We live in a world of refuse—not simply the orange peels, Amazon boxes, and old TVs rotting away in landfills but also the texts, emails, and torrented movies looked at once and left to languish in the cloud. We appear to be verging on a crisis point with the first kind of trash, but rarely ever think about the second: it is more or less inconceivable that, one day, there may be no more room for our digital ephemera. Is this a reasonable assumption? Or might we actually one day run out of space? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.
Francesca Musiani
Associate Research Professor at CNRS, Deputy Director of the Centre for Internet and Society, doing research on Internet governance and in particular on infrastructures as tools of governance:
To attempt an answer, it may be worth specifying who or what is the “we”’ here.
If the “we” is the population of the Earth, most likely, “we” will not. So far, history has shown that as the sheer volume of data to be stored increases (and indeed, it has increased spectacularly in the past decade especially), so the capacity and efficiency of storage systems have been increased and optimized. There seems to be an overall consensus among engineers and technical operators that for all practical purposes, due to a number of technical and economic factors, we are not going to run out of storage space in the foreseeable future (and for the less-foreseeable one, we’re discussing atoms and quantum computing).
If the “we” is rather this or that particular IT company or firm, and its pool of users, the answer is somewhat nuanced. Finding and allocating storage space is a very concrete and material infrastructural concern, and the Big Tech actors are much more likely than other actors to be able to increase by ‘brute force’ the quantity and quality of their storage space. As engineer Ben Podgursky recently mentioned, “YouTube can hoard cat videos as long as Moore’s Law holds for disk space costs.” This may eventually—in fact, may already—contribute to reinforce inequalities in the digital ecosystem. However, will Moore’s Law actually hold? And if so, until when? Even net giants may at some point need to make some choices.
What about decentralized storage solutions—are they the way to the sustainability and sobriety we might want to achieve even in an era of seemingly abundant storage capabilities? The blockchain has a number of advantages compared to centralized storage, but does not seem to be the way to go in terms of sobriety, due to the intrinsic downside of its characteristic built-in redundancy known as blockchain bloating. However, some solutions based on more “old-fashioned” peer to peer (which leverage idle storage space and CPU capacity) have shown, as in the case of the (unfortunately short-lived) Wuala, that interesting experiments exist to try and avoid brute-force scalability and building brand-new massive data centers as the only way to plan tomorrow’s storage.
In the end, I agree with Cisco engineer J. Metz as he points out that a much more problematic question than “finding a place to store data” could actually be “finding your data.” As the sheer volume of data increases and storage capabilities increase with it—and they will—will our tools for handling and retrieving just the information we want, exactly when we want it, keep pace?
The short answer is no. Of course, I don’t mean that no disk or device or cloud storage account will ever get full. What I mean is that, for most applications, the cost of storage is no longer an obstacle. These days, very few people say “this data is important, but we can’t retain it because that would require spending too much on storage.”
A decade ago, I published a paper through the Brookings Institution that examined the implications of the decades-long trend of exponentially decreasing storage costs. Many of the points in the paper are still relevant today—perhaps even more so given continued cost declines. The fact that storage has become so inexpensive has plenty of positive consequences, including, for example, the ability to store large photo collections. But it has negative consequences as well in relation to privacy and to the reach of authoritarian governments that can create vast databases derived from surveillance data.
The biggest challenge with data these days is not figuring out how to store it, but rather problems with the quality of the data itself. There is plenty of data that is biased, incomplete, noisy, privacy-violating, or otherwise problematic. Addressing those shortcomings needs to be a major focus in the coming years.