Does seeing people enjoying photos of kittens on the internet make you want to scream with rage and hit them? Though you may not be able to explain why you feel the way you do, this would not be an irrational act. The cloying stricture of tugging sentiment that you are supposed to Like is an insidious growth upon the internet: images of kittens have become the canal through which the poison of netkitsch flows.
What is netkitsch? Netkitsch is the cultural feces produced by the expectation of mutual agreement and general comity, as manifested on the internet. Netkitsch is the shared artifacts that no one can imagine anyone good or decent would object to. It is a byproduct of value systems: netkitsch is in misogynist Reddit memes, and it is present in preachy Alt Lit and iCommunard essays — but it is crystalized, condensed, and most stupidly manifest in kitten images.
How did we get here?
The term “kitsch” was first used in German art markets of the late 1800’s to deride easy, highly commercial works purchased by the growing new-money bourgeoisie. Ever since that time, the observable characteristics of this art have been facily conflated with amounting to the whole of what kitsch is — which is why the Czech dissident writer Milan Kundera’s application of the term to totalitarian Soviet symbology is more interesting.
In 1984, Kundera redefined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” Kitsch, Kundera explained, “Causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.” To resist the sympathies of kitsch is to be cast out – for, who but a monster could dislike the sight of children running on the grass?
The important distinction made in this definition is that the term is reassigned from a reified set of phenotypes to a social practice. Kitsch in Kundera’s expanded definition is no longer topical, but instead any aesthetic regime where, “all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.” Kitch in this sense has came to mean aesthetics that forbid their own rejection by coupling aesthetic participation with social and political standing. No matter its host-image, kitsch demands to be internalized and reciprocated, or else.
Kittens themselves lack the agency to produce netkitsch. It is produced of them by blighted idiots. Netkitsch, the regime of cats and “oh, isn’t that funny?”, is the soul-deadening iCapitalist analog to happy hammer-swinging Soviet laborer posters. Rather than the false consciousness of the worker paradise, our isolate digital cantinas beam a continuous stream of treacly-sweet, narcotizing sympathy that paralyzes the revolutionary class. This narcotic is evil, and the practice must be abolished by stronger beings.
Unfortunately, our fascination with kittens seems to be historically enduring. The Egyptians, saps that they were, built grand temples in their honor. Cat images have continued to be produced even as you read this essay; you may have read this essay because it is about cats. As pan-Internet value systems are more and more intertwined with the meanings assigned to cats, it will increasing become difficult to express any idea that does not contain within it a reference to a cat.
The infernal creatures threaten to bring our society to a complete, choking, thoughtless, halt. I do not understate this crisis at all — there are already micro-societies that enforce a practice of kitten-based censorship. This cannot continue. The acute crisis of our moment demands that we make a radical, tragic break with history. The only possible solution — what will be, at the last, our final solution — is to kill them all.
The Horizon! 