Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf population

It turns out that the number of gray wolves roaming the Northern Rockies between 2016 and 2022 moved in almost perfect synchronisation with the subscriber count of a person whose primary skill is giving away money on the internet, which is either a profound statement about the universe's sense of humour or evidence that the universe has finally given up entirely. One went up as the other went up, with the kind of unsettling reliability you'd expect from variables that actually share a cause, except they don't, which somehow makes it worse.

The real culprit here is almost certainly time itself, that relentless forward march that affects everything simultaneously. Both wolves and YouTube subscribers benefited from the same seven-year tailwind: growing internet penetration in rural America (making wolf population data more accessible to citizen scientists and MrBeast videos more watchable in Montana), increasing cultural interest in environmental causes and charismatic content creators alike, and the general expansion of digital ecosystems that happened to coincide with successful wolf reintroduction programs reaching critical mass. To put it in physical terms, we're talking about roughly 1,700 additional wolves and 150 million additional subscribers over the same period—one occupying a landscape the size of Belgium, the other occupying an algorithmic void that somehow generates revenue proportional to spectacle.

We are pattern-recognition machines who have built pattern-recognition machines, and now we're genuinely startled when the machines find patterns that exist only because we're looking at the same seven years from different angles. The wolves didn't watch MrBeast; MrBeast didn't summon wolves; they simply grew up together in a world that was growing up too. Correlation remains what it has always been: the universe's way of reminding us how little we actually understand.