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We need to talk about data as a physical object.
A lot of people think of data as something ethereal. It’s not. It’s still saved on disks somewhere, whether they’re a traditional HDD or a modern SSD.
It’s the same with “the cloud.” The cloud isn’t magic, it’s just a massive number of disks owned by corporations, who are essentially renting you a portion of their disk space to back up data.
The thing is, when you physically destroy a drive, if there is no backup, you have physically destroyed the data contained on the disk.
In other words, data was always as physical as words on the page of a book. Video cassettes, cassette tapes, 8-tracks, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, Bluray, and so on, are all physical items that act as data storage. That data can be retrieved with the proper “reader.”
Why did we accept the change in how ownership worked simply because of a change of storage medium?
Data is physical and takes up space. Even if it can be copied infinitely, like text in a book, it still requires a physical storage medium, just like text in a book. You can’t copy text onto nothing.
I feel like the conversation about how this all works got twisted somewhere along the way and the tech companies convinced everybody that data storage was magic and that it wasn’t simply the same as every other data storage medium before it. Because why else would we accept that we could buy a digital file on a Bluray disk and own it forever, but when we buy the digital file over the internet, we can go fuck ourselves? It has never made sense to me, and I can only assume this happened because so few people understand that data is a physical object.
A big part of it comes to the dying throws of a scarcity model that has been in progress for the past several decades. Data, or media, can be duplicated with trivial cost where a bit of bread or plank of wood cannot. Scarcity adds a premium onto the value of something irreplaceable.
Mass produced media holds less value individually to the average user since they have no stake on the creation, but family photos do since they have personal ties to them. Both are at the end just bits on a disk though.
What gives gives something functionally infinate in supply then is that the person holding it sees it as important, or in the case of purchases goods that they’ve exchanged something of known value for it. I don’t have a clear answer on how to give permanence to something that can stop existing with a few keystrokes, but a part of that is in not ceding control to another entity over access to it.
Exactly. They are trying to enforce scarcity on digital products despite the ability to copy them quickly and easily at very low cost, energy-wise. Great observation.
A lot of energy is being used for DRM and encryption that only exists to create false digital scarcity. Capitalists don’t care about climate change or the future so they would rather burn energy trying to stop piracy than providing a better product.
Very much agree, people make a leap of logic from the idea that data can be easily copied to treating data as being ethereal. The reality is that it still has to be encoded on some physical medium somewhere. Both ownership of the medium and the data encoded on it should be in the hands of the customer.
Further, the hardware and software needed to “read” the data should be open and accessible to the public, if they want to build their own reader.
Absolutely, and this is precisely why open standards for hardware and software are of fundamental importance.
We need to talk about data as a physical object.
We need to admit that it isn’t and that that’s a terrible metaphor.
It’s still saved on disks somewhere, whether they’re a traditional HDD or a modern SSD.
Yes, often multiple copies are saved. Sometimes it is aggregated with other data, sometimes not. Making a new copy is insanely cheap, and, under the hood, even when just moving the data from the hard drive to the computer’s memory, a copy is made automatically. There’s no way to avoid copying the data.
But, to make it clear, “data” is basically “ideas”, and you can’t really treat ideas as objects. For thousands of years the idea that you could control ideas was ridiculous. You could control the physical object that an idea was expressed on, but if someone took their own time and copied it, that was a new object and the person who made the original had no claim on it.
Copyright, and its evil friends, is a relatively new concept where the government grants a temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea. Stealing the physical object on which the idea is printed is one thing. But, now you can get in trouble for “stealing” the idea. That’s what you’re talking about with stealing “data”, is that what you’re supposedly “stealing” is information.
But, of course it’s not theft. When you copy an idea without permission, the person with the original doesn’t lose it, they just lose control over a copy of that information.
Treating ideas, data, etc. as physical objects just never works because ideas can be copied without the original person losing anything. This is different from physical objects where my taking it necessarily means that you no longer have it.
In other words, data was always as physical as words on the page of a book.
Not at all, because each copy of a book is its own physical object. Copying a book is difficult and requires its own printing press. Even a low-fidelity copy like a photocopy requires a photocopy machine, ink and paper. Copying data is essentially free. When copying a book required a printing press, you could sort-of pretend that ideas were objects because copying was so burdensome. But, with digital data it’s clearly ridiculous. That doesn’t mean you can’t have laws about data (i.e. information), it just means that those laws care going to have to be completely different from laws about physical objects.
Why did we accept the change in how ownership worked simply because of a change of storage medium?
Because copying is essentially free. It’s no longer an object, it’s information.
But, having said that, the storage medium isn’t a major issue. The real question is when did people start accepting that you could treat ideas as objects. Stealing a book out of someone’s backpack and photocopying a book are completely different crimes. In one case, the person no longer has the object. In the second case, they still have it, but they don’t have control over the copies of it.
Talking about data as if it’s an object or something you can own is a red herring. The real issue is privacy.
For instance, say you use a period tracker app, that is owned by an non-profit, trying to use the data to better understand women’s hormone changes so that they can get better medical care. Great! Ok, now what happens if that non-profit goes bankrupt and as part of the bankruptcy proceedings sells its data to Meta or Google so that it can afford to make payroll. Well shit, your data is now owned by them, and you’re out of luck.
A privacy rule handles that situation better. You can give the company access to your private data, and then revoke that access later. If your data is something they own, they can use it however they like. But, if you own your own privacy, it doesn’t matter if the period tracker app gets bought out or goes bankrupt or whatever. The data they have isn’t something they own and can sell, it’s private data that they had temporary access to.
