The afternoon sun falls through the venetian blinds in a Betoota Heights living room, and the dust motes dance like old memories in the warm light. There is a china cabinet in the corner, filled with bowling trophies and a framed photograph of grandchildren in school uniforms. On the coffee table sits a plate of Arnott’s biscuits, half-empty, and the unmistakable smell of instant coffee hangs in the air. Jamie Bruce, 73, semi-retired white goods retailer, settles deeper into his recliner. He is wearing a polo shirt with a collar that has been ironed carefully, and his glasses rest on the bridge of his nose. The television is off, because his friends have come over to talk, and the conversation has drifted naturally from the price of petrol to the hospital waiting times to a vague, shared feeling that the world is changing too fast and no one has given them a manual. Jamie listens, nods, and then leans forward. He has something important to say. He is not a foolish man. For more than forty years, he sold washing machines, dishwashers and chest freezers, and that work taught him how to read people: their excuses, their budgets, the quiet way they glanced at the price tag and the heavier silence when they knew they couldn’t afford it. He has talked down a dozen marital arguments in his showroom by offering a payment plan and a cup of instant coffee. He knows how to solve practical problems. But the past few years have made him feel less useful, less certain, less sure of what is real and what is not. He got his first smartphone only in 2020, after his daughter insisted, because of vaccine check-ins and Medicare and, more than anything, so that he could see photos of his grandchildren. Now the dark glass of the phone sits on his knee like a sleeping cat, and he is full of information he cannot trace to any reliable source. But to Jamie, it all feels the same: it arrives on the same screen, in the same format, with the same authority. And today, in this room full of nodding heads, he is about to offer something he learned recently, something that frightened him, something that made him feel, for a moment, that he still understood the world.
The conversation has turned to schools, and Jamie’s cheeks flush slightly before he speaks. “Well, a lot of people are saying that kids are allowed to identify as cats at school nowadays,” he says. He pauses, letting that land. He cannot remember exactly where he read it, but that does not bother him. He knows he read it online, and for Jamie, online is where all the news is nowadays. He doesn’t distinguish between a newspaper article, a blog post, a meme, a sponsored post, or a piece of content made by a strange man in a basement on the other side of the world. It all appears the same on his phone, and he has never been taught that the phone is not a neutral window but a machine that chooses what he sees. The Facebook algorithm had served him this story one evening while he was eating leftovers and feeling lonely. It was a rather polarising thing to read, he remembers. It triggered an emotive response. He felt angry, then worried, then righteous. And because it made him feel something, the feeling clung to him longer than any retraction or correction could. He never thought to ask whether it was true. He assumed that wherever he had read it, it was the real deal. “Why would anyone just put stuff out there if it wasn’t true anyway?” is a question he has never consciously asked, but it hums underneath all his media consumption. Now he tells his friends, leaning in with the earnest conviction of a man who believes he is sharing a crucial public service announcement: “Like they have a kitty litter tray for them and everything. The teachers let them. Apparently it’s happening everywhere.” His voice is not mocking. He is not trying to be cruel. He is trying to warn them, to be useful, to prove that he is still engaged, still informed, still able to offer something valuable to the group. He would never spread a rumour about a neighbouring family’s private business without having seen proof with his own eyes. But online, he quietly believes, someone is accountable. There is a logo. There is a share button. That has to mean something. The thought gives him comfort, and the comfort becomes certainty, and the certainty becomes a part of his identity.
No one in the room has heard about the cats before. Helen tilts her head, her teacup frozen halfway to her lips. Ray says he thinks he saw something about it on his phone, but he couldn’t say where. Jamie feels validated. He goes on, half-remembering details that may or may not have been in the original post. He is not sure if it was in Canada or the United States or maybe Queensland. He is not sure if the school was public, private, or somewhere in between. But the facts, as he understands them, are clear enough: children are being allowed to identify as animals, school administrators are buying cat litter for classrooms, and teachers are expected to go along with it. He says the word “litter” with a kind of grave disgust, the way he might describe a leaky washing machine in a showroom. He looks around at his friends, waiting for someone to challenge him, but no one does. They are too polite, or too confused, or perhaps too tired to argue. And Jamie, emboldened, repeats the phrase that has lodged itself in his memory: “It’s happening everywhere.” He doesn’t pause to ask what evidence would convince him otherwise. He doesn’t click the links. He doesn’t search for the school district or the principal’s name or the news outlet’s original report. He doesn’t notice that the article was probably written to exploit people exactly like him: people who are frightened, people who love their grandchildren, people who feel that the world has become strange and unrecognizable. He doesn’t know that the algorithm has studied him, learned his fears, and delivers the most outrageous thing he is likely to believe. He doesn’t know that his anger is a product and his attention is a currency. All he knows is that he read it somewhere, it sounded real, it made him feel something, and now he feels duty-bound to pass it on. The human brain is not designed to abandon a belief that provides emotional meaning, even when the source is weak. Jamie is not a bad person. He is just a person, and he is doing what people have always done: trusting what feels true, especially when the world feels dangerous.
To understand Jamie, you have to understand that the cat story is not really about cats. It is about recognition. He was born in the early 1950s, into a country that trusted its institutions — or at least knew how to pretend that it did. The newsreader on the ABC was a reassuring uncle. The newspaper was printed on paper, folded, and thrown onto the driveway, and if you wanted to complain about something you read, you called a phone number and a human being answered. Facts had a weight, a physical presence, a chain of custody. Jamie learned the world through those channels. He learned that authorities were fallible but mostly honest, that if something appeared in a major newspaper, it had passed through many hands and many layers of caution. He never needed to become media literate in the way his grandchildren are being taught: check the source, find the original study, beware of confirmation bias, ask who benefits. The world changed around him, and he adapted as best he could — which is to say, he learned to use a smartphone but not to read the whole article. The cat story, for him, is part of a larger emotional autobiography. It makes him feel like he still understands what is happening in society, even though he doesn’t understand the technology, or the language around gender, or the strange fluidity of modern childhood. He remembers being told by his daughter that pronouns are not a fadcars, and that he should try to be respectful. He remembers not quite understanding but wanting to be a good father, a good grandfather, a good man. Then, one evening, his phone handed him a story that confirmed every private fear he had been too embarrassed to voice. It said, in effect: the world really has gone mad. It said: your instincts are right. It said: you are not the one who is out of touch. Of course he believed it. It made him feel sane. And the moment a piece of information makes you feel sane, you stop checking it. You stop asking where it came from. You stop noticing that your outrage is being manufactured by an algorithm that has learned exactly which buttons to press in a man like Jamie Bruce. That is not stupidity. It is vulnerability. And vulnerability is not something to be mocked; it is something to be understood.
The larger tragedy is that Jamie is not alone. His generation of Post-War Australians grew up in an information landscape with high barriers to entry. To print a newspaper cost real money. To broadcast required a licence, a masthead, a face that could be held accountable. Misinformation certainly existed back then — rumours at the pub, nasty letters to the editor, whispers about the neighbours — but it did not arrive in your pocket at two in the afternoon, formatted like a legitimate news report, and it did not carry the emotional urgency of something designed to go viral. Now the barriers have collapsed. Anyone can be a publisher. Anything can be styled as a website. The old architecture of trust has crumbled, and Jamie has been left standing in the ruins without a map. He doesn’t know the phrase “bot farm.” He doesn’t know that the article about children and litter trays was probably written by someone who has never been inside a school, or that it was shared five thousand times before the original source bothered to fact-check it. He doesn’t know that the reason he can’t remember the source is that the source was designed to be forgotten; only the anger, the fear, the sense of betrayal, was meant to stick. And his contemporaries nod along because they share his vulnerability. They are not monsters. They are grandparents and volunteers and churchgoers and community members. They donate to the local RSL and help at the school fete and look after their neighbours’ dogs when families go on holidays. They would never knowingly tell a lie. But they have been handed a system that rewards certainty over truth and emotion over evidence, and they have never been given the tools to survive it. The phrase “media literacy” sounds like a school subject — dry, patronising, something that has nothing to do with pensioners and bowls clubs. But it is actually the most urgent form of compassion. It is the difference between a man who shares a piece of news because he wants to protect his friends and a man who shares a lie because he has been exploited by a machine that wants his attention. Jamie has never thought of himself as a mark. But that is exactly what he has become.
After Jamie finishes his story, the room is quiet for a moment. Ray says he will ask his son about it, because his son is good with computers. Helen says she hopes it isn’t true, because it doesn’t sound right to her. Jamie shrugs and says with a mixture of resignation and conviction, “I know it sounds crazy, but the world is crazy now.” And this, in the end, is the sentence that explains everything. Jamie isn’t defending a policy. He isn’t trying to attack transgender children or secular schools or modern parenting. He is defending his perception of reality. He would rather believe that children are being given litter boxes than believe that he can no longer see what is true and what is false. The first possibility is outrageous but manageable; the second is unbearable. It would mean that his phone is lying to him, that his own mind is being used against him, that his feelings are not his own. And that is too much for any human being to accept easily. As the conversation moves on to other topics — the price of bananas, a footy scandal, whether the new electric kettle in the club kitchen is worth the money — Jamie feels satisfied. He has contributed. He has sounded the alarm. Nobody has challenged him, so nobody has forced him to face the possibility that he was fooled. Later tonight, he will scroll his phone again and see another headline, and the cycle will continue. The algorithm will remember that he paused on the cat story. It will give him more stories like it. It will sharpen the hook. But for now, in the golden afternoon light, with the smell of coffee and the sound of familiar voices, Jamie feels connected, informed and useful. And perhaps that is the deepest lesson of the cat story: Jamie Bruce is not the enemy. He is the quarry. He is a man who always believed that information was a kind of power, but he never understood that it could also be a kind of trap. The real problem is not his willingness to believe nonsense — it is the cold, engineered, profitable ecosystem that preys on his fear and calls it engagement. The most human response, when we see Jamie in that afternoon living room, is not anger and not mockery. It is grief. In another era, his curiosity and his concern would have made him a well-informed citizen, the kind of neighbour you trusted, the kind of grandfather who could explain the world. Today, they make him a mark. And until we understand that, we will keep arguing about children and cat litter while the real predators hide behind the algorithms, unnamed, unaccountable, and smiling all the way to the next share.