An early morning burst of writerly enthusiasm quickly evaporated. I was talking to The Wookie, asking what I should do with this precious gift of a day. He said “Idunno, far as I can tell it’s just another day to waste.” But it came out sounding like “Data Waste”, or maybe a single word “Datawaste”. Either way the concept aptly describes my capacity to complete nothing of substance or merit this year. That makes for a great matchup with the digital hoarding tendencies. Hell, it sounds like an ace domain name, even better than flaneur.nyc. But, no surprise, the .COM version of that domain name is taken by a squatter.
It sounds like a word used by people monitoring a computer network, similar in spirit to “Data Breach” but used to send an alarm when someone is writing insipid drivel or horrible code. “We’ve gotta keep an eye on this datawaste coming out of 2B.”
Is any data truly wasted in the way physical matter wastes space when it is no longer needed? Or is lack of data what is wasteful? A storage device or media could be said to waste physical space when no information is on it, but it’s not as if blank storage media are truly empty. Writing data to any kind of storage media is a matter of switching its 1s and 0s around, so you are not writing anything, you are just rearranging what is already there. Some have theorized that a hard drive filled with data weighs an infinitesimal amount more than when it had no information on it. My quick foray into Internet discussion on that matter gave me a headache. Does my head weigh more when it hurts? It might seem so but I doubt it. Does a chess board weigh any more on account of a game having been played on it? One could suggest that the oils from the players’ hands added a few nanograms of weight to the pieces. If we eliminate that hypothetical by providing static-free rubber gloves to the players it becomes obvious that the rearrangement of the pieces adds nothing to the weight of the pieces or the board. I think that is somewhat analogous to hard drive and digital media storage. But what do I know?
UPDATE: Well duh, that’s a dumb analogy. It would be assumed that in a normal chess match a portion of the pieces would be removed from the table, unless it was some kind of unusual stalemate reached before any pieces were taken. So obviously the weight of the table with pieces on it would be lessened. I guess a better analogy would be where you have a table with some plates on it. You turn some of the plates over, leaving the rest as they were. In theory there is no change in the weight of the plates on the table. The scenario is only problematic if we consider the oils from the hands of whoever did this but as a lightweight analogy to writing 0s and 1s it works fine. Information itself is weightless.
A friend and I once decided we were going to open a bar and call it “WASTE”. People at their offices would say “Let’s go to Waste after work”, and the obvious nickname for the cliéntele would be “The Wasted”. I don’t know that a bar by that name has ever existed.
Datawaste. Wastedata. Where do we go to recycle our datawaste? It should be like old motor oil, where certain facilities are required to accept datawaste for recycling at no charge to the datawastee. All that wasted data goes into a cyclonic databin where it is morphed into a spoon or a crisp string of spaghetti. Or its bits and bytes are transformed from raw text and binary blobs to visual equivalents, or audio renditions. Simply take a dataform for one type of binary and apply it to multimedia standards, unpredictably creating either an unpredictable squall of noise or a primal machine language.
