Eulogy for a Cat in the Digital Age

Michael Lee

It was his time. Advanced kidney disease had sapped his appetite and limited his mobility. My parents were with him in his final moments. He didn’t fight it. He was at peace. I received the call a short time later that our family cat of nearly 17 years had passed.

Opening my phone later that evening, the first thing I was greeted with was my Photos app showing me a little slideshow it had put together for me entitled “Pet Friends.” Helio made up every photo in the album as an instrumental version of Pearl Charles’ song “As Long As You’re Mine” played. It’s no surprise, Helio was my only ‘Pet Friend’ and he is by far the most photographed subject on my phone. The algorithm did the math and figured I’d probably like to see this ‘Pet Friends’ album. It didn’t know that Helio had passed on earlier that day. Machines are cold that way. (or maybe it did know, which is even more unnerving)

memories and the machine

Helio is the first loved one I have lost in the fully integrated, always online, digital age. My grandparents passed away in the mid-2010s but as their health declined we took less photos. We had so many physical, printed and framed, family photos from years past of vacations together and important life milestones, that as the years went on, we were unconsciously (or perhaps consciously) curating our memories of them so that now when we remember them, we are taken back to ‘the good times.’ But when photography becomes integrated with the machine, the ways in which we remember people (and pets) come to be influenced—or to put it more maliciously, manipulated—by algorithms in such a way that our own memories can be manufactured by the machine.

Our phones now do so much work for us. And with their powerful cameras, they serve as the assistant documentarian of our lives. Which is particularly evident in these AI generated movie/slideshows. While we may be the director of this documentary—though truthfully we probably only have a vague producer credit at this point—we let the phone do so much else. It serves as the cinematographer, the editor, and even does the sound design. There’s nothing wrong with Pearl Charles’ song, but its soft folksy vibe has nothing to do with Helio at all. He was more rock’n’roll. By leaving the work of grouping together images and creating narratives to algorithmic processing we are outsourcing the emotional labor of memory creation. Letting an app determine what it thinks we should imprint onto our own souls as adequate remembrance of those no longer with us. Doing this still helps form memories, but… they feel so much more shallow.

troublemaker

Helio was much more of a handful than our previous cat, Luna (yes, she was a 90s cat, Sailor Moon was very popular at the time). Where Luna was caring and affectionate, Helio was indifferent and standoffish. It wouldn’t be until his senior years that he would mellow and become a real softie. He was always getting into trouble. A scrap with another neighborhood cat, the parade of “gifts” he would brings us, from birds, to mice, to even squirrels he hunted, but nothing was more harrowing for our family than the time he went missing for 3 days. Sneaking out of an open patio door, he ran off one night. We thought he was a goner. Raccoons had killed a friend’s cat in our neighborhood years earlier, and we assumed the same fate would befall Helio. But on the third morning, a faint cry was heard at the back door around 5:00am. It was Helio. Covered in burs and hungry, but otherwise unharmed, he’d come back to us. After that, a strict harness policy was in place for our dummy of a cat who couldn’t find his way home that one time. He didn’t adapt well to the restriction, and would wind himself around trees often with the harness and leash rendering him hilariously immobile at times. Photos of this remind us of how much of a goof Helio was.

neverending state of memory

With the ability to now snap photos anywhere at any time, there seems to be a cultural devaluation of the photograph as a memory node. Taking photos was an occasion. I remember going down to the Sears Portrait Studio to get the family photo done for Christmas. My great-grandfather had one photo, and boy is it amazing. He is fully decked out in his 1920s finest, a stoic expression on his face, and because it is the only photo, you pore over the details. His story is in that photo, the story of a young man who had just arrived in England from Hong Kong looking to start a new life in an unfamiliar place. Prior to photography, portraiture was the only way to record someone’s image. And this was often out of the reach of the common folk. We’re lucky that a device in our pockets can do something so powerful.

Technology allows us to create a memory in a flash, but because it’s so easy to snap a pic we think less about why we do it. For many, a photo is as much about memory as it is about chasing an endorphin high from likes garnered on social media. But even if our goal is to capture a memory, we’re so caught up in not wanting to miss a moment that we’re endlessly snapping away. It feels like we’re so unsure of ourselves, of what our own story will be, of how to frame our own lives, that we click click click in an effort to record everything. But with so much footage, how do you even begin to edit it down to a memory you will actually retain? Sara Reinis writes in the sadly now defunct RealLifeMag:

“Highlights” encourage us to rely on externally imposed criteria of relevance, freeing us from the responsibility of intentionality: Rather than considering the potential significance of a moment while capturing an image, we can take an endless amount of snapshots with the assurance that algorithms will eventually produce relevance for us after the fact.

Yet as these apps calculate which of our photos will lend itself to creating an emotionally impactful movie or slideshow, it does so in a vacuum that excludes us from its calculations. I was surprised to find that out of the hundreds of photos I have of Helio, not once have these apps ever pulled my actual favorite photos of him. In his case, the AI processing seems to choose only photos where it can clearly identify him. This means Helio is often fully in the frame and looking at the camera. If he is looking away, or obscured, it tends to not select those photos of him as it can’t be 100% sure it’s him. The candid shots that really capture his personality aren’t chosen, which puts these ‘memories’ my phone has chosen at odds with the memories of Helio in my mind. This becomes particularly evident when you can no longer snap photos of a loved one and all that remains is their digital presence.

Digital spaces of remembrance exist everywhere now. Facebook pages become memorials to those no longer with us. Someone’s last tweet becomes a site of mourning where people congregate to express their disbelief that a person is gone, or to find hidden, perhaps profound, meaning in their last statements to the world. Video games can include memorials to players who have died. People gather in digital space to remember someone who has been lost. Social media participation ensures us a plot in the internet graveyard (at least until the servers are shut down). Posts echo from the past in digital caverns, bouncing across timelines and devices, reverberating through us, reminding us of someone’s sense of humor or what their most important interests were. But on the flip side, with so much saved media of the people & pets we love, they have a tendency to show up unexpectedly and often. We are so connected, so wired into our devices, that there is no (realistic) escape from grief when we lose someone these days. The memories inside our phones, online, and scattered across the digital landscape find their way to us because we can’t disconnect. And because algorithms and optimizations push these memories towards us.

Helio shows up in the little Photos window on my home screen almost daily. I don’t mind. But there’s never any down time from remembering that he’s gone. It is a constant. I could tell the app that I don’t want to see Helio, but selecting that option, in its red font, feels like I’m rejecting Helio, which comes with its own complicated set of emotions. It is hard to know how much I’d like to be reminded of him, with what kind of frequency. Will I be happy to have these hundreds of photos years later when my memories of Helio become cloudy with the passage of time? I worry that the memories my Photos app has made will become my own in time. Will I lose the unphotographed moments I now cherish that still feel so fresh?

one last afternoon

I’m prone to taking a late afternoon nap from time to time, and on my final visit with Helio, staying with my parents the weekend before he left us, I could feel a little 4:00pm nap coming. Helio saw me sneak away but he’d been particularly affectionate this weekend. He followed me everywhere I went. As if he knew it might be the last time we’d see each other. He clamored his way onto my bed, up the makeshift staircase we assembled for him, and immediately dug himself under the covers. Something he normally would not do. He pressed his frail, bony little body up against my hip, curled up, and fell asleep next to me. There was no way I could nap, this moment was too precious, so I just read a book and stroked him gently. His faint purrs the only sound in the room save for the turning pages of my book. I don’t have a single photo of this memory, but that’s fine, I wouldn’t trust my Photos app to see the significance of it anyways.

Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and writes in other places as well. His work looks at video games, anime, and Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media. He misses Helio.