| "This is how the internet works," Noelle Mateer writes in her latest feature for WIRED. "You get into something for the fun of it, and you end up being radicalized." In Mateer's case, the fun thing was African pygmy hedgehogs. She followed hundreds of them on Instagram—hog after hog after hog. Wilbert munched on worms. Koala dressed up like Harry Potter. Lionel did sponcon for carpet cleaner. Maple went on a tiny camping trip. And the algorithm always had new hogs to suggest. Eventually, as Mateer scrolled into the infinite cuteness, she began to wonder: "When a species goes viral, what happens to the animals?" That question sent her into the fluffy white underbelly of the hedgehog-industrial complex, where she found what a volunteer rescuer calls "the non-cute part." Anthony Lydgate | Senior Editor, WIRED | 
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