“It’s quite scary,” physicist and information theorist, Melvin Vopson, replied to me when I asked him what he thought about the current growth of data. Data growth is out of control and leaping ahead at an annual rate of more than 25%. Based on my calculations, if we continue this growth rate, by 2053 we will be mining a Mount Everest wo... Read More »

“Information is physical,” Melvin Vopson tells me. “The fact that information is physical goes back to much older studies. What I did in 2019, I asked myself a question: If a bit of information is physical, and you can detect that energy associated with the bit of information when you erase it, what happens to that energy when the inform... Read More »

Management wants some quick wins, so we don’t have time to do proper analysis. We’d like to but, you know, unless you can show us some low-hanging fruit, we wouldn’t be able to embrace your approach. A Polish person once told me a joke about communist Poland. There was a big building site and everyone was working at a nice, leisurely p... Read More »

Data production is growing at around 25% per year. Humans produced about 60 zettabytes of data in 2020, and Statista estimates that over 2,000 zettabytes of data will be produced by 2035. This is a wholly unsustainable growth rate and it will have cataclysmic impacts on the environment if it is not radically reduced. The culture of inf... Read More »

90% of data produced and stored is not simply useless; it gets in the way of useful data. Waste data makes it harder and harder to find and make use of good data. John Booth gave me a great example of how just because you can collect loads and loads of data, it doesn’t mean that you should. “We work with a couple of organizations and s... Read More »

I have yet to meet a medium-to-large organization that knows how much data they have. I have yet to meet one that knows how many computers or servers they have. And with the Cloud, the problem is getting totally, absolutely, infinitely worse. We are sleepwalking into a data crisis and the consequences already are very substantial. They w... Read More »

Much of the digital world is built on lies. A search is not free. A tweet is not free. Facebook is not free. Packing and shipping are not free. Every years, billions of trees are cut down for packaging. Every year, Amazon uses enough plastic to smother the Earth. Delivery trucks cost. We return four times more bought online than in store... Read More »

You come home one evening to find your house almost burned to the ground. Someone is standing outside with a can of “organically sourced, sustainable green diesel”. They hand you a certificate for “One burned down house”. It’s a new currency, they say. If you trade well you may be able to turn it into two burned down houses and perhaps e... Read More »

Data is out of control. Content is out of control. In fact, data and content were never in control for the vast majority of organizations. Content management was always a joke. Data management was always a joke. At best, we have data and content publishing and storage. Only a tiny fraction of organizations that I have dealt with in almos... Read More »

Pat and Nuala Geoghegan are farmers from Askeaton, County Limerick. As the crow flies or the wind-based red dust pollution drifts, Askeaton is about eight kilometers (five miles) from Aughinish. Aughinish comes from the Irish word eachinis, meaning horse island. It was an island but is now a peninsula, jutting out into the Shannon estuar... Read More »