Lessons On The Future Of Data From The Ghostbusters
Is It Time To Cross The Streams?
Things are changing, but not the way people want. Ghostbusters was a lesson in people trying to control things beyond their grasp. Whether you want to see that through the guys trying to contain phantasms, the EPA causing a natural disaster, or the failure of the overly-PC engineered reboot — Ghostbusters taught us that humans make a mess.
Humans are great at technology… if your criteria is strictly the ability to create cool sh!t. Seriously, the proton pack is cool regardless of whether it does anything. It doesn’t — not in the real world. In the movie, it generates a proton stream — incredibly powerful and entangling.
Humans are great at data… if your criteria is creating a lot of it. Seriously, society has more data than even the most informed of us can fathom. In the time it took me to write this, we just added a sh!t load more. Today, data comes in streams — incredibly powerful and entangling.
What did the Ghostbusters do with the things they entangled with their proton streams? Put them in storage of course!
The Ecto-Containment System was a giant server and data warehouse. Is it any wonder that the government would make it crash? When was this movie written? Talk about clairvoyant. At this point, it might be interesting to note the guys were all doctors and drove around in an ambulance. Can you picture a young Jonathan Gruber taking notes? I bet he was rooting for Walter Peck. But I digress…
An Important Safety Tip
I like to think of the IoT as an endless array of data streams. So far, no one has stepped up to effectively capture them. And no one seems to care that they are all crossing…
“Total data reversal” doesn’t seem to be a concern. Although, isn’t that the plot line of Mr Robot? Regardless, it does seem to be making a giant mess and plenty of entanglement.
Following The Story Line
We should capture the data and contain it. Isn’t that what the Ghostbusters taught us? And that is what has been happening all along. Oracle, Teradata, and endless lists of other database technologies have become big data repositories fed from all those endless streams. But that was part of the story line too…
Tell Him About The Twinkie
All this “big data” is getting a little overwhelming. Initially, like the Ghostbusters, companies were mainly concerned with storage. Fortunately, technology, human ingenuity, and greed delivered us more cheap storage than we know what to do with… for now.
Without Walter Peck, the Ghostbusters story may have ended that way as well…
Today — companies are more concerned with generating competitive edge (note — I did not say insight). Their answer, of late, is an overwhelming urge to cross the streams! I thought we knew this was dangerous… oh, right — in the movie, this is how they saved the day! It all makes sense now…
That Ended Well…
Perhaps we should rethink that final lesson. Are companies trying to blow things up? Perhaps. After all, they only want a competitive advantage. Sometimes that just means exploding the big marshmallow. That seems rational.
The Ghostbusters movie literally told us when they jumped the rails. Crossing the streams was (and is) still a bad idea. It was just the only one left. They were dealing with an “end of days” scenario. Are the rest of us?
Take some lessons from the Ghostbusters. Recognize the power of data streams. Use them to entangle but better still, to capture data. Store it well. Don’t sweat the Twinkie (after all they went bankrupt). Beware of government regulators. Finally, a movie from 1984 may not have a great metaphor for where to go next — but it seems to have captured a lot of what to avoid. Don’t cross the streams.
Big Data will eventually deliver. It will simply require experience and discipline. Our ADHD society has never been great at that, but it won’t matter. Until it comes, everything else is just a mess or a distraction. Eventually, new solutions will develop to propel us to the next level. Until then enjoy a little distraction and thanks for reading!
Still worried about the Twinkie?
