Quantifying Cute

A look at BuzzFeed's Beastmasters. [Link]

Will I dent my already shaky authority here if I admit that I have no idea why this is so, why people are so drawn to photos of cats and other animals just sort of sitting there, not really doing anything? That—to risk once more the horror of my new Beastmaster friends—I am not only mystified but a little disdainful of this thing that most humans on this planet behold with a pure and uncomplicated joy? Do I lack love in my heart? Compassion?

I was wondering this stuff aloud one afternoon in the office of Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's boyish and sleepy-eyed editor in chief. BuzzFeed and its Beastmasters are so widely read, he said, in part because they've figured out that while sports and service-y packages about jeans and even politics are all essentially niche topics, aimed at some infinitesimally small percentage of the population, animals are the great universal subject, the Esperanto of the Internet.

"Your possible audience for something about cute animals," Ben said, "is the entire human race, minus the sociopaths."

So what you're saying is, if I don't respond to the cuteness...

"Yeah, that's a problem you might run into," Ben said.

That I'm a sociopath?

"You're a magazine writer," he said pityingly.

Okay, so: sociopath with a job to do. I began familiarizing myself with the virtual animal kingdom, which is effectively infinite. As with Internet porn, certain star performers recur, but otherwise there is an unending supply of aspirants, one-timers, and weird new scenes from foreign countries. Certain animals go in and out of vogue—"Hedgehogs were big like a year ago," Summer says, but the animals of the moment are quokkas, "these Australian things that always look like they're really happy." Only cats and dogs never really fade, in part because they're what people have in their own homes, and in part because, Internet-wise, cats and dogs are where it all began.

With cats, in particular—historians of the animals-online form date it, more or less, to the circa 2005 rise in popularity of LOLCats, photos of various mischievous cats with various mischievous captions ("Sup, bro?"). After that it very quickly became a free-for-all of outsize animal celebrity and species one-upmanship. I learned about the sugar glider, the little arboreal possum who became a wildly popular blog subject a few years back, and the slow loris—that tiny-bodied, huge-eyed primate, cute as a fur-covered button.