Global data created per year

It appears that as humanity generates more digital information—a torrent that would have seemed like pure science fiction in 2015—the price of sitting in a dark room watching other humans pretend to be different humans has risen in near-perfect synchronisation, as if the universe were running a cosmic joke on our collective sense of what matters. One might expect these two things to have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, yet they correlate at 0.969, which is the statistical equivalent of being told your houseplant and your mortgage are basically the same thing. They are not, of course, but the data would like to have words with you about it.

What's likely happening here is that both are riding the same economic tide—inflation, rising consumer spending, and the general expansion of the digital economy all conspiring to make everything more expensive in the way that everything becomes more expensive whether anyone particularly asked for it. The explosion in data creation (we went from roughly 10 zettabytes in 2015 to over 120 by 2023, which is a number so large it stops meaning anything) correlates with increased technological adoption, streaming services, and cloud infrastructure investments, while movie ticket prices climbed in tandem with theatre operators' costs, supply chain pressures, and the simple fact that going to the cinema became something only people who genuinely wanted to be there would do. Both rode the same wave of post-2008 recovery and pre-2020-collapse economic optimism, then both continued climbing as people found new ways to spend money on intangible experiences.

The correlation tells us something rather wonderful about how often we mistake companionship for causation, how data loves to whisper sweet conspiracy theories into our ears, and how the world remains baffled by its own behaviour. Neither the data explosion nor the ticket price increases caused the other, yet there they are, moving together like dance partners who've never met. Which is either deeply reassuring or deeply unsettling, depending on your tolerance for coincidence.