Where Everything Fights Everything
Acrobatic rodent obsessed with nut collection, featuring impressive jumping skills and bushy tail.
Autonomous cleaning device that terrorizes pets and gets stuck under furniture.
The Winner Is
Social media claims this peculiar victory, though one suspects the bear remains magnificently unconcerned. The digital predator has achieved what no physical creature could: ubiquitous presence without material existence, influence without proximity, and predation without the inconvenience of actually consuming one's prey.
Consider the efficiency differential. A grizzly bear requires approximately 20,000 calories daily during peak feeding season, obtained through considerable physical exertion. Social media requires only that you glance at your phone, a behaviour humanity now performs 96 times daily on average. The caloric investment comparison favours the algorithm rather dramatically.
Yet something valuable resides in the bear's approach. It asks nothing of you unless you enter its territory. It does not follow you home, ping you with notifications, or algorithmically suggest content designed to extend your engagement. The bear, in its ancient wisdom, understood that sustainable predation requires allowing prey populations to recover.
Social media has not yet learned this lesson. The attention economy operates without rest periods, harvesting human focus until exhaustion intervenes. Whether this proves sustainable remains the defining question of our technological moment. The bear survived five million years through strategic restraint. Social media has survived two decades through strategic excess. History shall determine which approach merits emulation.