Review: Cat Love by Tomás Q. Morín

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Cat Love is enjoyable and playful, and uses that playfulness to explore the bleak realities of labor, care, capitalism, and exploitation. Morín explores the question of Schrödinger’s cat from the perspective of the cat. The novel then uses that setup to hold a mirror up to the systems we already live inside and remind us of their perversity. 

In this funhouse world of desperation and fleeting opportunity, people train to become support animals to other humans and must fully play the part. It is absurd, but it also feels very present and very prescient to the moment we are in. Their training, the ridiculous quizing of right choices to random questions to become support animals, the performance of care, and the degrading expectations all feel like recognizable extensions of the world of work now.

That is where the novel connects strongly to the last-mile automation problem. So much of the frictionless service of self-driving cars, perfect AI outputs, and the like typically come from an exploitation of human labor and the need for that human labor while being disugised as originating from the machine.  We are often promised magic—automation, artificial intelligence, frictionless service—but somewhere behind it there are still humans doing the dehumnazing and exploited work. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is the obvious example, but it is part of a much larger pattern in which human labor gets hidden so that something can be presented as automated or robotic.

Cat Love makes those costs much more visible. The people applying for these jobs are forced into their own dehumanization even though it is often presented as a "choice".  Part of that process is to participate in the needless death of a cat through a pseudo-Schrodinger's cat experiment.  This particular tale follows one of those cats to see and learn the layers of exploitation in the system and the different ways that people are victims of the system at different levels while they all perpetuate the harms. Something likely to resonate with anyone who finds themselves stuck in this space of feeling obligated to participate in practices or technologies that feel like they put us at odds with our values or ways we want to show up in the world.

Seeing this through the eyes of a cat makes seeing the perversity easier to approach without making it less serious. All portrayals of cats are anthropomorphizing, so that comes with the territory, but the cat is a useful vehicle for alienating the reader from the normal way things are. Seeing the world through her is part of what makes the story successful.

There is also something particularly effective about using a beloved domesticated animal in a story about exploitation and consumer capitalism. The pet industry itself has balloned to nearly $200 billion per year.  People deeply love their pets, but we often express that love through products and services brought to us by recommendation systems, surveillance capitalism, Amazon, and larger systems of exploited labor. The point is not that cats do not deserve this, but that it is that care and affection itself is turned into systems of capital, captured, and then redirected through the same systems of economics and exploitation that the novel is critiquing.

In the story on its own, anyone who lives with a cat (or any pet) will latch onto the unnamed cat's relationship with her previous human (named "Mustache).  There's a bit of wish fulfillment in seeing the cat try to find her way back to Mustache, despite being in the box. It also doesn't hinder us from entering the story's critique of capitalism and even pet ownership.  At a certain point in the novel, she transforms and when she does, that connect to her human is still important but by that point, one is also invested in what she was becoming and whether she should pursue revenge.   Once the novel moves into the revenge plot, it becomes more surreal.  What interested me more was how the attempt to get revenge pulled us deeper into the world: into the relationships, choices, and larger social, political, and economic structures that put the cat in the box in the first place.

The near-future setting works and doesn't feel too far from the present's reality. The novel blends together satire, grief, and weird fiction surprisingly well. It also connects strongly with nonfiction and speculative fiction about automation, hidden labor, and the commodification of care. It reminded me of Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con, and Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job. Across all of them is a similar question: what happens to connection or connective labor when it is increasingly captured by hyper-capitalism?

Cat Love approaches that question through a cat, a box, and humor. That playfulness gives the novel an easier lens through which to explore exploitation, but it does not soften the critique. It makes the machinery of the present easier to see.

---

Did you enjoy this read? Let me know your thoughts down below or feel free to browse around and check out some of my other posts!. You might also want to keep up to date with my blog by signing up for them via email.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.