The Cat in the HatGPT
Look at me! Look at me! Look at me now!
Unlike other moralistic Seussian fables (cf. The Lorax, The Sneetches), The Cat in the Hat [Random House Books for Young Readers; $6] has snuck by as a “pure fun” tale for beginning readers. The cat’s energy pours out of the pages, and the stark contrast between boredom and thrill, responsibility and vivacity, is something both children and Millenials can deeply relate to.
But is there a deeper lesson here? Do we really need to be told, “Don’t let strangers barge into your house, juggle your stuff, and release wild animals?”
Well, in 2024, that moral is relevant. The cat is out of the bag. It’s in your pocket, your car, and on your face. Cats own the algorithms, own the capital, own our attention. Seuss delivers a moral as only Seuss can: people, beware the hype beast!
As a refresher, Cat in the Hat tells the story of two bored children who are suddenly impinged by a free-wheeling cat who bursts with optimism and energy.1 Hijinks ensue. Their fish, the cat’s clammy challenger, contests the cat’s bravado to no effect. Only when their mother returns from her errands do the children finally summon the courage to act.
The cat is hype. You know the type — big data, crypto, MDS, AI, LLMs. Bootcamp grad. Academic dropout. Thought leader. The cat absorbs the latest news about the latest thing and parlays it into attention-seeking behavior — “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me now! It’s fun to have fun but you have to know how!”
Hype beasts are harmless – unless they get inside the house. And that’s the story here: a pair of bored managers don’t realize what they’ve done. They gave the cat a credit card and an AWS account, and then they are forced to watch, mystified, as he puts on demo after demo of advanced AI trickery. They watch as he releases his two things — AI and ML ? —to bump, thump, thump, bump around the hallways.
“These things are good things, they want to have fun!” The cat assures everyone as they run amok. “They are tame! Oh, so tame!”
Hype beasts aren’t evil. They are just genuinely hyped. Their political platform is pro-fun. It’s as pure and simple and childlike as that. Of course, they won’t think about the business sense! Of course, they’ll unnecessarily leverage technology! “What if we replaced user profile settings were NFTs?!” What if?!
The cynic sees opportunism in the cat’s behavior. Waiting outside the door, barging in unannounced, moving from ideation to action without pausing to ask — does the business need this? Does anyone need this?
But Seuss sees the cynic not as a solution to hype but as its opposite. The Fish in the Bowl is a foil to the Cat in the Hat. The fish is anti-fun – not due to reason, but from some flavor of ego repression. The fish is a hype-eater, a gripe beast. Where the hype beast breathes fire, the cynic spits water. The cynic is a wet blanket.
If Internet culture unlocks cat-behavior, it does the same for fish-behavior. “‘Now look what you did!' said the fish to the cat. ‘Now look at this house! Look at this! look at that!’” The fish can point, can downvote, can post scathing commentary, but cannot escape the hype cycle any more than the hype beast can! The fish just can’t even. Like, seriously.
For readers, it’s a captivating dance. But it also explains the actual dynamics of, for example, the Gartner Hype Cycle. As the Hot New Thing, the cat takes an early, uncontested attention monopoly. Then the reactionary griping begins. It’s a back and forth dance, but fun has the last word. The gripers can’t win; but they settle for equilibrium. The hype cycle ends with a positive hype displacement. A wink from the cat.
Bystanders — especially children and middle management — are caught in the middle of these two forces, dumbfounded but entranced, as they duke it out. Our heads bob from left to right and right to left – or perhaps, swipe, tap, swipe, tap, swipe, tap — as hype and gripe go back and forth.
The moral question is, what will the children do? Get hyped? Start griping? Something else?
This tension comes to a head when the mother, the adult comes home. The children finally act, expelling the cat and its Things from from their home.
The mother’s role in the story is open for debate. There’s a clear case that she represents “reality” – the basic facts of biology or physics or economics that force us to adhere to social contracts, if we don’t want to end up hungry and on the streets. At some point, that LLM proof-of-concept must get integrated into Salesforce, where it transcends both hype and gripe. It becomes work. In this reading, there is an inevitability to adulthood that all children must face, which shakes the children from their hype-fueled stupor.
But I think this gives too much credence to external pressures. If there’s one thing the Internet has proven, it’s that we humans are happy to neglect our health, relationships, and social well-being to stay connected to the hype cycle. It takes a tremendous force to break us away. A super-natural force. And what can this force be, in the form of a mother, but love?
That mother doesn’t greet them with suspicion or judgment, but with an invitation: “‘Did you have any fun? Tell me. What did you do?'”
The mother gets it; she knows that cats walk the streets. But she sees her children are still clothed, still sitting at the window, still cleaned. Apparent equilibrium. How did this come to be, she asks? How was the time passed?
The question the children must face is not one of guilt — for they did little wrong. It is one of representation: “Should we tell her about it? Now what SHOULD we do?” The question is one of identity. Are we the type of people who give ourselves over to fun for fun’s sake?
The mother’s love makes them ask the question, but it doesn’t demand an answer. It rouses the children, it stirs us, but in a manner that elevates us out of the hype-gripe cycle.
But it leaves a door open. For with our ape-brains, and with the amount of technology coming at us, it may be quite beyond us to resist all that fun.
Instead of growing up, you could become the cat! That’s much easier than love or duty. Grab a hat with a wide brim to keep the rain out your face. Barge into houses. After all, it’s fun to have have fun, as long as you know how.