Babies named Alexa

It is a curious fact, and one that suggests the universe maintains a sense of ironic order we are wholly unprepared to appreciate, that as fewer parents named their daughters Alexa between 2010 and 2023, video game publishers found themselves with progressively more money to spend on things like hiring voice actresses to pretend to be Alexas. The correlation is almost perfect. Almost, in fact, suspiciously so.

What we are almost certainly watching is the slow collision of two separate cultural waves, each riding a larger economic tide. The naming trend reflects the rapid adoption of Amazon's Alexa voice assistant—parents grew uncomfortable naming their children after a gadget around 2014-2015, roughly when smart speakers stopped feeling futuristic and started feeling inevitable. Meanwhile, the video game industry was experiencing its own explosive growth cycle driven by mobile gaming, streaming platforms, and the release of hardware that made games feel genuinely three-dimensional. These are not connected by any thread of causation; they are simply two streams flowing in opposite directions while standing in the same river. To put it in perspective: in 2010, fewer than 5,000 babies received the name Alexa annually. By 2023, that number had fallen to around 2,000—roughly equivalent to the population of a small English village, vanishing one crib at a time.

The real miracle is not that these datasets correlate so perfectly, but that we can construct a coherent-sounding explanation for almost any two lines on a graph if we squint hard enough and invoke the right economic cycles. Parents and video game executives were never in conversation; they were simply both responding to the same technological moment, each in their own bewildered way. The correlation tells us nothing about causation, but it tells us something worth knowing about ourselves. We are pattern-seeking creatures in a universe that is drowning in patterns.