The dark side of the data explosion is no joke, and it goes well beyond privacy issues
If Madonna penned a new pop song for teens growing up in the Zettabyte Era, she could do worse on the lyric front than: “We are living in a data-rich world, and I am a data-rich girl.” What is a zettabyte? It equals 1,024 exabytes, which is a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. Expressed with all the zeros, a zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes — phew.
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The Zettabyte Era started in either 2012, when the world’s collective digital data first exceeded one zettabyte, or 2016, when Donald Trump’s tweets helped global IP traffic first surpass the same mark. Either way, the total amount of data created, captured, copied and consumed globally is forecast to grow to more than 180 zettabytes by 2025, up from 2020’s estimated 64.2 zettabytes, according to Statista.
There is probably no going back when it comes to data growth. Imagine a member of the zettabyte generation trying to live with your first digital music player, which could store at least seven songs, well, it could once you spent hours installing software to copy CDs to a computer and then transferring selected songs onto the formerly revolutionary device with 64 MB of memory.
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Older folks, of course, are also addicted to what the digital world provides. Imagine navigating the pandemic without online services, social media or streaming entertainment. Researching stories as a cub reporter at the Hamilton Spectator decades ago, I had to wait on paper files from a newsroom librarian. Using my iPhone, I started researching this column on my sailboat, and I could get instant transcripts. Need something translated. No problem. Thanks Google. But our data usage can be tracked or hacked, which is not great when dealing with confidential matters.
The dark side of the data explosion is no joke, and it goes well beyond privacy issues. If the Singularity plays out as more than a few tech geniuses predict, all our digital data will only make it easier for computer overlords to eventually control us. As things stand, we are already losing liberties to robotic humanoids such as Meta Platforms Inc. (a.k.a. Facebook) co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
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Estimates vary, but the average daily time an adult spent on social media last year reportedly exceeded three hours, up from 90 minutes in 2012, and much of this time was on Facebook, which collects data on more than two billion users and stores it all in a petabyte-scale data warehouse (one petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes). Facebook then deploys user data along with misinformation to enrage people and manipulate them into staying online, former company product manager Frances Haugen recently warned.
Others have raised similar alarms about the threat posed by big data platforms. Why aren’t we listening? Well, part of the problem is data itself, and our addiction to it, which distracts us and weakens decision-making, especially about immediate problems, according to Tickled: A Commonsense Guide to the Present Moment, a new book by journalist Duff McDonald.
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McDonald is an A-list author when it comes to writing about capitalism, known for books about Harvard Business School (The Golden Passport), McKinsey and Co. (The Firm), and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon (Last Man Standing). But while his latest work offers a must-read update on his views about scandal-plagued McKinsey, it isn’t a business book.
McDonald’s other books were written for money and to further his career. He was supposed to produce an examination of society’s obsession with measurements, data and predictions after the pandemic started, but he didn’t have it in him. “I was like, Jesus Christ, I’m trapped in a prison of my own design,” he says. This revelation led to Tickled, which marketing material calls “part self-help, part memoir.”
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Some readers, especially ones with rigid careers and insurmountable life challenges, might be tempted to dismiss the highly personal book as a condescending life lecture, the kind you get from a former boozer who has sworn off alcohol (like McDonald admits he has). But the book doesn’t tell you how to live. It just advises you to make the best of life by living in the moment and doing more things that “tickle” you.
This probably resonated with me because I started the book in hospital, between tests and X-rays related to chest pains that had me thinking of cardiac arrest (speaking of data, about 160,000 Canadians older than 20 are diagnosed with ischemic heart disease annually). Either way, Tickled offers an important lesson about living in the Zettabyte Era — when data blinds us to what’s possible now.
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For organizations, and society in general, focusing too much on a future that will never materialize as planned means missing out on making immediate improvements. For individuals, being distracted from what tickles our souls in the present means missing out on happiness.
McDonald’s philosophy of life is heavily influenced by Harry Potter, but let’s end with a reference to Star Trek: The Next Generation. As an android, Starfleet officer Data has impressive computational capabilities, but he’d trade them for the ability to genuinely laugh. We should learn from that while we still have something to laugh about. FPM
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— to financialpost.com
The post The data age is here: Good or bad, we’re all digitally addicted and there’s no recovery in sight appeared first on Correct Success.
