The Past Shows Us How Far We’ve Come

We’re Americans and we accumulate stuff.

That’s how we fit in, by having stuff that others see as part of our image. A house, two cars and a boat can be part of that as can mundane things like what brand of mower you use.

But I’m not talking about that stuff. We use the cars, boat, house and mower. I’m talking about the stuff we don’t use but choose to keep for various reasons. I’m talking about the heirlooms that you must carefully store so they can be handed off to the next generation after you’re gone so they can store them.

If you’re a homeowner, you likely have odds and ends of lumber, siding and gutter downspouts just in case you need them someday. You keep them because you’re afraid that you’ll lament the day you tossed out a perfectly good five-foot 2×4 and now it’s exactly what you need.

So, how much stuff do you store? Enough to rent a storage shed? There sure are a lot of them now. There wasn’t much call for storing things when I was growing up in Red Wing. We didn’t have anything worth paying to store.

I’m not making judgments on this. I’m doing this to make a comparison to another kind of storage that is increasing much faster than we can fill storage sheds.

I’m talking about data storage – everything from tape to floppy disks to CDs to thumb drives to hard drives. Many of us still have much of this legacy storage.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

But now we’ve moved on to cloud storage which is convenient because you don’t need to rent a shed and your data becomes available anywhere you can get internet access. It’s also more secure because it is stored “out there somewhere” in multiple locations. Your house can burn down but your cloud data would be fine.

It may seem impossible that, for many of us, our most important documents, photos and music are now stored out there somewhere. Well, that somewhere is a physical location that requires space, power, and cooling. It isn’t magic. It takes a lot of infrastructure.

They are called data centers. I’ll bet you’ve heard of them. We may not realize it, but we store lots of data on the internet. Every account you have requires data that is stored somewhere. If you have an Amazon account, you are using data centers. Same with other stores, apps, games, and GPS maps. That movie you streamed last night was from a data center.

No matter what your opinion is of data centers, they have become integral to our lives now. The internet calls data centers “the physical backbone of the digital economy.” This is essentially true. The world runs on these interconnected centers. It would be difficult to live off the grid these days.

How many digital photos do you have? They are easy to take but must be stored somewhere. How many duplicate photos do you have? This is serious enough that it caused an effort in the UK to get people to remove redundant and unnecessary data in their accounts to help slow the growth of data centers and power plants.

There are apps to help find duplicates. Have you used them? And if you diligently scan files and photos, you can get rid of the originals, right? Or maybe you’ll just let the kids deal with it someday.

But Wait, There’s More

Data centers aren’t just for data storage and website hosting anymore. They host cloud computing which does a lot of the thinking your computer used to do. Add in artificial intelligence and everything is just exploding. AI data centers, such as the proposed one in Pine Island, require the most power and cooling. And they can create a lot of data that must be stored.

I wouldn’t want a data center in my backyard. A lot of clear thinking needs to occur regarding their location and resource use. But they will go somewhere.

Data has become the new heirloom. It might include scanned family documents and photos as well as modern digital ones, anything that can be digitized. And after you collect this data, it’s up to your kids to determine its future. Do they know how to access it?

I hoped that all of our accomplishments could survive throughout eternity and could always be referenced. Kind of like the Looking Back section of this newspaper.

I guess there’s no data center that big.