If Data Is The New Oil, When Do We Go Green?

Perhaps we need to treat data with a little more care. It is, after all, just as precious as the environment.

The relationship between oil and data is becoming uncannily similar in all facets; from what it costs to extract them, to how they are consumed. Does that mean it is time to equate it to something more environmentally sustainable? We have, for years now, been equating data to oil. Yet, over the same period, there has been a move to eliminate oil from our lives due to the environmental and human damage it causes a situation we are now experiencing with data.

As our demand for storage of data has increased, so too has the consumption of carbon-based fuels needed to keep that storage powered - be it for our phones, or the huge centralised cloud storage facilities. Some of the latter consume more power than certain entire African countries, yet I haven’t even gotten to processing.

Data is the basic building block for information and knowledge just like crude oil is the core of our modern lifestyles with both having negative impact on the environment as well as the human. This might explain why we are so comfortable equating them as similar if not identical.

Pollution today doesn’t only mean the spewing of dangerous gases into the air. Gases which can damage human lungs. It also refers to the spewing of information extracted from data that affects the minds of innocent civilian consumers, both of which remain unseen until they manifest in different ways.

The similarity of data and oil was best experienced during the 6 January 2021 raid on The Capitol Building. Based on questionable information due to the unverified data upon which it was extracted.

I suspect the ease with which such a large group of otherwise sane people reacting unreasonably to a tweet could be attributed to pollutants in the air from the burning of fossil fuels. All which serve to affect the human brain. But then, I am simply speculating.

In the past, crude oil was the cause of many proxy wars. Today, it is data. Such as data from the past four disputed elections in Kenya, all of which had a minuscule technology componentnamely transmission of backup results. The latter was based on the unfounded belief someone was physically sitting inside the servers and altering the results, thus the demand for servers to be opened.

Just like with the crude oil extracted from the bowels of most African countries which is then shipped out for processing into useful products; that are then imported back for consumption, so too is what is happening with Africa’s data. It is being shipped out to be stored and processed into information in foreign nations over fibre optic pipelines.

In much the same way most oil producing African countries are clueless of the real value of the crude they ship out, so, too, is the case of our data. The data we keep sharing and is stored in foreign servers.

By equating this data to oil, we sanitise the process of the release of our data to foreign players who are then able to manipulate our thinking, as was seen with the Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of Kenya’s elections, an issue that we still refuse to address.

As of now, the current US President Joe Biden is looking to stop TikTok, a platform allowing youth to share goofy dance moves, from operating in the States while claiming the data it collects can be used to compromise the security of the US. What about the security of Kenya and other countries?