Today's Wisdom - Whaling, the Dead Internet and Birdwatching

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For a country that loves its frontier legends, it is strange how little space whaling occupies in the American story. For most of the 19th century the United States utterly dominated one of the most dangerous and lucrative industries on Earth. At its height, the American fleet chased whales across every ocean on the planet. By 1857 the single port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, produced over 90 percent of the nation's whale oil and a commanding share of the entire world's supply. It became, per capita, one of the richest cities in America. Nantucket, which had dominated the trade earlier, grew so prosperous from the hunt that it was said there was not a single poor person left on it.

Whaling voyages sent crews of men on journeys of 17,000 miles and more into barely charted waters, rounding the treacherous Cape Horn to reach hunting grounds on the far side of the globe. The crews were astonishingly diverse for the age, drawn from dozens of nations and including many free Black sailors, all bound together in pursuit of an animal that could kill them in an instant. Hunting a sperm whale meant rowing a small wooden boat directly up to a creature the length of the ship itself, close enough to drive in a hand-held harpoon. Hundreds of men died when those whales fought back, staving in boats with a flick of the tail. Most other ports refused to hunt the sperm whale at all, judging it too dangerous, which only hardened the reputation of the Nantucketers for an almost reckless tolerance of suffering and risk.

No story captured that peril more vividly than the fate of the whaleship Essex. In November 1820, deep in the remote Pacific, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale. What followed was three months of unimaginable horror, as the survivors, slowly starving and driven mad by thirst, were eventually reduced to cannibalism. Only eight men survived. The tale spread through the whaling world and, three decades later, inspired a struggling writer named Herman Melville to create Moby-Dick. Yet beyond that single novel, an entire epic of American history has faded from memory. Whaling ought to occupy the place in the American imagination that the age of sail holds for Britain or the conquistadors hold for Spain, a chapter full of monsters, castaways, and men circling the globe in search of fortune. It remains one of the greatest untold adventure stories the country ever produced.

The dead internet theory began, as strange ideas often do, on the fringes of the web. Around 2017, users on forums like 4chan and a place called Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe started floating a chilling claim, that the internet as a human space had quietly died. They argued that most of what we now see online is generated by bots and artificial intelligence rather than real people. A 2021 forum post by a user named IlluminatiPirate crystallized the idea and gave it a name. In its original form it was a full-blown conspiracy theory, complete with the belief that governments and corporations were deliberately flooding the web with synthetic content to manipulate and control the population. For years it was easy to dismiss as paranoid nonsense, the kind of thing that thrives in the internet's darker corners. Then generative AI arrived, and the theory stopped sounding quite so mad.

The uncomfortable truth is that the observable half of the theory, stripped of its shadowy puppet-masters, has largely been confirmed by hard data. According to the cybersecurity firm Imperva, automated bot traffic overtook human traffic for the first time in 2024, accounting for 51 percent of all activity on the web. The content itself is going the same way. A 2025 study by the analytics firm Graphite found that around 52 percent of newly published online articles were AI-generated, a share that has climbed from barely 10 percent before ChatGPT launched. On social media the picture is starker still, with credible estimates suggesting that a majority of accounts in certain niches, and by some counts well over half of all accounts on X, are bots.

The numbers deserve a sober second look because the theory tends to overstate its own case. A large share of that "bot traffic" is perfectly benign, made up of search engine crawlers and indexing tools that keep the web usable. More reassuringly, quality still belongs overwhelmingly to people: one 2025 analysis found that 86 percent of the high-ranking content that actually answers your searches remains human-made, since most AI output is low-value filler that never rises to the top. Researchers warn of a phenomenon called "model collapse," in which AI systems trained mostly on the output of earlier AI systems gradually degrade into gibberish. The internet is not dead, but it is changing character faster than almost anyone predicted. Perhaps the most valuable thing on the web of the future will be the knowledge that a real person is on the other side.

Below - the internet is becoming a place where machines outpace humans. Agentic AI now consumes more than 5x the tokens of human use on OpenRouter, up 14x since February.

Once dismissed as a pastime for retirees in floppy hats, bird watching has quietly become one of the fastest-growing hobbies on the planet and 2026 saw it named one of the top ten global growth hobbies of the year. The surge began during the pandemic. Confined to their homes and gardens, millions of people suddenly noticed the flurry of life around the bird feeders outside their windows. In the United States alone there are now tens of millions of birders, and the fastest-growing group is young adults between 18 and 34. The appeal lies partly in its sheer accessibility. Birds are everywhere, in every city, park, and back garden, in every season, so the hobby requires no expensive equipment, no gym membership, and no travel. You can begin the moment you step outside, or simply by looking out of a window with a little wiser and a cup of coffee in hand.

Much of the recent boom has been powered by a single free app called Merlin, built by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It has been downloaded more than 23 million times. Point your phone at a singing tree and its Sound ID feature listens and tells you, in real time, exactly which birds are calling, even the ones hidden from view. It draws on a database that now covers nearly all of the world's 10,000 species. Snap a photo and it names the bird in seconds. Many newcomers describe the experience as oddly addictive, almost like collecting Pokémon, as they race to add new species to a personal life list.

A growing body of research suggests that watching and listening to birds delivers measurable mental health benefits beyond those of an ordinary walk in nature. In one study, students who took regular half-hour bird walks reported greater well-being and less psychological distress than those who merely strolled through green space, which hints that the focused attention birding demands is part of what resets a frazzled brain. Other research has linked the hobby to reduced anxiety and depression, sharper memory, and a deep sense of calm. Part of the appeal is that it forces you to slow down and notice, pulling your attention out of the endless scroll of a screen and anchoring it in the flick of a wing or a snatch of song. In an age of dead internets and artificial noise, bird watching offers a small, free encounter with the living world.

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The A Little Wiser Team