Sneezing Kittens and the Ethics of Trolling a Toddler

A kitten sneezes hard enough to surprise itself. A sloth leans into a scratch with the concentrated gratitude of something that’s been waiting years for this exact moment. Corgi puppies look up at the camera and short-circuit whatever terrible thing you were just thinking about. CuteBreak was a site dedicated entirely to aggregating this kind of content—a corner of the web in active opposition to everything else happening on it—and it served a genuine function, which is more than you can say for most of the internet.

And then there’s the other genre: filming a small child’s complete emotional disintegration when you tell them you’re going to sell their little sibling. It’s mean in a way that’s hard to fully defend. It’s also genuinely funny, and the distance between those two things has never been as wide as we pretend. Roseanne—America’s great working-class family sitcom—built multiple seasons on this exact dynamic. The Conner kids existed partly to be messed with by adults who told themselves it built character. Nobody pulled the show. Kids are resilient, or at least that’s the story we tell while queuing up the next clip.

The internet is mostly terrible. There are moments, though—a sneezing kitten, a sloth getting what it needs—where it briefly earns its existence. Those moments are worth protecting.