In 2008, the internet was obsessed with cats who couldn’t spell.
LOLcats—photos of felines with misspelled captions in broken English—became a cultural phenomenon, generating millions of views and spawning countless imitators.
But beneath the silly syntax (“I can has cheezburger?”) lies something deeper: our fundamental need to anthropomorphize, to project human emotions and narratives onto the non-human world.
“We’ve always done this,” explains one psychologist. “Cave paintings, Greek gods, Disney movies—humans are wired to see intentionality everywhere.”
The internet just gave us infinite canvas.
What makes LOLcats particularly interesting is how they capture the ambiguity of feline behavior. Is your cat plotting your death or just hungry? The beauty is we’ll never know—so we write our own stories.
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