I was trying to explain to my cat about my blog.

It started because I was scanning in pictures and she wanted to know what the funny noise was. There are many funny noises in and close to our apartment and I try to explain for her those which are interesting, alarming, or which otherwise seem to be relevant.

So… How do you explain “scanning some pictures in” to a cat? To put them into the “computer” - another tricky concept and one which opens up a whole nother can of worms.

“I’m putting some pictures and posters into the computer” (weak gesture at the computer, which is actually not the one I’m trying to scan into) “so I can… um. Show them to some other people. And put them on the… internet?”

I think she was alright with the idea of showing them to other people, though why that involves a computer I’m not sure she got. The “internet” thing stopped her brain, though. First I thought she was astonished if not appalled at the pure commerce of it, the brochure-ness of the internet, all these people flogging their shizz, plugged into each other’s minimarts, all over the world. What could this mean to a being which spends most of its time sleeping in a sunbeam, chasing a rubber ball, or eating stuff that smells like dried fish served in a hay barn? (Her food smells pretty good, actually - I think she eats better than we do). Cats do not so far as I can tell sell things to one another, and certainly not in a such a passion of feeding frenzy consumerism and desperate thrashing salesmanship!

Although, as far as passion goes, you should see her go after that rubber ball! It has little knobblies on it to make it bounce funny. Actually we have several in different colors. That is only fair as our cat is also several different colors.

But the globalization part, that may have been the kicker: That we should need so much in the way of infrastructure, equipment, technology, dollar-bytes and whoop-de-do to accomplish something cats (if not most other animals) can do effortlessly, organically, reflexively, even thoughtlessly: communicate (share ideas and experiences, data if you will) with all interested members of the species, across great distances and with little loss of comprehension from receiving-node to receiving-node.

I’ve always thought this attribute contributed to flocking behavior - mutual motion coordinated with no evident signals or apparent communication - and it occurs to me now that this might also be why many animals don’t require artifacts: they have the vividness and integrity of truly shared memory.

I suspect that the loss of ability to communicate in this way occurs in a species’ evolution not long after “deceit”.