Bring Back Cats on the Internet.

There was a time when the internet knew peace. Or at least knew joy. Joy that had whiskers.

From good period on the early internet, the internet belonged to cats. Not influencers. Not brands pretending to be relatable. Not sponsored content disguised as vibes. Cats. Pure, unbothered, frequently blurry cats. The early internet was a digital playground where you could log on and immediately be greeted by a cat falling off a couch, a cat screaming at nothing, or an 8-Bit Pop-Tart cat flying through space leaving a rainbow trail behind it. Honestly? We were better for it.

Back then, you didn’t open Tumblr to be sold a water bottle or a skincare routine. You opened Tumblr and saw someone’s orange tabby mid-yawn with the caption “same.” Facebook feeds were flooded with badly cropped cat memes your aunt shared with zero irony (as she should.) YouTube was a wonderland of cats knocking glasses off tables or reacting violently to cucumbers. Vine gave us six seconds of cats doing what they do best: being uninhibited little freaks. Even dog people were in on it. Dog lovers would laugh at cat content and then immediately say “I’m not even a cat person but this is funny.” That was the magic.

Cats weren’t content. They were culture. THE MOMENT.

The internet felt fun because it wasn’t constantly trying to extract something from you. Yes, it was messy. Yes, pop-ups were aggressive. Yes, LimeWire and LiveLeak were basically digital crime scenes (both to very different degrees...) But you weren’t being tracked across twelve apps because you liked one video of a lamp. The goal wasn’t optimization. The goal was good vibes … and cats are the tiny barf-filled harbingers of fantastic vibes.

You could scroll for hours and never feel like you were being pitched to. Cat gifs existed simply because someone thought it was funny to loop a clip of a kitten slipping off a bed. Cat memes weren’t polished. They were low effort, high reward. Comic Sans captions. Misspellings. A blurry photo taken on a flip phone. Peak art.

… and the icons. Oh, the icons.

Nyan Cat alone deserves a place in the internet hall of fame. A pixelated toaster pastry cat flying endlessly through space to an aggressively catchy song had no business being that influential, yet here we are. Keyboard Cat was another legend. A cat in a shirt smashing keys with soul like it was playing Carnegie Hall. That video walked so reaction memes could run. Then there was Grumpy Cat, the undisputed queen of the RBF. She didn’t need to do anything. She just existed, looked mildly displeased, and the internet said yes, that’s me. (RIP, btw.)

We had cats with jobs. Cats with captions. Cats who “typed” responses to emails. Dwarf cats like Lil Bub, who looked like a mythical creature and captured hearts everywhere. Majestic Maine Coons who looked like they paid rent and had a LinkedIn. Cats who screamed. Cats who loafed. Cats who stared into the void like they knew something we didn’t.

Every corner of the internet had its own flavor of cat content. Tumblr was artsy cats. Facebook was minion-adjacent cats. YouTube was chaotic cats. Reddit was cats with lore and more likely than not an entirely unrelated argument in the comment thread. The beauty was that none of it felt forced. No one was asking if cat content converted. No one was worried about brand alignment. A cat was funny, so you shared it. That was the whole business model.

Compare that to now.

The modern internet is loud, polished, and exhausting. Every platform is optimized for monetization. Every scroll comes with ads, affiliate links, sponsored posts, and thinly veiled attempts to sell you something you did not ask for. Even “relatable” content feels focus-grouped. Everything is optimized, analyzed, and stripped of spontaneity. The joy has been sanded down into something algorithm-friendly.

What became of e-cats? Cats got pushed to the sidelines.

They still exist, of course. There are incredible cat creators out there. But they are competing with constant noise. With hot takes. With outrage cycles. With sponsored chaos that somehow manages to feel boring at the same time. A simple cat gif doesn’t stand a chance against a platform screaming “engagement” every five seconds.

The early internet didn’t need every post to be meaningful. Cats didn’t teach lessons. They didn’t sell courses. They didn’t try to go viral. They just were. People connected to that in a way that felt human. Seeing a cat miss a jump or stare at a wall was grounding. It reminded you that not everything had to be productive or profound to be worth your time.

There was also something beautifully communal about it. Everyone had a favorite cat meme. Everyone knew the big names. You could reference Keyboard Cat in a conversation and people immediately got it. That shared cultural shorthand feels rare now, when trends burn out in days and everyone’s feed looks different.

Cats gave us a shared language.

They also gave us relief. The internet today often feels heavy. News cycles are relentless. Content is political by default. Everything is a debate. Back then, you could escape into a loop of cat gifs and feel lighter for a moment. It wasn’t ignorance. It was rest.

*best Obama voice* Now let me be clear, *exit Obama* the early internet was not perfect. It was unregulated, problematic, and sometimes genuinely dangerous. But joy existed alongside the mess. The current internet feels cleaner on the surface and emptier underneath. We traded silliness for strategy. We traded cats for conversion rates.

So yes, bring back cats on the internet.

Bring back the poorly cropped memes. Bring back the absurd captions. Bring back cats doing nothing of value and being celebrated for it. Bring back content that exists purely to make someone smile for ten seconds before they scroll again. Not everything needs to teach. Not everything needs to sell. Some things just need to be funny.

Cats never asked to be the face of the internet. They simply showed up and carried it on their two (four?) tiny shoulders … and maybe, just maybe, if we let them take center stage again, the internet could remember how to be fun.

At the very least, it would be quieter … and softer … and pukier … and significantly more covered in fur.