Immortal Data: Our Ever-Growing Graveyard of Sentimental Digital Assets
Growing old in the modern world means accumulating massive volumes of data over decades. Each file saved and stored joins an ever-growing graveyard of digital assets with nowhere to go when we die.
Data is just as much of an asset and character in our everyday lives as our friends and family. But unlike mortal beings, our digital descendants will continue processing long after we die, outliving our weak human bodies with their timeless storage capacity.
Every digital interaction simultaneously generates a sequence of data capture, compressing/converting, sending/resending, protecting, and storing in real time, ready for on-demand dispatch when beckoned. Our data even has data. In 29 years, I’ve accumulated 814 gigabytes (GB) on my computer and phone combined, including documents, videos/photos, and app files. I’m not alone in that GB-tier statistic: The average consumer has 500 GB in their personal cloud storage, according to an estimate by cloud provider pCloud. Nearly half of that is photo/image files, followed by text documents (26%) and music/audio files (6%).
As file sizes and digital adoption are slated to grow exponentially in the coming decades, it’s reasonable to assume that the sheer volume of data stored on our devices will amount to socially-acceptable hoarding. What will this footprint look like when we reach our deathbeds?
Contents:
- Our Ever-Growing Data Hoard: The cannibalistic datasphere of the Zettabyte Era
- Clouds of the Future: The limitations of storage technology
- Bytes Beyond the Grave: Can we monetize our legacy? How can it be managed? Plus, other speculations
TL;DR? Read my summary thread on Twitter/X. This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter.
Our Ever-Growing Data Hoard
The hoard we’re building is unprecedented. We’re now in the “Zettabyte Era,” starting when global internet traffic reached 1 zettabyte (equal to 1 trillion GB). Projections indicate that around 120 zettabytes of data will be created in 2023, up from just 2 ZB in 2010, 15.5 in 2015, and 64 in 2020. Video is the largest subcategory with a 53% share, followed by social with 12% and gaming with 9%.
Global data creation is projected to grow 21% annually through 2026, per IDC. Most of that output is “unstructured data” — including photos/images, videos, voice files, and documents — driven by the rise in IoT, streaming entertainment (see last month’s post), social media, and productivity software. The rest is standardized “structured data,” such as names, phone numbers, and banking information. IDC also estimates that the ratio of unique data (created/captured) to replicated data (copied/consumed) will reach 1:10 in 2024, up slightly from 1:9 in 2020.
Part of this context involves the ever-increasing size of applications and media files, particularly on mobile devices. Per SensorTower intelligence, the top 10 iPhone apps in the U.S. grew 298% from 2016 to 2021, totaling 2.2 GB. The average iOS game topped 465 megabytes (MB) in 2020, a 76% increase from 264 MB in 2016. Ericsson estimates the average smartphone will use over 20 GB of mobile data per month this year.
Storage aside, peak internet use adds to the world’s massive data pile. There are about 5.3 billion internet users in our current global population of about 8 billion, bringing the world internet penetration rate to more than 67%. The average person is estimated to have 3.6 devices and connections in 2023, up from 2.4 in 2018.
Despite this growth, it might surprise you that around half of internet traffic is driven by bots, distorting analytics and reducing the overall reliability of the cannibalistic datasphere. Such is our modern civilization. The internet isn’t going anywhere, barring a world-ending war or some other catastrophe. This is our foreseeable future.
Clouds of the Future
Fast-forward 30 years from now: In 2053, many of us will be grandparents, retired, elderly, sick, or already passed to the afterlife, whatever that means to you. I’ll be getting ready to turn 60. While we were growing older, the internet aged in reverse, with evolved technical capacity and more powerful functions. Today’s pace and scale of innovation will seem so incremental by then. We’ll laugh about how long it took to achieve mainstream tech adoption (Web 1.0), interact through social media content (Web 2.0), and conceive of decentralization, blockchain systems, and cryptocurrency (Web 3.0). The current Web 4.0 empowers automation, machine learning, AI, and natural language processing, and Web 5.0 is expected to bring 3.0-like decentralization to help manage the next generation of connectivity.
Assuming the pattern continues, what becomes of our mountains of data on Web 9, 10 or 11.0? Will it reside in physical servers and cloud software, as in the present-day digital underworld? More likely, an insanely powerful distributed network would have replaced those dinky storage methods, flexing superior capacity, efficiency, and performance. These are the clouds of tomorrow.
The limitations of computing technology are bound to come to a head at some point. Per Ericsson:
“Moore’s law is slowing down, meaning developers can no longer assume that new demanding applications will be catered for by the next generation of faster general-purpose chips. In addition, today’s general-purpose computing proves to be unfit to meet contemporary energy efficiency requirements — from both a cost and environmental point of view.”
Amid the aptly-branded “digital transformation” of the last decade, most enterprise businesses have steadily transitioned their data assets from legacy storage infrastructure to the cloud. This includes prominent players across the economy, from streaming platforms like Netflix (which took seven years to migrate to Amazon Web Services) to retailers like Walmart (built its own massive cloud infrastructure, including a network of 10,000 edge nodes) to financial giants, including Bank of America (formed its own private cloud) and Wells Fargo (initiated a 10-year IT overhaul in 2021). One of the biggest cloud migrations in the consumer goods industry happened this year when Unilever (owner of Ben & Jerry’s, Dove, and 400+ more brands) finished its 18-month transfer to Microsoft Azure.
Cloud software can only go so far, though, especially when managing large data libraries and applications. That’s why many companies started using hybrid cloud systems, which have become the dominant architecture. This mixed environment combines computing with services (public and private clouds) and storage (on-premises data centers or distributed “edge” locations). Hybrid clouds are enough to meet present IT requirements, but it won’t be long before they’re antiquated.
We’re not far from developing technology that beats the human brain’s memory storage capacity, which is estimated to be at least 2.5 petabytes (or 2.5 million GB). But human learning capabilities have always been limited due to biological/evolution-driven characteristics. One interesting paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience explores the idea of a “Human Brain/Cloud Interface” enabled by neuro-nanorobotics — a product of exponential advances in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, computation, and AI. This machine can pick up the slack in humans’ cognitive abilities to dawn a more advanced age of real-time knowledge.
Bytes Beyond the Grave
Back to 2053. Imagine estate planning in the future, where our children and grandchildren will be left with a cache of data assets with our stored experiences and souvenirs. This opens up a new legal gray area that society hasn’t fully confronted yet. Facebook, Instagram, and a few other social platforms are looking ahead, already rolling out legacy planning features that allow users to pre-determine what to do with their accounts after death, opting for deletion or a memorialized profile. But this is just one slice of a person’s digital identity.
When we’re on our deathbeds, what do we do with a lifetime of work and personal files, videos, photos, and other data assets with and without sentimental value? Suppose it can be monetized. You could offload your data to the highest bidder, like a futuristic thrift store using an NFT-inspired model. In exchange, the buyer gets computing resources and a trove of personal materials that can be used to train AI models. Or, maybe the purchasing parties aren’t corporations but individuals looking to trade memories and experiences as an entertainment activity.
It’s an interesting concept, albeit perhaps too idealistic for assuming we have any control over how this data is handled. Such an exchange would require curtailing the current underground market run by tech giants and the advertising networks that buy from them. No one really knows how much their data is worth to advertisers. Why is that? It’s constantly being bartered in an unregulated Data Mart that’s inaccessible to consumers. To regain control and autonomy, we would have to peel the bytes out of their cold, dead hands.
Despite a growing collective awareness that we’re losing control over our data, none of this will stop us from posting, sharing, taking photos and videos, and otherwise feeding the machine all of our last bits of privacy — chipping away at our dignity in the process. There will always be a digital footprint shadowing our physical existence, shoveling deeper and deeper in the graveyard of stored memories.
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Note: This is an opinion essay. Much like a traditional newspaper column, my Medium is a side channel to voice my personal views and observations. It’s separate from my main gig as a journalist/reporter. You can follow my journalistic work here.
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