On a related note, probably a similar percentage of people claim on their car insurance. If only the rest realised they had "crap insurance" and were paying for nothing, they could save so much money!
This is obviously sarcasm, but I think it's important to remember that much of the data is stored because we don't know what we will need later. Photos of kids? Maybe that one will be The One that we end up framing? Miscellaneous business records? Maybe those will be the ones we have to dig out for a tax audit? Web pages on government sites? Maybe there will suddenly be an interest in obscure pages on public health policy if a global pandemic happens.
Complaining that data is mostly junk is not a particularly interesting conclusion without acknowledging this. Is there wastage? Yeah sure, but accuracy on what needs storing is directly traded off with time spent figuring that out, and often it's cheaper to store the data.
But if those orders aren't there, shit hits the fan. PCI compliance audits fail. The ability for customers to reconcile their charges with their purchases breaks. In that 0.01% of cases where the order was fraudulent, placed by mistake, or just didn't have what the customer thought it had in it, not having that data makes the order processor read as, if not malicious, at least incompetent.
The real question is, how much data do we need to store inefficiently, in a way that uses a lot of power and space?
This is indeed the critical question, and it's far from being trivial.
One issue we all hit is moving the data from the higher tier storage to the cheaper and more efficient one, which requires sync and paying for the transfer most of the time, but also handling two separate access and authorization process, backup and recovery system for data that absolutely needs to be accessible for the few years of legal retention, and can/must completely disappear afterwards.
In most orgs I've seen the cost of going through all that complexity is just not worth it, compared to "just" paying for the higher tier storage for the few years long lifetime of the data.
probably a similar percentage of people claim on their car insurance.
In that 0.01% of cases where the order was fraudulent, placed by mistake,
how much data do we need to store inefficiently, in a way that uses a lot of power and space?
The winning ticket ID, e.g. a "0x-636e-7461-4e7b", only makes sense in the context as one among the entire cohort of contestants; I can make one up like I did, but I can't walkout with the payout unless the rest of the lottery didn't exist.
Statistically, philosophically, technically, and all sorts of *-cally speaking, is the 2% data, the winning ticket datum, even data?
Cloud services make difficult and sometimes even byzantine processes for deleting stuff, and it's often impossible to operate en masse in order to clean up swaths of stuff quickly and efficiently. It's in their interest to retain everything at all costs, because more used storage can mean more profits. Cloud services also profit from unused storage, because if they're charging $20/year to 100,000 users who use 2% of their storage space, ka-ching!
It irks me to this day that standard or even advanced filesystems don't include "expiration dates" or "purge dates" on file objects. Wouldn't it be logical, if an organization has a "data-rentention policy" that mandates destruction after X date, that the filesystem simply purges it automatically? Why does this always get delegated to handmade userland cron jobs? Moreover, to my knowledge, nobody is really interested in devising a way to comb through backup media in order to [selectively] destroy data that shouldn't exist anymore. Not even the read-write media!
Google is now auto-deleting stuff like OTP SMS messages. I'd love it if auto-delete could be configurable account-wide, for more than just our web histories and Maps Timeline and stuff. Unfortunately, to "delete" cloud data means it still exists on backups anyway. But without deleting data in your cloud account, it becomes a juicier hacker target as it ages and accumulates personal stuff that shouldn't fall into the wrong hands. Likewise for any business, it behooves them to delete and destroy data that shouldn't be stolen. At least move it offline so that only physical access can restore it?
I will say that modern encryption techniques can make it easy to "destroy" data, simply by destroying the encryption keys. You can quickly render entire SSDs unreadable in the firmware itself with such a command. Bonus: sometimes it's even done on purpose!
But even deleting data presents a maintenance cost. So if 90% of an org's data is indeed crap, then 90% or more of your processing resources are going to be wasted on sifting through it at some later date. Imagine when your file formats and storage devices are obsolete, and some grunt needs to retrieve some record that's 30 years old, and 90% of your data was always crap. That grunt is hopefully paid by the hour. We really had this happen at a few of my jobs, where we had old reel-to-reel backup tapes and it was difficult enough to load the data into a modern SunOS machine.
Google or apple can put a big button delete everything in their phones/accounts but then some prankster will do it to a family member and this gives bad PR. Let's be pragmatic.
> It's in their interest to retain everything at all costs, because more used storage can mean more profits.
As an user, I get the reverse. When I had local NAS then I dumped anything and everything - assuming.. this costs not much. Will clean up later. Once I moved to cloud that changed to If I put crap then it will cost me money! Keep it clean
Once upon a time Google had given generous unlimited to all education and workspace. They stopped it in the last 2 years and you can see most educational and companies are running a tight ship.
Due to backup costs in our organisation we are forcing people to use max of 100GB for emails.
> advanced filesystems don't include "expiration dates" or "purge dates" on file objects. Wouldn't it be logical, if an organization
Totally agree.
Outlook email service has some kind of keep only the last newsletter from this service etc.
> auto-delete could be configurable account-wide, for more than just our web histories
- features are designed with majority in mind - most users have some sort of nostalgia for reading or keeping old emails SMS etc
Except when the app writes files outside of its own space, which is meant for stuff that should stay (like pictures).
Of course, some apps store the pictures in their private space, and you lose the pictures when you remove the app. And some apps write crap in the shared space. But that seems like a fundamental limitation (even if it was done at the filesystem): how do you make sure that the apps/software you use is doing it right?
"File-type strictly associated with app" is good for security and it's good for people's mental organization. Unfortunately you're referring strictly to local file storage, I assume, and practically nothing on my phone is in local storage but "in the cloud". The only local storage I use is for ringtones and certain audiobooks/prayers which I enjoy listening whether or not I'm connected to a network.
It would seem that data centers and cloud services are a long way from "file types strictly associated with app" and also the sort of behavior you describe would be really horrible and undesirable in a typical data-center setting. I mean, I can't even imagine how it'd be implemented, given that data storage is often remote or at least decoupled from the "application server", and it's definitely never a 1:1 relationship between those abstracted components.
Can you imagine needing to "delete the /bin/tar application" in order to purge every file ending in ".tar" or ".tgz"?
But it's true that the new mobile OS paradigm has advantages for cleanup. If you've got a 3rd-party app and you've created some big crap files with it, and you uninstall that app, then it's a clean sweep when it takes along all the crap and you don't need to worry about lingering loose ends, or files you simply can't open, because their handler's gone.
Scoped storage is way more secure; it's also wonderful on my Androids that I can selectively grant access to files and media, rather than giving "the keys to the kingdom" to all these Social Media apps. I definitely never want to post my bank screenshots to Facebook and the possibility no longer looms!
These days I am sort of nonplussed when a web app demands an all-access pass to my Google Drive, because permissions can be appropriately scoped now, and the app can play in its own Drive "Sandbox" without having access to my spreadsheets and medical records. I just wish that there were some really good "cleanup" apps. Remember those "cleanup" programs that would come with antivirus for your PC, or Regclean, or whatever freeware utility would purport to liberate your 10MB HDD? Those were good times.
It's the same with social media posts--I often wish to really scrub my account, delete all posts and all comments and basically all activity, and while that's possible on Facebook it's arduous and it takes me weeks to scrub the major stuff after 4-5 years. But I only think of it on Shrovetide Monday or Fat Tuesday, and then I spend 3 weeks in Lent doing scrub, scrub, scrub. Sometimes the mouse/keyboard gestures are more repetetive & physically demanding than cleaning the toilet. Way too difficult, and that's by design.
For the expiration dates most modern file systems have the concept of arbitrary extended attributes per file. It's quite easy to add meta data like this yourself.
It's like gym memberships, ISP/telco service bundles, and amenities at your apartment complex. Anyone not using every possible service is wasting money, but it's impossible to purchase a bespoke service, so essentially everyone will waste money because they're chipping in money for services that someone else uses more than they do.
Here at home I don't ever use the gym, the racquetball courts, the doggy-doo supplies, the laundry room, or a parking space, and yet my rent (everyone's rent) includes upkeep for all of those things. I'm subsidizing all my neighbors and all the wear-and-tear damage they put on those common amenities. Likewise, everyone who's paying $24/year for storage, or any business that purchases big multi-terabyte storage media, they're paying for unused storage space and giving profit. It's practically impossible to rightsize your storage media, and you never want it undersized, and you can't simply shrink them and reclaim the resources you invested, you just keep adding on new ones and replacing the malfunctioning ones. So nearly everyone always owns or rents more space than they can realistically utilize.
Furthermore, you'll notice that I specified "automatic" destruction of data by expiration date. Of course it is trivial to tag any arbitrary file with arbitrary metadata, but the challenge is to create a filesystem that executes automatic data purges on schedule, rather than pushing it into a rickety old handmade cronjob in userland. I've never ever seen a filesystem with such a feature, nor does it seem that anyone's interested in doing so.
And here I thought that computers were useful for automating business logic and easing the burden on human effort. And this is me, manually sifting through emails and photos in order to manually delete each one with 3 dialog boxes intervening. It takes hours, days, weeks.
For personal data, the concept would be simpler but still has requirements like say tax records need to be kept 7 years.
There is no clear path forwards. Perhaps regulation could be a solution but I doubt it would turn out nice.
>The Cloud is what happens when the cost of storing data is less than the cost of figuring out what to do with the crap
But I think that's wrong. The actual issue is that you often can't figure out "what to do with the crap" because the difference between useful data and crap data is determined at the point in time when you need it, not when you store it.
I'm relatively careful with deleting data, but even so, there were countless instances where I thought something was no longer needed and deleted it, only to figure out that, a month later, I needed it after all.
Also, the article has a few anecdotes like this:
>Scottish Enterprise had 753 pages on its website, with 47 pages getting 80% of visits
But that is completely orthogonal to the question of what is "crap." The fact that some data is rarely needed does not mean it's crap. If anything, the fact that it is rarely needed might make it more valuable because it might make it less likely that the same data can be found elsewhere.
It’s a trade off especially with digital where there’s not that much cost associated with holding onto things relative to the physical world. My whole house is basically in storage because of a kitchen fire and I’m planning to be pretty selective about what I move back in.
That's true, but things get easier to find over time. I have thousands of digital photographs from the 1990s that I burned on CDs and then copied to a NAS later. Today, for the first time, they're actually searchable because they're now indexed in Immich. So they're sorted by the person in them and searchable by their contents.
If I had culled the photos back then, I would have lost many photos that have become searchable (and thus valuable) only recently.
With that said, I’m surprised Apple hasn’t implemented a feature to group/bundle successive photos beneath what is determined to be “best.”
[*] Note: successive photos being separate shutter taps/actuations (potentially several seconds apart), where bursts are continuous (generally as fast as hardware allows, ms apart).
Removing duplicates isn't that complex already, and these tools exist so anyone can try it. It's just a truely grueling process.
But there's an important piece there that is about data that should not have been stored in the first place. All the big data bullshit made people believe every single piece of data you could possibly store from a user is data that you should store and this is both a huge waste of resources and a huge liability, because now a data leak with useless to you PII could completely bankrupt your business.
Perhaps I am missing something, but these examples all sound like candidates for _offline_ storage, for which no third party custodian or data center is required.
The price of large capacity NVMe SSDs continues to fall.
The amount of energy, the resource requirements, not to mention the environmental and community impact, of running a car insurance company are miniscule in comparison to that of running a data center.
In between is a vast gulf where your only good options are disks that you have to occasionally spin up to check integrity, have the disk trigger a data refresh if it's an SSD, and replace any disks that failed and rebuild their data from redundancy (raid or whatever you prefer). HDDs die even when off [1] and flash storage in SSDs is only rated to hold data for three years without power.
Sure, you can roll this yourself, but it can easily go wrong. Easier to either keep the disks spinning or pay someone with a tape archive (e.g. AWS deep glacier)
1 https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/twenty-pe...
Data that ends up in that sea of crap is very often poorly labeled.
Data that you cannot find again is useless.
If you take more than 3 minutes to find a picture you wanted to show me, it doesn't deserve to be showed anymore.
Storage is cheap, very cheap.
This is the basic argument that every hoarder uses to justify their hoarding.
Photos of kids are obviously not part of that "crap" (even if we have too many of them and it would be worth triaging for our own sake).
The question is: what makes for most of that data? Is that all business records, or is that storing stuff because we can? I've worked in multiple startups, all were tracking users as much as they could. Adding tools that collect data is easy, and storing that data is cheap. "We may need it later". Never needed any of that crap, and it was invading our users' privacy.
In any case, I think the article raises a good point: it's so cheap to store crap that we don't even think about it. And it's bad for the environment. Just like it's so cheap to take a plane that we don't think about it, even when taking the train takes almost the same time.
Look through the pictures with your kids (and with your kids) and pick out the best ones. Delete the rest.
That random photo of your messy living room might be trash right now, but beloved in 20 years when you want to remember your old home.
1. Bulk favorite photos in Google Photos for long term archiving
2. Set a retention policy of months/years for photos based on metadata.
3. Have a UX to quickly sort the week or months photos via a swipe left/right UX.
As we were gearing up to declare victory and start turning down the several dozen legacy storage clusters someone mused that given some users were subject to litigation holds -- not allowed to delete any data -- that at least some of the leftover data on the old system might be subject to litigation hold, and we'd need to figure that out before we could delete it or incur legal risk. IIRC the leftover 'junk' data amounted to a few dozen petabytes spread across multiple clusters around the world, in different jurisdictions. We spent several months talking with the lawyers figuring that out. It was an interesting dance, because on the one hand we were quite confident that there was unlikely to be anything in the leftovers which was both meaningful and not migrated to the new platform, while on the other hand explaining that it wasn't practical to just "go and look" through a few dozen PB of data. I recall we ended up somewhere in between, coming up with ways to distinguish categories of data like caches and working data from various pipelines. It added over six months to the project, but was quite an interesting problem to work through that hadn't occurred to any of us earlier on, as we were thinking entirely in technical terms about infrastructure migration.
If 90% of this data is "crap" and could be cut down, it would still be just a drop in the bucket compared to worldwide energy use.
What really bloats things out is surveillance (video and online behavioral) and logging/tracking/tracing data. Some of this ends up cold, but a lot of it is also warm, for analytics. It bloats CPU/RAM/network, which is pretty resource intensive.
The cost is justified because the margins of big tech companies are so wildly large. I'd argue those profits are mostly because of network effects and rentier behavior, not the actual value in the data being stored. If there was more competition pressure, these systems could be orders of magnitude more efficient without any significant different in value/quality/outcome, or really even productivity.
"I need an email when this happens.. and when this happens."
The requests are endless and I'm convinced there are people who if they could would do their entire job from their inbox and get everything and anything an application can do via email.
The insidious problem is that it never solves anything. "I didn't get the email!" is a constant refrain (yes they did, they always did). "Oh someone didn't do the thing so can you add this to the email too." and so on.
It is such an abused tool.
There must be thousands of copies of that email sitting in inboxes say: Job X ran successfully @ 04:30.
That sounds like a reasonable goal for a whole lot of job duties. And yes some entire office jobs. (Excluding some direct human communication but a lot of jobs already have too much of that in situations that could have been an email.)
> "I didn't get the email!" is a constant refrain (yes they did, they always did).
Well having to manually check wouldn't improve that, would it?
There is really no sense at all in the article's claims that "we are destroying the environment" to do x y and z thing the author whines about. We are destroying the environment to drive a Dodge Ram to the Circle K to buy a 52oz Polar Pop. Information sector doesn't even show up on top ten lists of things that are destroying the environment.
I would think that email providers tend to not offer E2EE just because it fundamentally isn't practical with email. Providers like Proton try to do it, but it works only if you talk to someone else on Proton (at which point you may as well do it on Signal, which has better encryption).
Back in the day Exchange offered SIS but in 2010 they ditched it. It's plainly not effective any more. Even regarding the OP' "the jpg signature logo" - it's a part of multipart in the message, not a separate file.
And one more thing - you can't just turn the dedup and be dandy, now you need to check against the hashes to determine if this chunk is unique or you already have it. And with TBs of data you need TBs of hashes to check. Until you have like 99% dedup efficiency, ie 99% of your incoming data is literally the same data you already have - it doesn't worth it.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/dude-where...
Or if everything in the year 20XX gets pushed into using E2E encryption, since that's pretty much antithetical to deduplication.
I have cleaned up dozens of product databases in cost management efforts and have found anywhere from 50-99% of data stored in product databases is crap, because they are not well managed and any single mistake can lead to a huge outsized impact on storage.
What to log all those http requests for just a day? Might as well turn that on for all time...
No we're not. I really dislike this "environmental" anti-technologist angle. A single steel plant in china has tenfold "environmental impact" than all photos stored on a platter everywhere.
Would you prefer the photos are a cocktail of weird chemicals on a negative and printed on glossy photo paper?
Digital data is the most ephemeral we are able to make it through vast effort.
Storing "useless" data makes financial sense.
This, by the way, has implications on storage systems design. You want something that's cheap yet dense to encode, potentially at the slight expense of decode speed. Normally people really lose sleep about decode speed first and foremost, which, while important, does not minimize the overall resource bill.
So the question isn't simply whether storage is wasted; it's how much waste there is relative to the environmental impact. Granted, books and photographs don't need to be continuously fed energy to make the information available. However, the cost of storage is now so cheap that even with 90% waste, it's economically viable to keep it online. So the problem, if you can call it one, is that energy is too cheap, and externalities are not accounted for in the cost.
I'm reasonably certain that this statistic is completely made up. The best number I can find for the proportion of library books that are never borrowed was from a university library, and was 25%.
Citation required. But don't bother because it's a meaningless statistic, or at least one designed to make it look like there's a lot more wastage in libraries than there actually is.
The statistic could be true, and yet still be the case that the vast majority of library books are well utilized.
> The vast majority of them have been read once and then left on a shelf
So opened at least once, with once being higher than never.
I'd guess that 75% of all new books sold here are variations on "Someone is murdered in a brutal fashion. A old drunken cop from somewhere in Scandinavia is assigned the case. He's helped by a young woman, who may be his daughter or who he'll a father daughter relationship to. They solve the case, maybe, the end. You just tweak the details a little, but it's the same bloody story over and over.
That seems like such a waste of paper in my mind.
This article is mainly focusing about the unused data by website and enterprise databases, only toward the end of the article it barely touched upon "the elephant in the room" of data in cloud.
Now everywhere in the world data centers are being built at breakneck speed to cater for the AI data modeling, training and serving. Most of the AI based data are being kept in datalake in the form of raw data that will probably never see the light of that day i.e never being processed.
Bill Inmon warned us against this potential data swamps in data center due to the increasing popularity of the datalake [1].
Hopefully open table format like Apache Iceberg can rectify this unused raw data epidemic but time will tell [2].
[1] Lakehouses Prevent Data Swamps, Bill Inmon Says
https://www.datanami.com/2021/06/01/lakehouses-prevent-data-...
[2] What Are Apache Iceberg Tables and How Are They Useful?
https://www.snowflake.com/guides/what-are-apache-iceberg-tab...
We are using 4-6 times as much storage as we need to, and these are often not small files (on the order of 100 MB - 5 GB, several dozen times a day) but fixing this overuse is so far down the priority list that I don't think it survived the great Jira purge of mid-2024.
I think another way of phrasing that is usage is correctly incentivised. In the example you give, the value to debugging is more than the cost of storage — and even if that’s not the case it’s so low-priority that it might not even be on your list of priorities anymore!
That literally means that it’s worth your limited, valuable time to do something else.
For a fun example, every time I'm on the Las Vegas strip I see dozens of people taking videos of the Bellagio Water Show.
There are 30 shows per night, if 50 people take videos in 4K 60fps (default on new iPhones), that's around 60 GB of data per show or ~600 TB per year of just videos of the Bellagio Fountain Show!
Data centers used ~4% of USA electricity last year, about .15 quads, while the chemical industry used 10 quads, virtually all in the form of fossil fuel. If you are going to start reflecting the externality of energy consumption in the price of goods, information sector will probably not need to adjust anything, while the chemical sector will be fundamentally impaired.
While I agree that most of the stuff in data centers is probably crap, but that's because most of everything people do is crap. That's not for me to decide though, people save things because they find value in them. Most of what has value to another person won't have value to you. Most of what people treasure in their life is thrown away after they die because nobody wants it, even their closest family members. Who gets to tell everyone the bad news, that objectively their memories are trash and they don't have a right to keep them anymore? Gerry Fuckin' McGovern?
Secondly, we aren't destroying the environment for any of this. Data centers use like 5% or less of the overall electricity use. It's a lot, but we don't have to put datacenters in random locations, we can (and do) put them where electricity is cheap. That generally means that the 5% of electricity used for data centers, kwh for kwh isn't as impactful as an average kwh of end use. Large companies like Meta and Google claim to have zero net carbon by obtaining offsets. So in general we aren't "destroying the environment" to store copies of photos.
I mean, sure, there is some impact. Storage media has to be produced. But there's a reason storage is cheap, it's not a whole lot of resources going into it. And hard drives that are idle in some data center without being accessed don't consume a lot of electricity.
There are very real and concerning problems with the environmental impact of IT. But they are primarily found in other areas. Energy consumption is mostly a function of "how much you compute with data", not "how much data you have".
In other words: be concerned about so-called "AI", be concerned about Bitcoin. Don't worry about unused data too much.
published July 3, 2024:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/google-reveals-48...
One short video can equal a year worth of emails for someone. Similarly those many webpages that don't get viewed often probably require only a negligible amount of resources to keep online and might help someone who'd otherwise be faced with linkrot.
Best to focus on the low hanging fruit.
Or the cost of figuring out that it's not worth saving...
In another site I found a mix of some old version windows disk images with data. With more crap inside.
In the end: storage may be cheap. Storing piles of disorganized crap is very costly if you want to find something
Proof of work. Look at all this data I/we created.
And the article didn't talk about logs and other operational data yet
Didn't Facebook start to move most of their least-used data onto optical arrays a long time ago?
not saying that it's infallible but yeah we need some chain of audible at least 1 or 2 layers deep.
Regardless of what you think about the article. This rings so true at many Fortune 500 companies.
The number of times I have seen teams work through pointless bullshit to push some meaningless objective for the company. Just so the middle manager (aka “Director of SVP of X product of Y branch”) can get a bullet point(s) in the quarterly “all hands”.
Oh and those 10 developers/off shore people that were just hired? It was all to pump his/her “head count” number to get to the promotion to next grade/level.
Then when that person gets promoted, those people get scattered throughout the firm or just let go.
It’s truly just weaponized incompetence.
citation needed
Whoever sent this dude made a mistake. People who don't share your worldview need to be persuaded, not insulted! Some dude stomps in, thinks all the snaps in the cloud are crap, things the big bosses are stupid for not instantly deleting the pictures they saved into the cloud.... and then what? Download Lisp? Thought we got over this, pal.
WORSE IS BETTER.
P.S. do not erase our porn. WORSE IS BETTER.
We need to think about the data we need to store before we store it, only store the data that we need to store, and only store it for as long as needed.
It reminds me of CIs. It's now so easy to throw 40 jobs on GitHub actions that people don't think about them. I have been in a startup where people would debug in CI: they wouldn't have e.g. Windows on their machine (maybe they should have, given that their product was supposed to run there) and were fixing compilation issues by sending patches and patches to the CI. Every single time it would trigger the 40 jobs. Sometimes you could see a patch sent every 5 min for 3 days (where reproducing the issue locally would actually take 3s and not 5min). They did not even bother disabling the 39 uninteresting jobs.
For open source projects, it's just wasted energy, for private repos it was costing the company a lot. This was just malpractice. But nobody cared. The finance person would say "GitHub is expensive", the CEO that "well we need it" and the engineers that "I don't want that Windows crap on my computer", I suppose.
Which I believe is not uninteresting, given the amount of answers here where people say "Is that data useless? I don't know, I could imagine that it's not, I think it's a hard problem". Well here we have one person saying "I have experience in that, and I can tell you that most of it is useless". Just a data point, but that's still interesting.
Now it's clear the new deal could be implemented only in homes/sheds with domestic p.v. and storage, smart cities keeps to fail since the ancient Fordlandia, see Neom, Songdo, Masdar, PlanIT Valley, Lavasa, Ordos, Santander city, Toronto Quayside (Google Sidewalk Labs), Amazon HQ2, Egypt new Cairo still nameless, Modi's Indian 100-smart city program, Arkadag, Innopolis, Nusantara, Proton City, ... and can't be powered with a smart-grid at such scale.
So well, new well insulated buildings, with ventilation of course, with p.v. and storage, with room for a domestic rack(s), with FTTH. Anyone with such settlements could have his/her own "datacenter" at home, following the same trend for medical devices more and more cheaper and smaller. A LOM? Well a NanoKVM PCIe or an external JetKVM cost MUCH less than classic LOM and do much more. We have all the gear to makes such "datacenter at home" assemblies, anyone holding preferred crap and participating in distributed computing networks to pay at least a bit gear and bandwidth.
It's not for all of course, some will be trapped in dense cities while some large owner dream an obviously not possible conversion from offices to apartments and datacenters like https://finance.yahoo.com/news/southern-californias-hottest-... or https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/02/29/madrid-to-convert-u... and https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/05/office-to-ho... or https://czechdaily.cz/half-of-pragues-office-buildings-are-a... etc for all over the developed world. That's while we admit https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2304099120 we need a full-remote DISTRIBUTED shift.
Food, meds, general retail distributed by a single integrated logistic platform for maximum efficiency in a spread society, the IT evolution makes Distributism possible.
Doing so erase the big amount of concentrated energy, dense network, heat handling and water problem of datacenter and also reduce much the crap, because anyone keep it's own personal and being not free keeping it they'll learn to be storage continuous.
Storing the files for Mr. McGovern’s website requires plastics, metals, power and physical space, yet I assume he believes that environmental effect is worthwhile. Who is he to decide for others that their choice to pay for the storage of data is not equally worthwhile to them?
That’s the beauty of a price system: each of us gets to decide what we will buy, and what we will not buy.
Now, perhaps his argument should be that the price of storing digital data does not adequately reflect the true cost. Perhaps there are unaccounted-for externalities. If so, then he should make that argument, perhaps arguing for a tax to align prices with costs.
Someone else might argue that data is a liability as well as an asset. That’s another argument he could make.
But haranguing folks for spending their money in ways he doesn’t like doesn’t seem likely to produce the outcome he appears to wish.