The cameras never sleep. Seventeen high-definition lenses mounted along the Brooks River in Katmai National Park stream 24/7 to explore.org, where millions watch brown bears catch salmon in midair, their jaws closing on calories that mean the difference between life and death come January. This week, 1.2 million humans will log on to vote in a single-elimination bracket. The winner — likely Chunk, last year’s 1,200-pound champion — will receive no prize, no ribbon, no extra salmon. The bears do not know they are contestants. They only know hunger, and the river, and the winter that comes for all of them. The Signal Most coverage treats Fat Bear Week as wholesome internet culture — a rare pocket of joy on a platform defined by outrage. But the frame obscures the mechanism. What we are witnessing is not celebration of nature. It is the final domestication of the wild: the transformation of an...