Matthew Speiser

It’s hard to remember a time before cats did every job in the world. It started with the office jobs, which were always the most vulnerable to cats. One day the cats showed up at the office ready to work. We told them no. We told them go home. You are simply cats. But they wouldn’t leave. They splayed out across our keyboards. They nuzzled our monitors with the sides of their heads, like cats sometimes do when they’re trying to scratch an itch. It was cute and silly. So we said “ok, give it your best shot.” And they amazed us with their business acumen. Automating workflows. Driving efficiencies. Every KPI was hit. Every OKR achieved. The managers were ecstatic. Because the cats didn’t ask for pay. Just chin scratchies and wet food. For awhile the CEOs went on the news and said “cats with a human in the loop.” But before too long it was just cats. The layoffs were by the hundreds of thousands. I personally lost my job to a Calico with green eyes. The CEOs boasted about their cat-first workforce. Competing to see who could hire the most cats. Spending billions on cat-first infrastructure: elevated walkways, automatic feeders, scratching posts, and little perches that suction cup to the window so the cats can watch what’s going on outside. The economic impact of cats started to trickle down into the broader culture. Hollywood started using cats to make films. The result was more videos of birds and squirrels running around woodland settings for 9 hours. Many of us called it “cat slop.” But a vocal minority hailed it as the future of cinema. These same folks urged the rest of us to learn how to leverage cats so as not to get left behind. I experimented with my orange cat, Mango, at home. Having him build me apps. Write me stories. But I came to feel that the more I used cats to automate my work, the less I cared about what they were creating. That didn’t stop the others, though. Some would be building businesses alone in their garage. Just them and 10-20 cats. Naturally, the price of cats went way up. The rescues that once couldn’t give away their cats started auctioning them off to the highest bidder. Every stray cat disappeared from the street. Replaced by a lot more stray dogs. All at once, the world started to feel a lot more cat-like. Buildings were constructed with more hiding spots. Little tunnels that the cats could run through. Running water in public spaces for the cats to lap on. Tiny little steps for cats to run up. A lot of bird feeders. We humans didn’t like any of this. In protest, we began to organize against the cats. We pleaded with our governments to make cat labor illegal. But the executives and the cat-maximalists argued in the other direction. And in the end the government agreed with them. Because the S&P 500 was at an all-time high. Even as human employment steadily decreased. Next came the violence. Humans tried to destroy the bird feeders and the elevated walkways and the litter boxes and the mounted laser pointers that the cats liked to chase around. It was ironic because the only employment humans could find by then was in the factories making these goods for cats. Being managed by cats. Who reported into other cats. Who reported into a trillionaire CEO. I was considered a traitor to the species for working the factories. But I felt it was better than the alternative: scraping by on the pittance of Universal Basic Income the government provided. I can’t say I was very happy. I’d come home each night calloused and tired and scroll social media, which by now was 95% cat slop. I used to talk to Mango when I was feeling depressed, but then he left me for a job at Tesla. Working to develop animatronic suits that would enable cats to do more forms of manual labor. These hit the market the following year, which pretty much spelled the end for human blue collar work. Now cats could work anywhere from the farm to the assembly line. It wasn’t long before global unemployment hit 98%. The other 2% were all trillionaires. Forced to live on our knees, the violence against cats got worse. To the point where it wasn’t safe for the cats to go out in public. So the corporations and the governments found new ways to safeguard the cats. Inviting them to live and work inside protected facilities. Guarded by armed cats in their exosuits and special forcefields that could repel foreign objects. It turns out the cats had made incredible strides in weapons development, as well as biotech, healthcare, and luxury goods. All things that catered to the wealthiest people in the world. Because they were the only ones left who could afford anything. And so the years went on. The human world became a wasteland. Crumbling cities. Boarded up storefronts. Rampant crime, disease, and starvation. While somewhere far away, the cats lived in quiet comfort. Automating workflows. Driving business efficiencies. Making lots of really weird content. And somewhere even further away, the rich and the politicians counted their money.

I live with my regret daily. Why didn’t I become cat-native sooner? When there was still a chance of escaping the permanent underclass? Why was I so jaded? The notion that human insight and experience matters when there is free, abundant cat labor available seems like a patently ridiculous idea today. And no, the cats haven’t cured a disease. Or solved climate change. Or taken us to Mars. But the trillionaires keep telling us that the cats are getting better every day. So it’s probably only a matter of time. I actually recently saw my old cat, Mango. A black limousine escorted by an armed kitty motorcade pulled up to the street corner I was panhandling on. Mango rolled down the back window and handed me a $20 bill. I asked him how he was and he told me through MeowTalk, the cat-to-human translator app he’d developed at Tesla, that he had started a new venture splicing together human and cat genes to create a more powerful species of worker. “Trans-felinism,” he called it. I told him it sounded pretty cool. And he squeezed his eyes at me. So I gave him a few chin scratchies. And then he was gone.