This bias to copy is technological rather than merely social or cultural. It would be true in a different nation, even in a command economy, even with a different origin story, even on another planet. It is inevitable. But while we can’t stop copying, it does matter greatly what legal and social regimes surround ubiquitous copying. How we handle rewards for innovation, intellectual property rights and responsibilities, ownership of and access to the copies makes a huge difference to society’s prosperity and happiness. Ubiquitous copying is inevitable, but we have significant choices about its character.
Tracking follows a similar inevitable dynamic. Indeed, we can swap the term “tracking” in the preceding paragraphs for “copying” in the following paragraphs to get a sense of its parallels:
The internet is the world’s largest, fastest tracking machine, and anything that touches it that can be tracked will be tracked. What the internet wants is to track everything. We will constantly self-track, track our friends, be tracked by friends, companies, and governments. This is deeply troubling to citizens, and to some extent to companies as well, because tracking was previously seen as rare and expensive. Some people fight hard against the bias to track and some will eventually work with the bias. Those who figure out how to domesticate tracking, to make it civil and productive, will prosper, while those who try only to prohibit and outlaw it will be left behind. Consumers say they don’t want to be tracked, but in fact they keep feeding the machine with their data, because they want to claim their benefits.
This bias to track is technological rather than merely social or cultural. It would be true in a different nation, even in a command economy, even with a different origin story, even on another planet. But while we can’t stop tracking, it does matter greatly what legal and social regimes surround it. Ubiquitous tracking is inevitable but we have significant choices about its character.
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The fastest-increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating. It is (and has been) expanding faster than anything else we can measure over the scale of decades. Information is accumulating faster than the rate we pour concrete (which is booming at a 7 percent increase annually), faster than the increases in the output of smartphones or microchips, faster than any by-product we generate, such as pollution or carbon dioxide.
Two economists at UC Berkeley tallied up the total global production information and calculated that new information is growing at 66 percent per year. This rate hardly seems astronomical compared with the 600 percent increase in iPods shipped in 2005. But that kind of burst is short-lived and not sustainable over decades (iPod production tanked in 2009). The growth of information has been steadily increasing at an insane rate for at least a century. It is no coincidence that 66 percent per year is the same as doubling every 18 months, which is the rate of Moore’s Law. Five years ago humanity stored several hundred exabytes of information. That is the equivalent of each person on the planet having 80 Library of Alexandrias. Today we average 320 libraries each.
There’s another way to visualize this growth: as an information explosion. Every second of every day we globally manufacture 6,000 square meters of information storage material—disks, chips, DVDs, paper, film—which we promptly fill up with data. That rate—6,000 square meters per second—is the approximate velocity of the shock wave radiating from an atomic explosion. Information is expanding at the rate of a nuclear explosion, but unlike a real atomic explosion, which lasts only seconds, this information explosion is perpetual, a nuclear blast lasting many decades.
In our everyday lives we generate far more information that we don’t yet capture and record. Despite the explosion in tracking and storage, most of our day-to-day life is not digitized. This unaccounted-for information is “wild” or “dark” information. Taming this wild information will ensure that the total amount of information we collect will keep doubling for many decades ahead.
An increasing percentage of the information gathered each year is due to the information that we generate about that information. This is called meta-information. Every digital bit we capture encourages us to generate another bit concerning it. When the activity bracelet on my arm captures one step, it immediately adds time stamp data to it; it then creates yet more new data linking it to other step bits, and then generates tons of new data when it is plotted on a graph. Likewise, the musical data captured when a young girl plays her electric guitar on her live video stream becomes a foundation for generating indexing data about that clip, creating bits of data for “likes” or the many complex data packets needed to share that among her friends. The more data we capture, the more data we generate upon it. This metadata is growing even faster than the underlying information and is almost unlimited in its scale.
Metadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits. The least productive life for a bit is to remain naked and alone. A bit uncopied, unshared, unlinked with other bits will be a short-lived bit. The worst future for a bit is to be parked in some dark isolated data vault. What bits really want is to hang out with other related bits, be replicated widely, and maybe become a metabit, or an action bit in a piece of durable code. If we could personify bits, we’d say:
Bits want to move.
Bits want to be linked to other bits.
Bits want to be reckoned in real time.
Bits want to be duplicated, replicated, copied.
Bits want to be meta.
Of course, this is pure anthropomorphization. Bits don’t have wills. But they do have tendencies. Bits that are related to other bits will tend to be copied more often. Just as selfish genes tend to replicate, bits do too. And just as genes “want” to code for bodies that help them replicate, selfish bits also “want” systems that help them replicate and spread. Bits behave as if they want to reproduce, move, and be shared. If you rely on bits for anything, this is good to know.
Since bits want to duplicate, replicate, and be linked, there’s no stopping the explosion of information and the science fiction levels of tracking. Too many of the benefits we humans covet derive from streams of data. Our central choice now is: What kind of total tracking do we want? Do we want a one-way panopticon, where “they” know about us but we know nothing about them? Or could we construct a mutual, transparent kind of “coveillance” that involves watching the watchers? The first option is hell, the second tractable.
Not too long ago, small towns were the norm. The lady across the street from you tracked your every coming and going. She peeked out through her window and watched when you went to the doctor, and saw that you brought home a new TV, and knew who stayed with you over the weekend. But you also watched her through your window. You knew what she did on Thursday nights, and down at the corner drugstore you saw what she put in her basket. And there were mutual benefits from this mutual surveillance. If someone she did not recognize walked into your house when you were gone, she called the cops. And when she was gone, you picked up her mail from her mailbox. This small-town coveillance worked because it was symmetrical. You knew who was watching you. You knew what they did with the information. You could hold them accountable for its accuracy and use. And you got benefits for being watched. Finally, you watched your watchers under the same circumstances.