Feeding the Beast

Last night, I watched the wonderful, eerie, and discomforting Ex Machina on Verizon Fios’ OnDemand system. Following that viewing, I checked my iPhone for Tweets, SnapChat updates, new Instagram photos, [insert 21st application to check here], and FaceTimed with my fiancée. I then jumped on my computer and searched for “the singularity”, felt utterly depressed by my findings and proceeded to watch episodes of “Comedy Bang! Bang!” on Netflix until midnight in the hopes of alleviating my stirring mind.

Today, I now have the uneasy feeling that this single evening is a microcosm of my relationship with the digital age. Constantly, and without thought, I am “feeding the beast”, inputing more and more information about myself and my habits (or, more aptly, all of my shit) onto devices hooked up to the Internet. And the beast will only grow hungrier as she gets bigger. There’s no telling whether she will ever bite the hand that feeds her, but it’s certainly worth wondering how big that byte…er…bite could be.

According to Asigra, a cloud computing and backup software company, 90% of all data online has been created in past two years alone. 3,000,000,000 people go online everyday, and the entire web structure is equal to about 8 zettabytes of information today. For those who don’t know what a zettabyte is, it is equal to 1 trillion gigabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. I would have to say that’s an awfully big bite.

Despite the growth of super-computing and proliferation of big data companies, it boggles the mind to comprehend this vast amount of information. And yet…for a mind beyond our comprehension, this information can be a treasure trove, unlocking secrets behind doors we could not recognize as doors.

Perhaps my unease and anxiety as I look at those numbers is much ado about nothing. Or, it’s an understandable reaction to the mounting evidence that I am just a tiny, insignificant speck in the sea of information and data. Or, it’s a paranoid reflex caused by over-saturation of information that a good digital cleanse could fix (if you’re in the mood for irony, search the term “digital cleanse”. With over 1.25 million pages available, I’m sure you could spend oodles of years online learning about how to avoid being online). Or, we are all toast, just waiting to be gobbled up by the Internet beast. “It is what it is,” Nathan mumbles to programmer Caleb in Ex Machina, “It’s Promethean, man.”