Sip & Learn - "Cats Built the Internet”

In this lecture, Dr. Peter follows cats through the history of the internet to ask how a joke becomes culture, how communities create value around it, and what happens when that value gets a price tag.

Dr. Peter Chow-White is an SFU professor who has spent nearly two decades studying how the internet, social media and emerging technologies change the way we communicate. He is the co-editor of Race After the Internet and has given keynotes on everything from social media to blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Whenever the internet gave us new ways to create or share, people used them to share cats. That obsession propelled the internet’s evolution

People started posting cat photos every Saturday. It became an internet tradition called Caturday. When online video took off, cats became some of its first viral stars. When memes became their own language, cats were everywhere.

Strangely, Richard Dawkins had already described exactly what was happening. In 1976, he coined the word “meme” for an idea that spreads from person to person, changing as it travels. Decades later, millions of strangers were doing exactly that with pictures of cats.

Cat memes are easy to dismiss as fluff, but they do real work. They carry feelings, inside jokes and shared experiences between millions of strangers. They become references people understand without ever having met each other, and communities form around them.

Then came memecoins, cryptocurrencies inspired by internet jokes. Suddenly, the kind of culture people had spent years creating and sharing for free could have an actual dollar value. And, like every other phase of the internet, cats followed. Cat-themed coins are now a genuine force in crypto.