It’s not simply crap content. Computer code bloat is everywhere. For starters, most software, most features, serve no useful function. A pile of crap software is launched and then either it dies a death, or else for years badly designed fixes are made to try to get it to work in the most basic manner, while making it even more complex and bloated. It’s hard to comprehend the appalling quality of most enterprise systems, while most consumer software apps hardly even get downloaded. Those that do, hardly ever get used. Thirty days after news apps, shopping apps, entertainment apps, education apps have been downloaded, most will have lost over 90% of their users. A typical webpage can easily weigh 4 MB. If it was properly coded, that weight could be brought down to 200 KB, a 95% reduction. 95% crap.

Big Tech laughs about all this crap production. This is how Big Tech makes so much money in its data centers. It sells them as plush five-star hotels for superior VIP data, when in reality it’s running a datafill, a data dump. If most of the data stored in a typical data center was processed and accessed every day, then everything would explode, the servers would fry. The demand would crash everything. The data center business case is dependent on most people never accessing the data they’ve stored. You’re paying for a data dump.

To protect their profits, Big Tech has historically made it very hard for you to delete. Artist Honor Ash observed:

“Initially, Gmail didn’t even include a delete button. Not only was it no longer necessary to delete emails regularly to make space in your inbox, but it was actually not even possible. This shift broke everyone’s deletion habit—it ended the ritualistic appraisal of what should be kept, and ushered in a default in which literally everything should.”

While the good habits of deletion ended with the Cloud, they were replaced by the very bad habits of keeping everything. How often I’ve heard the argument that we have to keep everything because you never know what will be important in the future. This was executives in charge of intranets, websites and computer systems, where nobody could find anything because of the terrible search design and because of the awful information architecture. And what they did find was usually some sort of dodgy draft, some copy of a copy, or something that was way out of date, inaccurate or useless. Keeping all this junk data does not simply reduce the chances of findability, it also increases cybersecurity risk. Huge quantities of poorly structured and badly maintained data and software are an invitation to hacking and other risks.

Even if we could put a data center in every town and village in the world, we couldn’t keep everything anyway. There is simply too much data being produced, vastly too much, so that in any one year we’re lucky if we have the space to store about 10% of the total data produced. We are now into the era of zettabytes. As my previous book, World Wide Waste, explained:

“A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000? MB or one quadrillion MB. If a zettabyte was printed out in 100,000-word books, with a few images thrown in, then we would have one quadrillion books. It would take 20,000,000,000,000 (20 trillion) trees’ worth of paper to print these books. It is estimated that there are currently three trillion trees on the planet. To print a zettabyte of data would thus require almost seven times the number of trees that currently exist to be cut down and turned into paper.”