whalefall!

Are you familiar with Whale Fall?

Here's a cool description from tumblr:

"With a "normal" whalefall, we're talking about something (a dead whale, to be precise) that lands in an EXTREMELY nutrient-poor environment, the deep ocean. It's not the equivalent of "a truck full of free hamburgers lands from the sky in the middle of your neighbourhood". This is an environment where an important part of the food chain is "marine snow", aka flakes of organic matter (including feces) that drift down from above, and they eat that because it's possible to get nutrients from it. So when a whole-ass (or partial-ass, because it's already been nibbled on from sharks and the like) whale carcass arrives, it is something MAJOR. It starts a whole new localized ecosystem, an oasis of life; those that eat the dead whale, those that eat those that eat the dead whale, and so on. And as the whale is consumed, the creatures there shift, leaving when there's nothing left that they'd eat, arriving when parts of the whale that they DO eat are now exposed, and it continues until the very bones have been devoured.
Whalefalls are fascinating."

pomrania in this tumblr post

The tumblr post goes on to think about a "Sky Whale Fall", the death of a celestial being that changed the magic / cryptid ecosystem in an eldritch horror kind of way.
But, here's a less fun play on the idea - some industries are going through some serious, serious party-over-hangovers - tech and other startups after the thrill of COVID-era zero interest rates, the film industry once the streaming bonanza started running out of steam... but maybe more worrisome, what if the entire introduction of the Internet was similar?

"The invention of the internet is like a whale carcass at the bottom of the ocean. It's an anomaly that lasted 50 years. A lifetimes-long anomaly. Long enough that people started and ended their career within its duration. Long enough that books about "business practice" were written by people who thought it was a new normal. When tech VCs try to apply their startup culture to biotech, scientists have to slowly explain to them that you cannot launch a crop alpha release in 18 months"

elrohir@mastodon.gal put it on mastadon

Sobering metaphor. Especially for a guy who started his career as the whale was just hitting the seafloor, and just got laid off again.