Are you reading this? Good! Are you reading it online? Oh no! There’s no way to break this to you gently, but the internet is evil. I don’t mean in the way that it allows David Cameron to know, with gynaecological precision, all your porn preferences. We’ve all, surely, accepted that long ago as the reasonable price for the pleasure of never talking to a human ever again thanks to email, and being able to look at photos of cats all day.

No, the reason it’s evil is the cats, actually. I don’t think anyone could have come through the past week without a vague suspicion that the internet is a brilliant plot by an evil mastermind plotting world domination, possibly operating under the name of Doctor Claw, operating out of a spooky castle with only a villainous cat for companionship (Inspector Gadget was extremely formative for me, OK?).

Let’s look at some of the news of the past week: Boko Haram posted a video of an execution; Islamic State destroyed 3,000-year-old statues and more than 100,000 books in Mosul; an opponent of Vladimir Putin was murdered in front of the Kremlin by someone who had absolutely nothing to do with the Russian president; an Indian court decided that a documentary that exposes the shockingly misogynistic views of one of the rapists behind the 2012 gang rape in Delhi is as dangerous as the rapists themselves and therefore must be suppressed; and Binyamin Netanyahu, the self-described “emissary of the entire Jewish people”, tapdanced around the US Congress, sticking his middle finger up at President Obama while Republicans queued up to offer him sexual services. (Yes, I am speaking literally here.)

And what were you doing while all this was going on? You were looking at a photo of a blue/black/white/gold/who-cares? dress. You were making comedy memes out of a weasel riding on the back of a woodpecker. You were watching two llamas doing something in Arizona. You were almost certainly looking at photos of cats.

The internet is full of stupid crap with which we distract ourselves, but the past seven days have felt like a bellwether, an indication of not only how our world is now but how it will end. I have a vision – a vision of the apocalypse, and it will consist of Earth being consumed by fire and brimstone, but no one will notice because they’ll be too busy inside looking at a photo on the web of a frog using a leaf like an umbrella. And as their faces melt, they’ll be crying, “Wait! But I must tweet a link to this baby panda sneezing!”

I exaggerate not: while Bibi was avowing, once again, that Iran was armed to the teeth with the kind of cartoon bombs he memorably waggled in front of the UN general assembly in 2012, the men in the western world were all too busy measuring their penises (it’s a really serious issue, OK?) to pay any attention.

Movies promised us that the end would come by a sudden alien invasion, the cruelty of vaguely foreign terrorists, or the explosion of one of Netanyahu’s cartoon bombs. Not once did I see Bruce Willis having to fight against the terrible numbing power of animal memes that’s turning us all into zombies so that we don’t notice that Satan is actually taking over the world.

That human beings seek to distract themselves from unpleasantness with stupid stuff will come as no news to anyone who has suddenly found watching Loose Women on telly a decidedly preferable proposition to doing one’s taxes. But the way human beings are seeking distraction is new.

Things that would once have been sniggered over by 12-year-olds during break-time are deemed international events

Things that would once have been sniggered over by 12-year-olds during break and then forgotten are deemed international events, gripping allegedly adult human beings for days, worthy of front-page stories on broadsheet newspapers. Even Hillary Clinton took a break from plotting world domination to not just look at but joke about that stupid dress. I don’t think I’ll ever fully come to terms with 26 and 27 February 2015, aka The Days of the Dress, but I frankly live in fear of the day the internet discovers this strange and unknown thing called “the optical illusion”.

Oh my God, is that a drawing of Freud or of a naked woman ?! Those steps in the Escher painting never end – my brain is melting!! I just cannot deal. Because this, you see, is the only acceptable response on the internet.

I used to think that the web would become a strange pit of snark and conspiracy theories – and, in certain areas, it is. But the dominant tone on the web these days is one of Buzzfeedish enthusiasm and emojied exclamation marks and joining in to be part of the zeitgeist. Anyone who professes bewilderment at whatever animal meme or mysteriously coloured dress is doing the web rounds instantly marks themselves out as an incurious out-of-it oldie sadster, and there is nothing – nothing! – worse than looking out of it on the web.

So this is where we are now, folks. The world is going to hell, and none of us care because the vast majority of us are too busy looking at photos from the Japanese cat island. It’s time to accept that the bad guys have infiltrated our homes, our minds and our very beings, and we’re too busy looking at stupid stuff that doesn’t matter to notice it. They’ve won and we’ve lost. But at least we have the cats.