US federal prison population

It appears that as Kim Kardashian's Instagram followers climbed from 30 million to 300 million between 2015 and 2021, the federal prison population did something rather unexpected: it declined by about 180,000 inmates. One might reasonably expect the universe to have better things to do than arrange these two numbers in perfect inverse waltz, yet here we are. The cosmos, it turns out, has a sense of irony but no sense of proportion.

What we're probably witnessing here is the innocent collision of two entirely separate historical trends that happen to occupy the same seven-year window. The prison population dropped partly due to criminal justice reform efforts, sentencing guideline changes, and the simple fact that crime itself was declining—all unglamorous policy mechanics. Meanwhile, Instagram itself was exploding, and Kardashian, who had already mastered the platform's grammar of attention in ways that make marketing consultants weep, was riding a wave of technological adoption that saw global smartphone users nearly double from 3.5 billion to 6.4 billion. These two trains were leaving the station from completely different platforms, heading to entirely different destinations, yet we've found ourselves standing on the platform marveling at their synchronized departure.

The real lesson here isn't that Kim Kardashian's popularity somehow deflates incarceration, nor that prisons shrink when Instagram grows, but rather that our brains are pattern-detection engines that will happily detect patterns in the cosmic noise. We are, all of us, running powerful prediction software on a universe that mostly just shrugs. Perhaps that's not so terrible. Though we should probably buy better noise-canceling headphones.