Professor Christian Fuchs for Gizmodo about whether we are ever going to run out of digital storage

Professor Christian Fuchs, Professor and Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute, was quoted in an article by Gizmodo about whether we are ever going to run out of digital storage.

The article discusses how we appear to be on a verging crisis point for digital storage, and how one day there may be no more room for digital storage.

Talking about whether this is a reasonable assumption and if we may one day run out of space, Professor Fuchs said: “If data and digital capitalism continues in an unlimited manner and uses up non-renewable resources required for computing, it might at some point of time run out of the physical resources needed for building computing and storage devices.

“But there is also Moore’s law that cheapens data storage and the search for new forms of computing such as quantum computing, which mitigate these limits and might result in new forms of data and digital capitalism that overcome storage limits.”

He added: “The key question, however, is not a technological but a moral-political one: Do we want endless storage of almost all aspects of our lives? What will be the consequences and impacts of a society that monetizes and securitizes ever more of our thoughts and activities of human life? The big danger is that digital capitalism becomes digital dictatorship and digital fascism. The solution is therefore that we minimise the data that is stored to the minimum that is necessary for operating computers and society. We need digital democracy instead of digital capitalism in order to avoid the rise of digital fascism.”

Read the full article on the Gizmodo website.

Photo by Art Wall – Kittenprint on Unsplash