DANGER: Information Overload - Le Alternative -

💙 donations

This is a text automatically translated from Italian. If you appreciate our work and if you like reading it in your language, consider a donation to allow us to continue doing it and improving it.

The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

The prequel natural from last week's article: Information overload, social overload.

This article was written on November 6, 2015 from Cassandra

Cassandra crossing 359/ DANGER: Information Overload

If on the Internet in the 80s 10 Gigabytes were exchanged per year, now we are in the order of Zettabytes: to paraphrase a well-known quote, "Quantity is Quality".

Cassandra, as the 24 tireless readers well know, has the habit of wanting to put everything in a "historical" perspective, always running the risk of falling victim to the "Good Times Syndrome" and therefore boring to death. In this case there is no such danger, because we will only talk about numbers, or rather, prefixes, offering a bare thesis and avoiding any conclusion. To make this little page more fluid you need a reminder of elementary algebra. A number that is a power of ten is often called an “order of magnitude” and is used to roughly estimate the size of something. So when an engineer or a physicist says that something is of the order of magnitude of 10⁶ they are saying that it is more or less a million. In fact, a million is written as 1,000,000 and, if you count the zeros, you can compact it by writing it as 10⁶, which translates as "One, followed by six zeros": one million, in fact. It is a very convenient method for writing very large or very small numbers; one thousand billion is not 1,000,000,000,000 but simply 10¹², and a billionth is 10^-9, and above all there is no need to count the zeros! Furthermore, the international system defines prefixes to baptize the multiples of the units of measurement: kilo is 1000 or 10³, Mega is one million, or 10⁶, Giga one billion or 10⁹ and Tera one thousand billion, or 10¹². Uppercase and lowercase have their meaning, but let's not get too much into it… kB, MB, GB, TB, i.e. kilo, Mega, Giga and Tera.

Three extra zeros for each prefix change.

Let us now return to the familiar terrain of information technology and telematics.

Cassandra's first hard drive was a glorious one Apple ProFile, of 5 MB (about 10⁷ Byte): then we wondered what could be used to fill it, given that the size of a good video game (Galaga) was about 60 kB (10⁵ Byte).

In 1986 or so, Cassandra personally verified, working in a privileged position as Olivetti (where Olivea, one of the backbone hosts of NSFnet), that the daily traffic of the entire network amounted to less than 10⁸ Bytes, one hundred small Megabytes, that is to say 10¹⁰ Bytes per year, of the order of 10 Gigabytes only. Of these, around 40 were made up of traffic from newsgroups which, since the web had not yet been invented, were, together with ftp sites and email, the source of the greatest traffic: obviously even then 40 percent of this traffic was made up of porn... But that's another story. There were around one hundred thousand users (10⁵), and receiving three emails (10⁰) on the same day was rare: we are talking about when responding to an email that arrived in the morning in the afternoon was indelicate, doing it the same day after unbearable rudeness, and not responding to a request for help or information, giving the best one could offer was inconceivable. After all, if you used an instant means of communication, you had to use it both ways and to do useful things. Logical, right? Think about it, a week of all Internet traffic on a CD, almost 2 months on a DVD: on the other hand, 9600 baud intercontinental lines were an inconceivable luxury, and mainframes had 10⁶ Bytes of memory or little more. How much information was being produced in electronic format in the world in 1985? Probably not much more than what ended up on the internet: accounting, land registers and registry offices were not computerized, the spies had analogue radios and that was it, and the wiretaps were carried out with microphones, reel-to-reel tape recorders and notes dedicated to listening in real time and to transcription, as seen in the Italian crime films very popular in that period. As always, information was born analogue, and had to be digitized every time: digitizing information on the Internet was a rational act, which had to be justified and which cost effort. However, the result was quality information and a very high signal-to-noise ratio. Only thirty years have passed and even technologists and engineers, who are used to seeing and manipulating numbers and quantities, if they don't deal directly with IT, no longer care about how much the numbers of this technology (or perhaps "arcane science") are have evolved in a short time, and what effects this simple but not simplistic dimensional description has had in changing the rules of the game, and therefore its results.

What happened that was significant? Well, the most striking thing is the change in annual Internet traffic: Cisco esteem which at the end of this year or at the beginning of 2016 will reach 1 Zettabyte.

“Well, what does that mean?” several of the 24 tireless readers will comment.

Simple from Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, Yotta... Internet which transports 10²¹ Bytes per year, 11 more zeros in thirty years ago: much, much more than Moore's law doubling every 12 or 18 months (depending on the versions).

What happened? And why would it be a danger? Well, the increase is linked to the fact that many more people put or take information online: the GB/month of your smartphone and the videos you watch on YouTube, multiplied by one/two billion of your peers, add up to a lot. But much more is due to the fact that information is created directly digitally, and therefore it costs much less to produce it. And the very strong growth is finally due to the fact that most information is now produced by automatic means, think of all the digital sensors that exist in the world, and the growing number that are connected to the internet. A ship like the poor Costa Concordia can have thousands of them (10⁴). Then there are, in ascending order, the data produced by Rosetta, Opportunity and Deep Horizons, the telemetry data from the satellites, the data from the SCADA systems, the data from the ecommerce and those of online media consumption… ah, and obviously those of the Internet of Things. But what about the signal-to-noise ratio? How much of this data is worth keeping? Should they remain proprietary or should they be made available to everyone? These are basic questions for the Internet, but in other contexts. Here it is enough to conclude that "quantity is quality", and the network that exchanged 10¹⁰ Bytes per year cannot be the same as the one that exchanges 10²¹.An example: a war weapon in 1940 had a charge of the order of 10⁰ KG of TNT, and in extreme cases it reached 10¹⁰. In 1945 the value grew to 10⁷, and in 1965 it reached 10¹⁰, where fortunately it remained. Has this growth in quantity changed the world and the art of war? Certainly, and it has produced political upheavals, reversals of fronts, revolutions and much more. Just 7 zeros, seven orders of magnitude, changed the world. Here we are talking about 11 zeros, 11 orders of magnitude. Can we therefore be surprised that this growth has changed everything, transformed the primordial Network of Eden, of cooperation and gift into something completely different, in the current cyberpunk world, from where we interact directly and powerfully with the material world? Where real money circulates, where wealth and above all poverty are created, wars are fought, people are spied on and walls are built?

Marco Calamari