BlackBerry global smartphone market share

It is a curious fact, and one that ought not to be curious at all, that as fewer people bothered to own a BlackBerry—that peculiar brick designed by someone who believed the future was both smaller and more keyboard-heavy—sharks became markedly less interested in eating Americans. One wonders what the BlackBerry's market share algorithm knew about oceanic predation that we did not. Possibly nothing.

The answer, it turns out, is probably sitting in the same place where most good answers sit: somewhere obvious we weren't looking. Both trends bottomed out around 2013-2014, which was precisely when smartphones stopped being luxury items and became atmospheric oxygen—everyone had one, all at once, which means fewer people were buying new ones, which means market share cratered. Simultaneously, shark attacks followed a different logic entirely: more people were simply doing more things in the ocean. A 40-year study tracking coastal beach visits would dwarf any smartphone dataset, yet here we are watching BlackBerry's 55% global share in 2007 vanish like a poorly designed operating system, while sharks maintained their steady 40-50 unprovoked attacks per year across America's coasts. The real variable, as always, was the one nobody measured.

What we have stumbled upon is not a conspiracy of phones and sharks but a demonstration of how patterns emerge from the sheer statistical mud of existence when you're not looking at the right things. The BlackBerry and the shark attack move in opposite directions for reasons that have almost nothing to do with each other, yet they correlate nonetheless, which tells you everything you need to know about correlation and nothing about causation. We are meaning-making creatures in a meaningless universe, which is fine. We just keep terrible notes.