The March, 2021 IDC Annual DataSphere and StorageSphere forecast reported 64.2 zettabyes of data created or replicated world-wide in 2020, 5.2 zettabytes more than was predicted in the May, 2020 forecast. Much more data will created over the next five years, according to the latest forecast, more than twice the amount of data created since digital storage began. I put together a chart showing the exponential growth of data since 2005 with the volumes of data by year copied from a 2018 tweet. That tweet of an IDC forecast predicted 47 zettabytes of data created, copied and consumed world-wide in 2020.
The additional data was largely due to social media, mobile data traffic, cloud gaming, Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR and VR), computational imaging, and the non-stop conference and entertainment video streaming during the pandemic. The volume also swelled because of more IoT communication, more Internet users, 5G, and in the US, increasing reliance on the Internet by schools and state and local government agencies.
One zettabyte of data is a trillion gigabytes. This is Big Data. Like a planet, it has volume, velocity, variety, and gravity. Mining operations plumb its depths, aggregating data into central repository lakes so that useful patterns can be easily discovered and extracted. Big Data is getting exponentially bigger faster than predicted. Is there a limit to how big it can get?
As the Covid-19 pandemic reminded us, exponential growth in the natural world is not permanent. Exponential growth stalls when whatever is fueling it begins to run out. The rate of growth reaches an inflection point and the growth begins to follow a logistical curve as it levels off. This is the way the rate of infections from a virus like Covid-19 behaves.
Big Data is man-made, a technology. It doesn't exist in the natural world. While it's limited by the availability of electricity and other finite resources, innovations in computing efficiency, computational power, and digital storage have kept costs and energy usage down. Energy usage is increasing, but the rate of increase is much less than data growth. As long as computing and storage are relatively cheap, Big Data is a good investment. How can this investment make money?
Attention
In June, 2017, I was in a grocery store checkout line when I noticed the National Enquirer and InTouch magazines for sale above the conveyer belt. Both cover stories were about Angelina Jolie. According to the National Enquirer, Ms. Jolie was in a hospital dying of anorexia while InTouch magazine was gushing about Ms. Jolie getting married. I pointed this out to the woman waiting behind me but she only shrugged. She was right, any thought about celebrity gossip was one too many.
The National Enquirer sells stories about dying celebrities who may not be dying. Somebody must like them, but the issue I looked at was five months old. The InTouch magazine was new. Funny though that InTouch was also in the phony gossip business. Ms. Jolie was separated but still married to Brad Pitt and wouldn't be divorced until 2019.
January 16, 2017
June 5, 2017
August 7, 2017[3]
I thought of an experiment. Each person in the checkout line would select one of three magazines on display. Besides the National Enquirer and InTouch, the third magazine, the control, would be about something anodyne about Ms. Jolie, like gardening tips. Each person would be asked why they made their choice and what they thought of Ms. Jolie. Was she a home wrecker, philanthropist, leftist, or just another movie star? They'd also be asked, without being too specific, about their age, social background, religious and political beliefs, and what they do for a living. To factor in location, factor out bias, and be statistically significant, the experiment would be repeated many times at grocery stores across the country. Which lie do you prefer?
Probably the results would be what I expected. Those who hate or merely dislike Ms. Jolie enjoyed reading about her dying. Maybe they they saw her impending death as a just punishment. Those who thought she is charitable and loves her children would pick read ingabout her getting remarried. The rest would choose chose the gardening tips.
I was wondering how much more attention was drawn to whatever confirmed biases. It's human nature to have some confirmation bias. We live in a complex world with too much information to consume. Because it's a way of holding attention, all kinds of biases are exploited on-line. Dividing, rationalizing, trivializing, and agent provocations are popular avenues to gain audiences. In this environment, a conspiracy theory revolving around anonymous cryptic messages, originally dropped onto an 8chan board, fits right in. QAnon portrays a life or death struggle between good and evil playing out in real time. It's been described as a LARP, or Live Action Role Playing game, but to QAnon's disciples it's real. It confirms their thoughts and feelings about the existence of a shadowy Deep State run by an satanic cabal.
If the QAnon conspiracy theory is not a game it plays out like one, more like a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) than a LARP. A randomly timed cryptic message is picked up and broadcast to smart phones around the country. There's a dopamine rush upon hearing the ding when a text message arrives on a phone. Most text messages are disappointingly about normal life while A QAnon drop is exciting. It can be shared and deciphered among friends. Soon, before they were banned, YouTube QAnon influencers would present their own interpretations and predictions.
In the book "A Deadly Wandering" there are "two types of attention, "top down" (what we want to focus on) and “bottom up” (what takes us by surprise)." A QAnon message drop takes advantage of both types. It's arrival is a pleasant surprise. It's not a distraction, it's an important message deserving of immediate attention. The message is, pay attention or the criminals will get away with it. We have to stop them. But it could also be an example of how the Internet has evolved to manipulate attention since its free-for-all early years.
Mediation
A CNN ad campaign in late 2017 was about trust. CNN reports a fact as it is, the ad explains, showing us an apple and pronouncing, "this is a fact." I wondered, is the picture of an apple, actually off screen because the ad was recorded, the fact of an apple, or is the picture actually the fact? If the picture is the fact, was there ever really an apple? The surrealist painter Magritte painted this question a long time ago. Below a picture of a pipe he added the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe). My own version, updated by television, is a photo of CNN's ad with text similar to Magritte's added below the apple.
by René Magritte's painting, "La Trahison des Images," 1929.[4]
Ignoring the political spin of the talking heads, if we assume that the media channels cover events objectively, the information is still mediated. Several layers of technology sit between us and the story and its sources of information are hidden. Presumably the sources are vetted but we're asked to believe them. Without tangible proof, it's healthy to doubt something is true. I don't mean immediately deny something is true. It's important to be skeptical, to step back and question everything, no matter who is telling the story.
As we all know, on the day of the November, 2020 election and for days after, while Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona tallied their votes, Trump's supporters posted videos, rumors, and eye-witness accounts intended to prove / clearly proved election fraud. Allegations that Dominion voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden began when a mistake was made while tallying the vote in a Michigan county. The inventor of E-mail as we know it today, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, posted a video analysis that explained how Dominion vote switching in Michigan worked. Bespoke blogs and Web news sites seized on the allegations and analyses and made new ones, expanding voting fraud to all the swing states. Another great news mediator, Fox news, decided to sell the allegations to its main-stream audience.
Articles and videos posted for the curious pointed out errors and mis-directions behind the claims of fraud. Sites like Snopes and Politifact debunked the videos and rumors that Dominion had connections to Antifa, Venezuala, Nancy Pelosi, or George Soros. A non-political YouTube channel, Stand-up Maths hosted by Matt Parker, posted a video to explain Dr. Ayyadurai's mistakes. Mr. Parker made a scatter plot from the same Michigan voting data. using Dr. Ayyadurai's methodology but from the perspective of registered Democrats. The plot showed votes for Biden had been switched to Trump, if one agreed with Dr. Ayyadurai's own argument.
Source: Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai
from Biden to Trump.
Source: Matt Parker, Stand-up Maths
Before the 2020 election the former President Trump said he'd lose only if the election was rigged. When Biden was declared the winner and Trump said the result was a fraud his more vociferous supporters began chatting on-line about what to do. Incendiary rhetoric lit up the Internet. Trump invited them to a rally outside the Capitol on January 6, promising them "it will be wild," and they went.
Surveillance
The Trump supporters driving to Washington DC were like many occasional tourists on the road last January. They chatted with friends on-line, sent e-mails, and tweeted or posted their selfies on Facebook. They looked up the local weather, found a place to stop and eat or a hotel to spend the night. Meanwhile, apps on their cellphones pinged their locations to ad services at regular intervals. The cellphones' advertisement identifiers were supposed be anonymous but the apps had worked around that restriction. Their names, addresses, route to Washington DC and presence at the rally and Capitol building on January 6 were stored.
leading up to January 6, 2021.[5]
Ad services interfacing with mobile apps built a surveillance infrastructure for buying and selling everyone's personal data. This data worth more because it offers a higher resolution picture of every day behavior. When asked to agree with an app's terms, consumers agree because they know what they're getting but not what they're giving up. something for free they don't understand what they're giving up. The invisible surveillance economy needs a lot of high-frequency high-resolution data or its machine learning predictions won't be as accurate.
There is an attention economy that works to manipulate you into paying attention. There is a surveillance economy that spies on you so it can buy and sell your personal information. Between them is technology that helps keep your attention and hides the price you pay when giving your attention.
A few statistics
| Year | Statistic | |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 1.7 megabytes of data is created every second by every person. | |
| 607 terabytes of Internet data is consumed every second. | ||
| 95 million photos and videos are shared every day on Instagram. | ||
| 90% of the world's data was created the last two years. | ||
| 306.4 billion emails and 500 million Tweets are sent every day. | ||
| Humans generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. | ||
| 2022 | Annual global IP traffic is 4.75 zettabytes. | |
| 2025 | Size of the global datasphere is 175 zettabytes. | |
| Humans generate 463 exabytes of data every day. | ||
Notes
- Data Creation and Replication Will Grow at a Faster Rate than Installed Storage Capacity, According to the IDC Global DataSphere and StorageSphere Forecasts
IDC Media Center, March 24, 2021. - Omnigraffle graphic based on Karl Tate's for TechNews Daily (defunct), found on the APIXEL SG company website. Karl's graphic labels the increasing size of each data volume as a multiple of 1,000 but it's actually 1,024. Computer memory is composed of bytes and each byte has eight bits of zeroes or ones, or 28 bits of information. Computer data volume sizes are multiples of 210, or 1,024 bytes, of information.
- Chart created in Excel based on JM Alvarez-Pallete's tweet of the number of zettabytes created worldwide, .1ZB in 2005, 2ZB 2010, 12ZB 2015, 47ZB in 2020, and 2024, based on the International Data Corporation's 2018 graph of information created worldwide (tweeted by Vala Afshar).
- René Magritte (1898-1967) painted La Trahison des imagesin 1929 and Ceci n'est pas une pommein 1964. Media presents representations not facts. It is up to the viewer to believe that the things represented exist and their representations are objective, accurate, and timely.
-
They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them
"Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data."
Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, February 5, 2021
References
Attention
- I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age
"The internet rewired our brains. He predicted it would." Charlie Warzel, February 4, 2021, The New York Times.
"To describe its scarcity, he latched onto what was then an obscure term, coined by a psychologist, Herbert A. Simon: "the attention economy.”" - A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind
November 12, 2010, Volume 330, SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org. Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert. - You Can Get Focused (Hint: Put Down That Phone)
"The average person’s mind wanders nearly half the time. Here’s how to pull it back to attention." Caren Osten Gerszberg, September 26, 2020, The New York Times. - MEDIAWATCH: THOSE WE DIDN’T LOSE IN 2017
Analogue Boy In A Digital World, December 31, 2017 - Richtel, Matt. A Deadly Wandering New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, First William Morrow Paperback edition published 2015.
Mediation
- Parler Tries to Survive With Help From Russian Company
"The social network, popular with President Trump’s supporters, went offline last week after it was kicked off Amazon’s servers." Jack Nicas, January 19, 2021, The New York Times
"If Parler routes its web traffic through DDoS-Guard when its full website returns, the experts said, Russian law could enable the Russian government to surveil Parler’s users."
"Russia required many internet companies in the country to install technology that feeds the government a copy of much of the data that passes through their computer servers." - HBO’s ‘Fake Famous’ reveals the tricks influencers use to gain followers. Marisa Dellatto, February 2, 2021, The New York Post.
- Fake Famous
A documentary directed, written, and produced by Nick Bilton, released on February 2, 2021 and aired on HBO.
This documentary has been knocked for its not very nuanced view of the on-line video influencers phenomenon. It's still fascinating, though, how anyone can buy software agents that behave as real followers and commenters of one's work. -
McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin. "The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” Corte Madera, California: Gingko Press Inc. Originally published in 1967.
"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us un-touched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments."
Surveillance
- They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them
"Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data."
Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, February 5, 2021
"While some Americans might cheer the use of location databases to identify Trump supporters who converged on the Capitol, the use of commercial databases has worrying implications for civil liberties." -
TikTok Coughs Up $92 Million In Fine For Harvesting User Data Of Minors!
Abhradeep Ghosh, February 27, 2021, DAZEINFO Briefs, Social Media. - moz://a *privacy not included
The Mozilla Foundation. - Your iPhone Is Spying On You -- Here's How To Stop It
Davey Winder, Senior Contributor, June 2, 2019, Forbes - A powerful spyware app now targets iPhone owners
Zack Whittaker, April 8, 2019, Tech Crunch. - The Coup We Are Not Talking About
"We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both."
Shoshana Zuboff, January 29, 2021, The New York Times.
"To understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it’s important to know that surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth." - O'Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy New York: Broadway Books, Crown Publishing Group, Penguin Random House LLC. Kindle Edition.
- Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism New York: PublicAffairs Hachette Book Group. January, 2019. Kindle Edition.
A few statistics
- The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core
IDC Seagate Data Age Whitepaper. David Reinsel, John Gantz, and John Rydning, November, 2019
"it is about the integration of intelligent data into everything that we do."
"The data-driven world will be always on, always tracking, always monitoring, always listening and always watching – because it will be always learning."
"IDC forecasts that over 22 ZB of storage capacity must ship across all media types from 2018 to 2025, with nearly 59% of that capacity supplied from the HDD industry."
"Consumers are addicted to data, and more of it in real-time." - What will the world look like in 2030? "A decade of distrust." The Editors, December 26, 2019, The New York Times.
Edward Snowden, Former N.S.A. Contractor and author of “Permanent Record”
"The drowned cities of tomorrow will be founded on the conveniences of today. Electricity usage by data centers is enormous and expanding, threatening to top 10 percent of global electricity consumption within the next decade and to produce roughly five times the CO2 emissions of all current global air travel. As more power is required to cool these data centers, the warmer the planet will become; and as consumer electronics get cheaper and more disposable, the more they will leach their minerals into our groundwater, poisoning the future.
To achieve sustainability we will need to treat technological change and environmental change as symbiotic. If more efforts aren’t directed toward converting data centers to renewable energy, and innovating ecologically-responsible, recyclable machines and batteries, then the internet, too, will become a weapon of the rich, even more than it already is — a tool used to seize and control ever more scarce natural resources." - What's causing the exponential growth of data?
Timothy Greaton, December 23, 2019
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