Bonsai Kitten

» see bonsaikitten.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In December 2000 I was two years into a dial-up connection in Turkey, and forwarded outrage was the internet's main delivery system everywhere, so Bonsai Kitten is the kind of address that could have turned up in any inbox I had. What happened to it afterward could only have happened where it happened. An American university's legal office, an American federal field office, American animal-welfare organizations with mailing lists, and that whole machine is something I know from the reporting rather than from anywhere near it.

The site claimed to sell kittens raised inside glass jars, so that the animal would grow into the shape of the container. It was presented as a product line, with an ordering page and a gallery, and it was a hoax from the first byte. An MIT graduate student built it and gave the handful of press interviews under the name Dr. Michael Wong Chang, describing it as satire aimed at the human habit of treating living things as goods you can specify. The HTML says the same thing more quietly. An editor comment left in the page records that the file was created at 5:25 PM on 23 January 2001 by Claris Home Page 3.0, which is a consumer web-page editor, on a student's own machine.

It had a wordmark, a scrolling status-bar script that listed the site's name in six languages, an animated NEW badge and a meow.wav embedded in the page. The craft level is that of a hobby site from 1999, because that is exactly what it was.

~ the chronicle ~

~ eleven hosts in one month ~

The response was immediate and enormous. Animal welfare organizations circulated calls to have it taken down, petitions went around, and the email came in by the tens of thousands. The Humane Society said it could not determine whether the site was genuine, and asked for it to be removed either way, on the grounds that even a convincing fake might encourage someone to try it.

Hosting providers folded one after another. Inside a single month the site was picked up and dropped by eleven different servers, each of them taking it on and then discovering what arrives in your abuse inbox when you do. In March 2001 it landed at Rotten.com, which was the one address on the web with nothing left to lose, and it stayed there.

~ the subpoena ~

In February 2001 the FBI's Boston field office issued a grand jury subpoena to MIT for everything the university held about the site. This is the detail worth sitting with. A federal agency went to a university with a court order over a web page that a student had made in a WYSIWYG editor, because enough members of the public had written in to demand it.

The investigation found what every reporter on the story had already found: no animal had been harmed, and no kitten had ever been sold. No charges followed. The site stayed where it was, and the complaints against it shifted from whether the kittens were real to whether a convincing enough depiction of cruelty should be allowed to exist at all.

~ the domain lapsed ~

Nobody won. The site just stopped being paid for. The Internet Archive holds captures of the front page running steadily from 2001 through 3 March 2006, every one of them between 2,400 and 2,590 bytes, unchanged for years. After that date the crawler stops finding anything at all for nine months, which is what happens when a host stops answering.

The next capture, on 22 December 2006, is 599 bytes long. It reads: the domain bonsaikitten.com has expired, please contact your reseller. Below that, an iframe pulling parked advertising from Google's domain park service. The page that pulled a grand jury subpoena and burned through eleven hosts in a month ended as an unpaid invoice with keyword ads stapled to it.

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