Ancient Buddhist tale Newatia uses to explain principles that outlive their original justification. In the tale, monks tie up a disruptive cat during meditation on a Taoist guru's orders; generations later, long after both guru and cat are dead, scholars write learned essays on the importance of tying up a cat before evening meditation. Newatia argues tech loves tethered cats — e.g. the industry belief that hybrid apps are slow, ugly or insecure, whose original conditions (2012-era mobile JS performance, bad shared-codebase tooling) no longer apply.