In the mid-1970s it was briefly fashionable for journalists to write scare stories about the recent cooling of the globe, which was presented as undiluted bad news. Now it is fashionable for them to write scare stories about the recent warming of the globe, which is presented as undiluted bad news. Here are two quotes from the same magazine three decades apart. Can you tell which is about cooling and which about warming? The weather is always capricious, but last year gave new meaning to the term. Floods, hurricanes, droughts – the only plague missing was frogs. The pattern of extremes fit scientists’ forecasts of what a ——world would be like. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the ——trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century ... The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality. The point I am making is not that one prediction proved wrong, but that the glass was half empty in both cases. Cooling and warming were both predicted to be disastrous, which implies that only the existing temperature is perfect. Yet climate has always varied; it is a special sort of narcissism to believe that only the recent climate is perfect. (The answer by the way is that the first one was a recent warning about warming; the second an old warning about cooling – both are from Newsweek.)

As Paul Romer puts it: ‘Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered.’ (...)
Technologies I cannot even conceive will be commonplace and habits I never knew human beings needed will be routine.

Recently it has been possible to claim that 90% or more of all the extant information in the world has been generated over the preceding two years. Seagate (2017) put total information created worldwide at 0.1 zettabytes (ZB, 1021 ) in 2005, at 2 ZB in 2010, 16.1 ZB in 2016, and it expected that the annual increment will reach 163 ZB by 2025. A year later it raised its estimate of the global datasphere to 175 ZB by 2025—and expected that the total will keep on accelerating (Reinsel et al. 2018). But as soon as one considers the major components of this new data flood, those accelerating claims are hardly impressive. Highly centralized new data inflows include the incessant movement of electronic cash and investments among major banks and investment houses, as well as sweeping monitoring of telephone and internet communications by government agencies. At the same time, billions of mobile phone users participating in social media voluntarily surrender their privacy so data miners can, without asking anybody a single question, follow their messages and their web-clicking, analyzing the individual personal preferences and foibles they reveal, comparing them to those of their peers, and packaging them to be bought by advertisers in order to sell more unneeded junk—and to keep economic growth intact. And, of course, streams of data are produced incessantly simply by people carrying GPS-enabled mobile phones. Add to this the flood of inane images, including myriads of selfies and cat videos (even stills consume bytes rapidly: smartphone photos take up commonly 2–3 MB, that is 2–3 times more than the typescript of this book)—and the unprecedented growth of “information” appears more pitiable than admirable.