2020 is the perfect time for a ‘Datageddon’

When the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000, the Y2K hysteria ended. What people thought would spark a global computer crisis turned out to be no more than a hiccup in a few systems. Computers didn’t crash, and the world didn’t stop spinning.

Photo credit: NASA

The world survived the supposed computer-induced apocalypse. But with the way 2020 has unraveled, a digital purge might not be the worst idea.

Datageddon, the term popularized by the hit TV show Silicon Valley, depicts a stark future where the world’s need for digital entertainment may overtake the internet’s ability to store all the new data being created. What would happen could be as small as a company needing to find a new data storage system or as large as a global digital infrastructure failure caused by a massive data overload.

Whether Datageddon is possible or not (it isn’t), it does bring light to some growing concerns in the data science community. Where will all this growing data go? Is there such a thing as too much data? And is the mountain of data being created even worth anything in the long run?

Data hoarding is a problem. We’re not talking about those chain emails from 2010 or pictures of your lunch from five years ago, although it may be time to delete those. We’re talking about massive amounts of data created on a global scale.

This year, it’s estimated that 1.7 megabytes of data are created every second by every single person on Earth. That’s over 1.8 quintillion bytes of data in 2020. And by 2022, that number is expected to reach 3,650 quintillion bytes.

That’s a lot of data. And it needs to be stored somewhere.

When more data is being created than we can analyze or know where to store, this puts a strain on data storage technology. We’re quickly reaching the point where our current data storage tech won’t be enough to hold all that information.

Is there such a thing as too much data?

There are two parts of this “too much data” argument that we should separate. One is the concern that data storage isn’t physically prepared to hold the growing amount of data. That’s more focused on big data needs as an industry.

The other is that individual internet users are struggling with data exhaustion. Because there’s so much information out there to consume and we’re essentially rewiring our brains to need that information, we’re burning out from constantly ingesting that mountain of media.

Let’s focus on the former, if only to keep ourselves from feeling bad about the amount of media we’re consuming on a daily basis.

The popular adage “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” could be used against the call for a more critical look at data storage. But a more fitting variation for our modern age would be: “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Data is worthless if you can’t analyze it. There is value in preserving the world’s digital history – data collected today can give future generations a better understanding of humanity as a whole. But if the amount of data becomes too vast to manage, learn from, or analyze, have we made too much? Probably.

What would Datageddon look like?

Could Datageddon be prevented?

The bottom line