BlackBerry global smartphone market share

It is a curious fact that as BlackBerry phones became less popular—a device that once felt like the future but turned out to be merely rectangular—Americans simultaneously began spending more money on weddings, as if one pocket was emptying while another filled with orchids and fondant. The correlation is so tidy it almost suggests that every BlackBerry discontinued somewhere in Toronto required an extra $3,000 in floral arrangements in Des Moines. One wonders if there was a law we all forgot about.

What's genuinely interesting is that both trends track something much larger: the 2008 financial crisis and its uneven aftermath. BlackBerry market share collapsed because the iPhone arrived in 2007 and everyone wanted it, which is a straightforward story of technological displacement. But wedding costs rose during this same period—from around $20,000 in 2007 to $33,000 by 2016—partly because people postponed marriages during the recession and then made up for it with enthusiasm once the economy sputtered back to life, and partly because inflation and venue pricing simply accelerated. Both lines are really tracing the same economic anxiety and eventual recovery, just in completely different markets, like watching two entirely unrelated animals both react to the same invisible vibration in the ground.

This is what the internet era has taught us: correlation will find you, no matter how much sense your datasets refuse to make together. The BlackBerry and the wedding are now eternally linked in a 94-percent waltz that means almost nothing and yet somehow happened anyway. We are pattern-finding creatures living in a universe of pure noise, occasionally delighted by what the noise resembles.