the early “web surfer.” On a 56k modem, it would have taken ages and ages to download a single one of the cat videos we can blithely knock back by the dozen today.