Deja Vu

Lost in the Cloud

Tags:

Denis Diderot,

Enlightenment,

France,

Google,

humanism,

Internet,

technology

“The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” by Chris Anderson, Wired, July 2008.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

“Encyclopedia,” entry from Encyclopedia, by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 1751-1772.

Encyclopedia. This word signifies chain of knowledge…

Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.

It would have been difficult to propose a more extensive object than covering everything related to human curiosity, duty, needs, and pleasures. For this reason some persons accustomed to judge the possibilities of an enterprise by the limited resources they recognize in themselves have pronounced that we will never bring ours to completion….

When one considers the immense material for an encyclopedia, the only thing one perceives distinctly is that it cannot be the work of a single man. How could a single man, in the short span of his life, manage to comprehend and develop the universal system of nature and art? Whereas the numerous scientific community of La Crusca spent forty years constituting its vocabulary, and whereas our French Academicians had labored for sixty years on their dictionary, before producing its first edition! Yet what is the dictionary of a language? What is a lexicon, even executed as well as it can be? A precise collection of the articles to be filled in by an encyclopedic and analytical dictionary.

It will be said that a single man is master of all that exists, and will dispose as he wishes of all the riches that other men have accumulated. I cannot agree to this principle: I do not believe it is given to a single man to know all that can be known, to make use of all there is, to see all that can be seen, to understand all that is intelligible. Were an analytical dictionary of the sciences and arts nothing more than a methodical combination of their elements, I would still ask whom it behooves to fabricate good elements; whether the elementary exposition of the fundamental principles of a science or an art is the first attempt of a pupil or the masterpiece of a master….

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