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January 30, 2024 27 mins

Discover the fascinating origins of internet culture in this episode of 6 Degrees of Cats, the worlds #1 (and only) cat-themed culture, history, science and - in this instance - tech podcast. 

Did you know that pizza was the very first item ever bought and sold online? Or that approximately 1% of all internet activity revolves around adorable cat photos and videos? While some of these facts may not be independently verifiable, it's undeniable that cats and pizza have become iconic symbols of the worldwide web.

Join us on an entertaining journey into the depths of host Captain Kitty (a.k.a. Amanda B.)'s psyche as she explores the intertwined relationship between felines and pizza. Alongside Roberta's Pizza alumni and renowned pizza consultant Anthony Falco, delve into the reasons behind this peculiar connection. Special guest Maria Bustillos, a prolific writer and expert on cat internet culture, sheds light on the unique charm of online communities and the pivotal role of cats within them.

Prepare to immerse yourself in the quirky, captivating world of internet folklore, where pizza, cats, and eccentricity reign supreme. Together, let's celebrate the delightful weirdness that makes the internet such a vibrant and fascinating place.

Tune in for a truly enjoyable and enlightening exploration of pizza, the internet, and our beloved feline companions in this wonderfully weird episode!

Support the podcast, sign up for The Captain’s Log, the companion podcast newsletter and learn about way$ to help keep this ship afloat for our next season here: linktr.ee/6degreesofcats.

Referenced artifacts:

Referenced episodes:

About the experts:

  • Maria Bustillos is an American editor, journalist, information activist, and the founding editor of Flaming Hydra, Popula, and the Brick House Cooperative. She authored the viral essay, “How Cats Won the Internet” (BBC.com, via Cat is Art Spelled Wrong, Coffeehouse Press, 2015). Maria can be found at https://thebrick.house, https://mariabustillos.com/ and on Mastodon at @maria@thelife.boats.
  • Anthony Falco is an American chef, author and pizza consultant. He is the author of Pizza Czar: Recipes and Know-How from a World-Traveling Pizza Chef and can be found at https://www.piz.za.com. Follow Anthony’s pizza travels on Instagram at @millennium_falco.

Producer, writer, editor, sound designer, host, basically everything*

  • Captain Kitty (Amanda B.)

* with co-executive producers Binky & Snuggles

Animal voices include:

  • Binky & Snuggles _^..^_

Music:

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
[crash]

(00:01):
[screaming]
[crashing]
Sorry, Snuggles.
Are you okay?
[sniffing]
At least we didn't break the camera.
We'll have to try going viral another time.
This obviously didn't work.
[music]
Welcome back to all Cats
and cat allies alike
to "6 Degrees of Cats"
the world's best
and only

(00:21):
cat themed culture, history and science podcast.
When I started talking about "6 Degrees of Cats"
this podcast,
the reactions were across the board,
you know, optimistic and encouraging.
[music]
"How interesting!"
"That's so... you, Amanda."

(00:42):
"Oh yeah, cats market themselves.
This is easy."
I mean, obviously this was going to be a hit.
After all, cats are the number one
most beloved animal on the internet, right?
Kind of.
I have a strong case
that cats should wear the crown
as king of the internet.
I can name 20 cat influencers off the top of my head.

(01:04):
And I know I'm not the only one.
So, truly.
[music]
I think that cats are the king of the internet.
But I guess we have to look at the history first
to challenge that hypothesis, if you will.
So...
[music]
In this episode,
we're going to be exploring the way our furry friends

(01:24):
have catalyzed conversations
across the worldwide web.
[music]
Hang on, bear with me.
[music]
Oh!
It was just snuggles.
Sitting on the modem.
All right, are we rolling?
[music]
We are certainly living in a weird moment in time.
I don't think this is a unique feeling

(01:47):
to our here and now.
But I don't think it's controversial to say that
we're living in a world beyond our ancestors'
wildest dreams.
And nightmares.
We haven't achieved world peace.
We haven't solved world hunger.
We haven't reversed climate change.
Or ended animal cruelty or housed everyone
afforded.
But we do have

(02:08):
wireless,
fidelity.
Wi-Fi.
More generally,
the internet.
[claps]
Hey, come on now, seriously.
The internet.
It's amazing.
It's great.
It's...
[typing]
The heck?
Are you kidding me?
[typing]
People think the world's flat?
Oh my gosh, I can't even look at that image.

(02:30):
It's just racist.
Oh, she looks really pretty.
Let me just check the comment--.
Mm, no.
What is wrong?
Okay, fine.
It does look like the internet isn't as civilized
a place as it could be
thanks to the amplification and acceleration
of only the most extreme, chaotic,
and outré voices on there.

(02:51):
That's a bit of a bummer.
But let's not just all be doom and gloom here.
On the whole, I still think things are a lot easier than they used to be.
It used to take weeks to send and receive documents
for signatures and stuff
because we had to use snail mail to send printed items.

(03:12):
It would take hours if not days to perform research.
You'd have to actually go in person to libraries
and scan books with your eyes.
You had to use the phone,
pick up the receiver, put it to your ear,
and hope that the person on the other end picked up.
But now...
I can take my laptop anywhere in my home.

(03:34):
No wires.
And connect to potentially 5.3 billion people
over half the world's population
to send pictures and graphics interchange formats,
gifs in real time.
I can chat with someone in, say, Algeria, where this here podcast was once in the top 100?"

(03:55):
So, truly, everything and everyone is connected.
A good majority of us, at least.
Thanks to that network of subterranean cables
and the satellites that communicate to make up the internet.
Thanks, US Department of Defense.
Yeah, I told you everything's connected.

(04:18):
Almost all modern infrastructure and systems we use here in the United States
include innovation and technology first developed
through...
more related stuff.
And in this instance, we are talking about
the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency,
or ARPA, who named the very first iteration of the internet, ARPAnet.

(04:40):
That actually could have caught on, ARPAnet.
Anyway, they launched that in the 1960s.
But, you know, let's not give them too much credit.
The concept of signals connecting wirelessly isn't new,
and you might be surprised by some of the four parents,
four mothers, if you will, such as...

(05:01):
Ada Loveless, the estranged daughter of none other than English romance poet,
and total rabble rouser, Lord Byron.
Ms Loveless was a 19th century mathematician,
and the first computer programmer.
And about a century later, none other than Hollywood actress

(05:26):
Hedy Lemar patented a special radio frequency hopping system
as part of an effort to support torpedo warfare for the Allies during World War II.
So again, a step towards wireless tech.
Thanks to...
War...
[doorbell ring]
My pizza delivery.

(05:48):
Perfect timing.
While the original intent of the internet was to facilitate fast,
secure communication, of course, the tools of the internet were quickly found to be
very useful in the food trade.
Pizza is kind of famously the best food suited for delivery.
There was a monetization very early on,
which like trying to incorporate pizza delivery, the order off the internet.

(06:12):
[Music]
That was pizza expert, or pizza czar, chef Anthony Falco.
I am an international pizza consultant and the author of "Pizza Czar".
I have a consulting company called Falco and Limited Concepts with my wife, Rebecca.

(06:32):
My Instagram is Millennium_Falco, two L's and two N's.
And on my Instagram, I document my travels around the world as a pizza consultant.
I've made pizza in 20 countries and counting, and I have a goal to make pizza on every continent.

(06:54):
Maybe we should team up on my cat tour of the world.
Yes.
We are on the same path.
It's just one is furry and cuddly, and the other is hot and cheesy.
The passion for pizza, like the passion for cats, is a global,
web-based phenomenon that gooey, cheesy slice of joy with any and all variation of toppings is the

(07:20):
unofficial food of the net.
I mean, it's the most Instagram food on earth.
I think it's just like something that's universally loved.
I mean, if pizza can be adapted to anyone, there's gluten-free pizza.
If you're vegetarian, if you're vegan, if you don't eat pork, if you don't eat beef,
to understand the evolution of internet culture and its cat worshiping denizens is to appreciate

(07:44):
the rise of pizza.
Anthony served me a slice of world history, starting with his own Sicilian style, personal,
pan-parable.
The world had to come together to create pizza.
It's the world's favorite food because it belongs to the whole world.

(08:04):
No one really owns pizza.
[music]
My dad's side are all Sicilian farmers from central Texas.
My great-grandparents immigrated through New Orleans and settled in Brasis River Valley of Texas
where there was a bunch of Sicilian farming communities.
They still have a big San Giuseppefestival in Bryan, Texas, which is not really

(08:27):
on a lot of people's radar.
I loved pizza as a kid, and my great-grandmother used to make something
that she would call pizza, but pizza was a word that she had never heard before,
because they only spoke Sicilian, which is considered its own language.
When they left Sicily, it had only been a part of Italy for a few years,
so they didn't even speak standard Italian.

(08:49):
We didn't actually describe what pizza is.
I think for the purposes of this episode of pizza is this round slab of baked dough.
I don't want to hear it Detroit.
What even is Detroit Pizza? I've never heard of it.
I am from Michigan.
Anyway, we'll say that the common understanding of a pizza is a flat bread, if you will,
with layers of sauce, usually tomato-based, plus cheese and toppings,

(09:14):
such as corn and mayo [gasp]
I'm not kidding, ask the Japanese.
And pizza is from Italy, at least that version is.
According to my research, the modern day pizza seems to have originated in the 18th century,
some time around the net least, by the folks in Naples, not Bully.
You've heard of the Neapolitan pizza, right?

(09:38):
Well, seems like that's the OG pizza.
What's so special about this particular delicacy's history,
beyond how freaking yummy it is?
Is that?
Pizza is one of the few foods where you can historically say it started at this time.
There's a great book by Michael C. Mann about the pre and post-columbian exchange

(10:02):
world.
It's based on a more scholarly book called "Ecological Imperialism".
It dives into how the exchange of plants, animals,
diseases, and humans from the old world to the new world really affects every aspect of every

(10:22):
society on earth.
Because wheat and tomatoes were separated completely until the European settlers
explorers went to Mexico and brought wheat to Mexico and then brought tomatoes back to Europe.
So it couldn't have existed before that.

(10:43):
There were flat breads.
And you know who was around then?
Keeping rodents away from the grains used to bake those breads?
I'm pretty sure that cats are old world species.
There are native big cats, so there's the cougar and then there's the jaguar,

(11:04):
which is also in North America, but less so.
It's been pushed out a lot.
Then there's some small ones like links and oscillates.
But the domesticated house cat didn't come until possibly Viking ships in the ninth century
brought them.
I have this image of a cat wearing a little Viking helmet and it's really just the cutest. [aww]

(11:24):
Oh my goodness, it just occurred to me.
Cats are partly responsible for pizza.
Okay, that might be a bit of a stretch.
Speaking of stretch, stretch, do we?
Ah, yes.
Those flat breads.

(11:44):
Going back to the Roman times, you can see pizza ovrns that are almost identical to the ones that I
used today and they would put fat and meat and olive oil and herbs on them and stuff.
But there was no tomatoes. [gasp]
You can't have pizza without tomatoes.
That's what makes it pizza and not a flat bread.
A lot of pizzerias have white pizzas, but there's no pizzeria that doesn't have tomato sauce.

(12:08):
I definitely can't think of a pizza without tomato sauce in some aspect of that equation.
And please, no ranch.
No ranch.
Pizza has a lot of Mexican influence, actually.
Mesoamerican farmers, domesticated tomato, chili peppers,
and the water buffalo that makes buffalo mozzarella originates from India or East Asia.

(12:33):
And they were brought to Italy in the 12th century.
So mozzarella actually originates from a species from Asia.
Even wheat originates from Eastern and Turkey.
Really, the only thing native to Italy that's in pizza is olive oil.
So pizza is truly an international food.
The food of the people.

(12:55):
In person and online.
Anthony saw firsthand when pizza went virtual.
Yeah, I'm very early internet guy.
Like I was in high school working on BBSs, which is like a bulletin board system.
And that predated the internet. You had to call one website to log on, essentially.

(13:16):
That's pretty similar to how the first web-based pizza delivery site worked.
Courtesy one Pizza Hut located in Santa Cruz, California, USA in 1999.
The rudimentary online form was called "Pizzanet".
Once customers entered their pizza order via a pizza builder menu page,

(13:40):
someone from that Santa Cruz Pizza Hut would call and confirm that, yes,
"Seymore Butts" is your real name. "Why is that funny?"
And then you'd pay at the door in cash because the technology to pay by credit card for stuff like that wasn't set up.
Speaking of paying for pizza, pizza may have been the very first food purchased with bitcoin.

(14:06):
Or at least the most notorious bitcoin purchase of food.
You'll see what I mean.
When bitcoin first came out, some guy was like, "Oh, well, what do I do with this?
I have bitcoin now. I don't know what to do with it.
Someone buy me a pizza and I'll send them bitcoin."

(14:27):
It was only worth $8 or something, so like he said,
50 or 60 bitcoin, the bitcoin pizza would be worth millions of millions of dollars now that the guy bought.
$421 million to be exact.
Bitcoin Pizza Day is like an internet holiday.
And that illustrates how pizza is baked into the culture of the internet.

(14:52):
So, it's the 90s. We have the basics, food, a dial-up internet connection that
allowed for 28.8 kilobytes per second to be downloaded,
and a place to gather with the random friends we met online.
Who - no, dad. We were not telling them our home address so we could be kidnapped.

(15:13):
But what was there to talk about in those early internet days?
What were we sharing? How could we bond? What was the lingua franca of the early internet?
Come on, we all know who it was.
Felis catus.
All right, folks. Order in a hot tomato pie, throw a piece of chicken at your kitty,

(15:36):
and we'll follow that pizza cat after the break.
Oh, that's so cute. I gotta send this to my cat text. Oh, sorry, I got a little distracted there.

(16:01):
Before the break, we learned how pizza took over the internet.
Pizza party. Speaking of parties.
Ah, isn't it fun on the web?
[Collage of various noise pollution from the internet]
Yikes, never mind.

(16:21):
I guess it's more like a bar fight when it's not a bunch of ads or commercials or
adritorials shouting at me to like buy a bunch of stuff I can't afford.
But as I said, it wasn't always this way.
The early internet was scrapier, more random, more playful, and full of cuter stuff,

(16:42):
like kitties. I had the opportunity to speak to an expert who literally wrote the book on
kitties and the internet.
My name is Maria Bustillos. I'm a journalist and editor, the founding editor of
Popula and the Brickhouse Cooperative, which is a journalist-owned publishing platform

(17:04):
that you can find me at thebreak.house, which is where I do a lot of my publishing and editing,
and at MariaBussios.com. This is my personal website. I'm on mastodon@ Maria@TheLife.boats.
So, the early publicly available web, uh, the memories.

(17:25):
You've got mail.
This essay that I wrote in an anthology from Coffee House Press, it was a very fun project
about how the internet started out being kind of like a homemage and ever.

(17:46):
At first it was fun and everybody was having a great time. There was no commercial interaction in it
at all, even on Facebook. When it first became possible for anybody to like get on Facebook,
there was a box where you could list the things that you liked. Click a button and you would
immediately find everybody on Facebook, individual people who had listed the same thing. I like

(18:08):
James Therber and I like half videos, and I like this one.
Indeed, the early internet really was all about connection. And this is where the cats come in.
It was cats that connected people across the internet from the get-go.
There's a few sort of universal human places of connection and cats and cat videos is one.

(18:35):
The thing that's so thrilling about them is a cat can at any moment be about to do something stupid
and embarrassing or noble and beautiful and it's at the same time, right? This is where we're
joined together in love of cats is like this whole love of the unexpected and excitement.
Interestingly, it was rodents that actually helped first bring kitties into the space.

(19:02):
Why does that sound familiar? I became aware that there were going to be absurd animal videos
right at the very beginning of the internet in the mid 90s when I first saw a website called
hamster dance. It was these like hamsters that were like allegedly dancing. My daughters would like

(19:23):
actually do the slow rotating and they would swing and the few people that were online at that point
were just completely obsessed with it. Oh yes, we were.
But of course we had no band with them. I mean, it was like literally impossible on these
modems that we had. You couldn't even send photographs at all. What passed for the internet in my
life was, and then see our team monitor two colors, kind of green and black. And so it was very exciting

(19:50):
when we started to be able to have photographs. Everybody put their pets up almost the first possible
thing. And this became a bonding mechanism for people all over the world to post pictures of their cats.
From scanners to digital cameras to today's smartphones, the trafficking of cute cat photos and

(20:11):
stories increased rapidly. As did groups, forums, platforms, and other types of community gathering
spaces online for pet owners and myers and for investigators.
It was an inevitability that people were going to film in cap videos and they just became more and
more fun and silly and funnier. And I would say 2010 to 2015 there was a real sort of golden age

(20:38):
of making awesome ridiculous videos of pets where it was just one person looking at my cat.
Yeah, it's this emotional connection to our adorable furry friends that will keep this kind of
content alive and flourishing on the web forever more or at least I hope. I think that's never going to end.

(20:58):
People are always going to love animals and they're going to love seeing other people's animals
and they're going to love an animal that gets rescued. And I still see the video of those guys who
had the pet lion and I've been like watching a hundred times. We now return to the present 30 years

(21:20):
after Hamster Dance and those weird homegrown community driven spaces, random chat rooms or forums
or rudimentary pages where you could make best friends with I love kittens and babies 1976.
A nice fellow youth or so you hoped messaging you from Omaha Nebraska. Well those spaces disappeared

(21:41):
or dissolved. Early web domains like geocities and browsers like Netscape gave way to the monolith
that is Google or alphabet. Stuff has become more accessible and affordable like high speed internet
and computers capable of processing more and more information that we can download within

(22:02):
seconds, microseconds into our ubiquitous handheld devices. Not all of this is bad per se but
the commercialization of the internet is the thing I wrote about in the essay and I mean what was
evident and slightly troubling and less fun in 2016 in 2023 is just become turbocharged into

(22:26):
appearance sanity to make money out of it then algorithmize and generate ad views and stuff. There's
always 10 computers in the way between you and anything. Less and less is it possible to just
find a person that you want to talk to by yourself without a commercial mediation and so there's

(22:48):
a less organic kind of feeling. The worldwide web has become well more and more homogenized
and whitewashed. Everything is starting to look and sound similar in all of this search engine
optimized driven language and for many reasons partly due to the huge population online as well

(23:11):
as this commercialization it feels very depersonalized almost not as human as it used to be. Look I'm
not saying anything original here this has been reported on by many a journalist researcher and
every single person who says I can't figure out TikTok it's intimidating.
Sure the internet is a marketplace but underneath all of that it is a community.

(23:40):
So I think we really need to value those chaotic wonderful cat videos not only because they're cute
but because they really do represent something so special about the culture of the internet.
I like the idea of exploring humanity through something like cats because I think it is that way

(24:02):
with pizza you know the more I go around the world obviously everyone's differences are important
and it's hard we're entering like a global culture where there's a flat lining of a lot of things
but I do think it's still a good thing to think of people is like we are all just humans feeling the
same human problems and you know that all the cats in the world are just cats dealing with their own cat

(24:25):
problems. Yeah and we all need a community a forum a place where we can share stories support
solutions and when we're able find the humor in them or our cat's problems as long as they're not
terrible. In the beginning of the internet there was pizza and there were kitties.

(24:54):
Cats truly are the symbol of the internet just pull up your keyboard you'll see there are more
cat emojis than any other animal emoji just want them to make a pizza cat emoji.
I think the story of pizza and cats on the internet is a great reminder to stay weird stay playful

(25:18):
and make this second life we live online a giant cat filled pizza party.
You're doing the world a good thing when you share a cute story or a picture of a cat so go
ahead and do that now and remember to tag @6DegreesOfCats so we can see it.
Thanks folks I know it was a real leap from pizza to pussy cats - that alliteration got a little edgy

(25:43):
there. In the next episode we'll be continuing our celebration of all things kitty as it'll be
Valentine's Day. We did an episode last Valentine's Day on Cupid and Kitties check out that episode
if you haven't listened to it already then make your own cat Valentine meme. I want to thank my wonderful

(26:05):
experts Maria Bustillos and Anthony Falco. While the opinions are my own the research and work
is theirs if you'd like to learn more about them please check out our show notes which also include
the references and research that went into this episode. If you loved it please help this pirate
ship sail across the worldwide web by sharing it writing about it and giving us a top rating and

(26:29):
a review with all those SEO keywords or whatever listeners community members brands on the internet
I appreciate you it's always so great to remember that everyone and everything is connected.
6 Degrees of Cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours truly Captain Kitty aka Amanda B.

(26:55):
please subscribe to our mailing list by going to linktr.ee/6degreesofcats
or look us up on all those social media platforms. You'll be first in line for the extra audio
and more treats if you connect with us there. All episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood,
the marginalized, the resilient and the weird and of course all the cats we've loved and lost.

(27:22):
[Music]
Maru is the one for me it's so obvious but I mean there's just I have yet to see another cat star
that would dislodge Maruin my heart, he's like the cat version of like Clive Owen for me.
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