A random thought hit me the other day while I was sitting outside on a gloriously cool and sunny day: I can purchase a 32-gigabyte flash drive for as little as thirteen dollars. That’s about 2.5 gigs per dollar. Now, compare that to the floppy discs of the 80s and nineties. The floppy disc closest to our generation (chronologically) was the 3 ½ inch floppy, with a storage capacity of 1.44 megabytes. That sold for approximately $46, putting the price at about 32 kilobytes per dollar. In about 30 years, data became 81,920 times more cost efficient. This massive increase in cost efficiency has shaped the technologically oriented society we live in. This has allowed companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon to flourish off data collection.
Sidebar. The data Google owns has been estimated to be about 15 exabytes, or 15 million terabytes. To picture that absurd amount of data in an even more absurd way, imagine if all of Google’s data was on punch cards. The amount of punch cards used would cover new England to a depth of 4.5 kilometers, 3 times deeper than the ice sheets of the last glacial age over the region. Here’s a visual to help.
Anyway, to the main point here: the way the price of data has been going would make it seem that increasingly more cost-efficient data is a democratic technological development, right? More people can more easily access free data storage. However, consider the programs we work with daily. A single word document takes up about 12 megabytes of storage (about 9 times more than the capacity of that nineties floppy disk). A nine-to-ten-megapixel image takes up about three megabytes. A 1080p video takes up around 4-5 megabytes per second (4K takes around 7 to 15 megabytes per second). The average AAA video game takes up somewhere between 60 to 80 gigabytes. When compared to the massive size of programs, images, and videos today, our storage capacities suddenly seem adequate at best. Efficient storage seems less like a democratic technology and more like a necessity to keep up with massive programs. Data becomes a public necessity instead of a public luxury. Considering this, data might cost a whole lot more than we realize.