Global data created per year

We have discovered that the universe's information generation and America's fatal dog encounters are moving in perfect, eerie synchronisation, as if the cosmos had appointed itself a sort of celestial correspondent to our most specific local disasters. One would have thought that zettabytes—actual zettabytes, which is a word that sounds like a sneeze in a library—would concern themselves with matters of genuine cosmic significance rather than the statistical likelihood that your neighbour's golden retriever is becoming increasingly homicidal. Yet here we are, watching data expand and dog fatalities tick upward with the devoted lockstep of a couple who've learned to waltz at exactly the wrong moment in history.

The obvious culprit is population growth, which drives both trends with the relentless momentum of a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel: more Americans means more dogs, more opportunities for catastrophic misunderstandings, and also more people generating data about the misunderstandings. The rise of cloud computing, smartphones, and the general human compulsion to document everything from breakfast to bereavement has meant we're creating roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes per day by 2023—that's enough to fill 330 million 16GB iPhones, every single day—and simultaneously, economic prosperity has meant more leisure time, more dog ownership, and more opportunities for the statistical improbability of tragedy. Add in regional reporting variations, breed popularity cycles, and the fact that dog attack data wasn't consistently tracked in 2015 but absolutely was by 2023, and you've got a correlation that feels inevitable only if you squint sideways at it.

What we're witnessing is not causation but the universe's infinite capacity for pattern-generation, which is to say we are very good at finding reasons to believe that unrelated things are best friends. This particular correlation teaches us mainly that in an age of exponential data creation, we're probably going to find a lot of coincidences that move together through time for entirely separate reasons. The real question isn't whether data creation causes dog attacks. It's whether we'll ever stop looking.