4:52pm June 23, 2014

Cat’s Cradle, and the karass effect of the internet

Cat’s Cradle (the Kurt Vonnegut novel) is a weird, dense, chaotic book. On the surface it’s sort of a satirical dystopian sci-fi sort of thing with loads of characters who come across (to me) as fairly annoying, but that’s sort of typical for Vonnegut, and overall Cat’s Cradle was easier for me to get through than, say, Slaughterhouse 5.

I read Cat’s Cradle for the first time when I was about 16, and again a couple times a few years later, and I’m sure if I read it again I’d notice a million things I hadn’t before.

But there were a couple ideas in it that struck me as really interesting even as a teenager. One in particular is the concept of karass, defined (per the above-linked wikipedia article) as:

“karass - A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.”

The granfaloon, meanwhile, is sort of the inverse of a karass and is defined thusly:

“granfaloon- a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. [or put another way, a group of people whose only connection is superficial]”

Anyway, though, I’ve found this pair of concepts to be…really useful and true to a number of things that I’ve never really encountered “regular” English words for. Like…there’s this thing. Where for years I’ve ended up encountering the same people online in different contexts. We’re in the same places for different reasons in some cases, and we’ve got different main issues we focus on when we’re being serious. But there’s *something* that links us. We’re not a “team” in any formal sense, but we are nonetheless inextricably connected by something like…I don’t know, an invisible web of fine threads.

Specifically, here on tumblr there are at least…hmm, 5 or 6 people that I perceive as being in a karass-like situation. There’s me, and youneedacat, and karalianne, and codeman38, and swankivy, and clatterbane, and a number of others. And it’s uncanny and kind of cool the way it seems like we all sort of end up gravitating to the same internet haunts without really meaning to. Even if we don’t directly interact all the time, it’s like…I find it really neat knowing that y’all are out there doing your work for the universe (so to speak) and that on some level I can’t even describe in words, there’s a common purpose there.

(Okay hopefully nobody was weirded out by this! And I don’t mean to say only the people I mentioned have any kind of subtle bizarro-but-cool connection, I’m really bad at remembering that loads of people even exist all at once, and I don’t claim to have ultimate judgment on this sort of thing to begin with. Really, I’m just taking a fictional concept and applying it to make an analogy to something I perceive in real life that I’m pretty sure is a thing but which it’s hard to find standard words for. So take it for what it’s worth. :))