A Tangled Web, Indeed

When my son was born in 1991, there existed precisely one website on what we now generically refer to as the internet, an entity in itself that had already been in existence for some decades before, in the service of defence and subsequently, academia, alone. One. The original Tim Berners-Lee, CERN-hosted, experimental website: the very punctus fons of a system, which in just over thirty years has come to underpin every aspect of our lives. Every aspect. From what we buy, how we are paid and how we bank our pay, through to how we actually think and conduct ourselves as a society. Everything. Scary thought, if you mull it over for longer than a millisecond.

Essentially, we're now in financial and psychological thrall to a mere handful of global mega-corps, whose sole purpose is to maximise the shareholder dividends of yet more mega-corps in the form of pension and hedge funds, merchant bankers and the like: moving huge amounts of money around in the meta-world of global finance to line the pockets of a group of über-rich individuals whose total number would barely constitute the population of a large village, whilst they bleed the rest of the world's population dry in the process. This has all happened within my son's life to date: just thirty-two years.

The numbers generated by this rapidly expanding bubble are fascinating and appalling in equal measure. Berners-Lee's original prototype website was literally a few pages of linked text: you can still view the thing online today. Now, a page of text in data terms can be stored in a very few kilobytes: 3-4 Kb at most, if it is just plain text. So assume a single A4 page of a book occupies say four kilobytes, then a novel of three hundred pages or so would be capable of being stored in around one-and-a-half megabytes of memory or disk space: a serious amount of storage when I first got my hands on a computer keyboard, just over forty years ago. By the time my son was born, the average computer program's code would still fit well within one megabyte, ten years on.

In the thirty-two or so years since, things have got a tad more expansive on the data-usage front. Applications and apps typically occupy gigabytes of space, both in storage and the memory required to actually run them; and most depend on some form of network access to the web for some of their functionality, if not all, in the case of online games. Even a gigabyte is a very large number of chunks of data: one-thousand-million, to be exact, but that figure palls into absolute minuscule insignificance beside the numbers we witness in today's wonderful world of data: the internet of today carries unimaginable quantities of the stuff every nanosecond, hither & thither, and most of it is permanently in transit, so resides in no particular place for very long at all.

The entire contents of the British Library is around thirty terabytes in data terms: around fourteen million books. The amount of fresh data created and added daily to the internet is 0.33 zettabytes, or approximately 110,000,000 times the amount of data stored in the British Library. Every day. One hundred-and-ten-million British Library's worth of data created every single day. And most of it is garbage data culled from your personal browsing, streaming and purchasing histories, alongside the content that supposedly is the principal purpose behind this 'delivery' system.

We have gone from a well-meaning, ground-breaking academic exercise in sharing stuff, to today's monstrosity of a global über-capitalist machine in a single generation. And it doesn't stop there. The corollary to all of this is the impact it has had, and continues to have, on world economy and the environment itself. On the environmental front, all of this data movement and storage comes at an enormous cost in terms of energy usage. Data centres eat up vast amounts of electricity, not just in data processing itself, but in keeping the damned computers cool enough to survive their operations. Estimates say that Ireland [Guardian, yesterday], for instance, might have a data-centre industry that could be using up to 70% of its generated electricity by 2030.

As to economics - and obviously the energy equation is pertinent to that - I think that we can go well pre-internet-as-we-know-it to see the seeds of corporate-think starting to erode our economy. Post-war Britain was a very different place to the one we find ourselves living in today. Yes, there was a de facto austerity as we were still reeling from the Second World War. But there was a social contract in place, and the country's infrastructure was publicly owned and run. It didn't take long for the puerile thinking of a Tory government under Harold Macmillan to decide that the railways, for instance - as good as they were at the time - should be run on a more cost-effective basis, with the government-commissioned Beeching Report outlining areas where money could be saved, based on the kind of mind-numbingly simplistic economic theories that have brought us to where we are today. Basically on our fucking knees.

The approach that Beeching took in his 'research' was to identify areas of the railway network that were 'unprofitable' and to close them down. That meant of course the smaller, rural community-based branch lines and spurs that enabled the relatively few to travel out into the wider world of their counties and cities, and which also brought valuable goods and services back into those remoter communities; replacing the trains with inferior motor bus services at the behest of the then burgeoning road transport lobby of the 1960s. Pressure from that sector, combined with a grossly unsophisticated approach to the needs of the economy, led to the closure of a large part of the nation's rail network. And it was the bit that in reality was the most important, socially and economically. The social bit speaks for itself: people need to be connected, and the old rail network made that cheap and accessible.

As to the economic impact of the closures, we can fast-forward to today for the exact parallel: as Yannis Varoufakis rightly points out in his piece in the same edition of The Guardian, the overarching economic 'philosophy' of the Right - currently being echoed by a rather timid Labour Party in opposition - is that one manages a country's economy in much the same way as one manages one's own domestic finances: this has been the accepted, crass trope for decades. Although Varoufakis was more eloquent in his appraisal of it, my feelings are that this is simply trite bollocks. He is correct in identifying that public spending and borrowing are vital economic drivers, and that wrong-minded 'purse-strings' and 'belt-tightening' approaches just lead to economic shrinkage as more and more people are forced into economic inactivity through penury.

Access to transport links is one way of ensuring that more people can realistically participate in a meaningful way to the economy. As would be a return to spending opportunities that would actually be feeding our economy and not the pockets of the very few, the stateless billionaires who control and monetise our data, and who were allowed in through the back door by the initial naivety of the internet community, to effectively control the bloody world. Oh, and by the by: don't trust The Cloud to hold your memories and prized piccies forever: when the electricity fails, as it probably will, they will all simply vanish into thin air: better start using analogue backups, folks...