When my dog chewed up the 4MB memory card for my Nintendo GameCube, I thought it was the end of the world. But fortunately, the save files that it held lived to see another day. In fact, they’re still living now — dusty and defeated in the bottom of a drawer inside a cracked, warped and bitten plastic casing. The bite marks have outlived the dog that gave them, and the data has lived through four presidents and multiple paradigm shifts. It lived to see itself be replaced. It watched helplessly as its 8MB, 16MB and 32MB cousins entered the fray and obsolescence began to set in.
“Can you believe memory cards hold 32 ‘mbs’ now?!” I asked my friend one Saturday afternoon in 2004 as we examined the different types of memory cards that lined the game store wall.
“And they’re even smaller in size than the 16 ‘mb’ ones!” He replied excitedly, his mother a mere arm’s length away.
“Those ones are a little expensive — won’t the 16 one do?”
“NOOO!” we exclaimed in violent unison.
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We didn’t understand yet that we were children born atop exponential curves of innovation, only that 32 megabyte memory cards could hold a lot more data than the 16 megabyte ones from the year prior. We didn’t understand that we were witnessing the beginnings of a trend that would continue tirelessly alongside us throughout our lives as we grew into adults.
As the years passed, that 32 megabyte memory card hanging on that GameStop wall grew to feel like a symbol of our ever-spinning world. The tech we marveled at in our youth was just the tip of the digital iceberg. The scale of our digital universe had begun an explosion of Cambrian proportions. And the pace of progress has accelerated so quickly that we’ve all become highway blind.
In the 1980s, the total volume of data on the internet amounted to just a few gigabytes. By the late 1990s, with the advent of the World Wide Web and the popularization of home internet access, it ballooned to over 100 terabytes.
To put matters in perspective, if the amount of data in the 1980s were represented by a glass of water, by the late 1990s, it was a swimming pool. By the 2010s, that swimming pool had reached the size of an ocean, and by 2020, every ocean on earth combined.
Only four decades after our experiment began, the knowledge on the internet could only be measured in an order of magnitude exceeding trillions of gigabytes. Quantities of information so large are measured in units called zettabytes. 2010 was the first year that the unit could be applied, and in the 13 years since, the internet has grown to 120 zettabytes. But the rate is still only increasing; by 2025 our volume of stored data is projected to nearly double again.
All of these years of staggering improvement have culminated in a reservoir of knowledge so colossal that it can’t even be fathomed. It’s the equivalent of 60 trillion HD movies, the sum of which would take 684 billion years to finish. The human genome, when digitally stored, is roughly 200 GB. 120 ZB could store all of the genetic data — absolutely everything that makes us us — for 600 trillion humans.
In the near future, it’s likely we’ll be measuring our data in yottabytes, brontobytes and geobytes. Soon we’ll have to invent entirely new words to keep up with the rate of our expansion. We’ll keep growing our vocabularies just to keep making sense of this strange, strange world we’re creating.
But even as we start trafficking in hypothetibytes, it still won’t account for all of the information that exists. Every song on every record, CD and tape recorder is stored material piling on top of itself infinitely. Every photo, video, essay, and file on every retired computer is data we’ve created.
The rapid advancement of information technology has been one of humanity’s most astonishing achievements. It’s been a story of exponential improvement ever since the very first byte.
This isn’t just about bytes and bits, though. This is a shift unlike any that’s ever occurred before it. This vast sea of information has the power to shape economies, dictate trends, and redefine life on earth. And the more data we have, the more we risk drowning in it. Not everything stored to the cloud is worth holding onto forever.
When I consider my own life — every useless file in every hard drive I’ve ever acquired, and every memory card, computer and old cellphone I’ve ever shoved into a drawer — it’s hard to imagine the sorts of numbers that all of mankind has achieved. Trying to even conceptualize the scope of an entire species amassing content in device after device, year after year, and in greater and greater quantities — it’s trying to grasp at infinity. And though it’s a difficult infinity to make sense of, it’s one we’ve still quietly managed to harness.
In factory sized buildings in undisclosed locations, we house sums of information so expansive that entire nations could hardly make sense of it all. With electrical signals, tidbits of data go firing across the globe on the impromptu whims of a billion different people immersed in a billion different tasks.
We accomplished that.
One of the bewildering things about humanity is the way in which we reliably reach heights that fewer and fewer of us can even comprehend. When we’re born onto a precipice, it’s hard to fully appreciate the view.
There was a time when most humans understood the machinations of the tools in their lives. But that was well before the advent of the internet and artificial intelligence.
Today, our very lives depend on a limitless repository of intangible knowledge. It’s utterly reshaped what it is to even be a human on planet earth. The cellular and Wi-Fi connections our world relies on are lightyears beyond the understanding of a disturbingly large majority.
How we ever created anything whose capabilities exceed our own sounds like an impossible paradox. How could something as advanced as a computer — let alone even a calculator — ever be crafted with these imperfect hands of ours? Well, they can’t. Not anymore at least.
There’s not a hand on earth that’s equipped to handle work in the microscopic realm of chips and circuitboards that go into each and every new smartphone. So we’ve built computers to build computers. We’ve added yet another layer between us and a full understanding of the world we’re pioneering.
This intangible realm of information has a palpable weight, and it’s one that our very real planet must bear. The energy-hungry data centers, the server farms — they all feed on our resources. It’s a nebulous idea for many that this invisible body of information we’ve created could have a cost — that the cloud above our head might be stationed here on earth — that a well-orchestrated cyber attack could erase our very history or reveal our most precious secrets.
There’s nothing we can’t grow used to. Even the entirety of human knowledge floating through the air around us can be taken for granted. Our digital lives have propelled us into the bizarrest of futures. They’ve brought us to this strange place where we can earnestly complain about Wi-Fi connections and storage restraints.
There was a time when the phonograph seemed like an achievement we’d never surpass. The ability to store physical media at all used to seem plainly like witchcraft. The ability to amass so much of it that our species is drowning in it — it could simply never have been foreseen.
Our entire lives are suspended between servers. Who we were twenty years ago careens at light speed between cellphone towers in Beijing and Los Angeles. Encased within incomprehensible waves of information are the photos we captured, the songs we recycled, and the people we were. My middle school conversations have all been compartmentalized into a tiny digital box called “Meta.” Floating dormantly in loose bits of disembodied code are all of the people I used to love — all of the people they were when I still did.
Because we pour our souls into these devices, we continue dancing to the beat of a binary drum even once we’ve returned to dirt. In each still frame and every text floating free and forgotten, there’s a part of us straggling spectrally onward. When we die we become more than fossils.
I still visit the digital graveyards of my friends who’ve passed. And I can still see their final posts. They’re written in a haunting present tense.
The enormity of these digital lives we’re all leading is something no single mind could process. Each year, our devices consume more and more of us. Not just in terms of hours and attention, but they capture our lives in more intimate detail. They’ll absorb more and more of our very essence. 4K cameras turn into 16K cameras and the phones they’re attached to will store more and more vivid moments.
When we die, we’ll remain here. We’ll continue on in clouds, and hard drives and corroded circuitboards of forgotten phones — in words written and photos captured and dusty save files of closeted memory cards. The people we are today will linger, even if it’s in a cold and binary world.
In the silent hum of faraway servers, there’s an eerie sort of infinity. Shadows of existence are etched in silicon, and the line between memory and eternity blurs irreconcilable.