US mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people

It turns out that Americans' ability to carry a telephone in their pocket correlates almost perfectly with their ability to buy heirloom tomatoes from someone named Derek, which suggests either that mobile phones are somehow calling farmers markets into existence, or that the universe has decided these two things are cosmically linked for reasons it hasn't bothered to explain. Between 2005 and 2022, as phone subscriptions climbed from about 70 per 100 people to over 120 per 100 people (which is to say, we've somehow acquired more phones than people), farmers markets multiplied as if someone had whispered a spell into the network. The real mystery is whether we're buying local vegetables because we can text about them, or texting about them because we desperately need something local to believe in.

The more you stare at this correlation, the more you realise these aren't really twins at all, just two trends that happened to walk in the same direction while completely ignoring each other. Mobile phone adoption and farmers market growth both follow the general prosperity and urbanisation curve of the 2000s and 2010s—phone penetration accelerated as data became cheaper and smartphones became inexpensive enough for everyone including your uncle, while farmers markets boomed partly because urban populations grew and became sufficiently affluent and anxious about food sourcing to shop at them. What's genuinely astonishing is that by 2022, there were nearly 9,000 farmers markets in operation, a number that feels impossibly large until you realise the US also has 130 million mobile phones, at which point suddenly everything is inexplicably enormous. Both trends reflect the same underlying shift: a wealthier, more connected, more geographically concentrated population making different consumption choices.

The real story here is that humans are pattern-recognition machines who will notice when two things move in the same direction and immediately begin spinning stories about causation, which is probably healthy up until the moment you're making policy decisions based on farmers market density predicting phone adoption. This particular correlation doesn't mean anything, which hasn't stopped us from noticing it, and that's somehow both the point and the problem. We see connections everywhere because the universe is actually quite densely connected, but mostly by accident.