Global smartphone shipments

It turns out that the more rectangles we carry in our pockets, the more we want to buy heirloom tomatoes from people named Derek. Between 2009 and 2022, global smartphone shipments and American farmers markets moved together so precisely that one might suspect they were attending the same support group for things that grew exponentially for reasons nobody fully understands. This is what happens when you correlate literally everything with everything else long enough—you eventually find that humanity's appetite for connectivity and locally-sourced zucchini are, improbably, the same appetite.

But here's the thing: they probably aren't actually talking to each other. What they're both riding is the wave of disposable income and cultural anxiety that characterized the 2010s. Smartphones exploded because we got richer and more paranoid; farmers markets exploded because we got richer and more paranoid about where our food came from. Both required a certain baseline prosperity—you need money to buy a new phone every three years, and you also need money to pay six dollars for a bell pepper. By 2022, there were roughly 8,700 farmers markets operating in the US, which is to say one for every 40,000 people, a density that would have seemed utterly mad in 1995 but felt perfectly natural once we'd all learned to live inside our devices.

The real lesson here is that correlation is just what we call it when two different human anxieties move in the same direction at the same time. We were simultaneously trying to connect with everyone and reconnect with something real, and both of those projects happened to require buying things we didn't strictly need. This is not a warning; it is simply how we are.