Hmmm….

I want you to think about something.

First, allow me a moment to preface. I am not “conspiracy theory” guy. I’ve never been one to talk about the government, the illuminati, or aliens. I believe Oswald shot JFK and I’m pretty sure Area 51 is bullshit. I don’t believe in black helicopters or MIB’s, and I don’t think the US orchestrated 9/11.

I am a realist though, and I understand that a certain amount of corruption and control exists behind the scenes. Maybe I am “conspiracy theory” guy, just a much more subdued version of him. I do think the worlds governments are all corrupt, lying, self-serving greed mongers. I do believe that gas prices are controlled by the whims of massively lucrative partnerships between entities that would otherwise spend their time dropping bombs on each other. I believe advertising is bullshit, contests, lottery, sports and game shows are rigged, and the agencies that are out there to regulate these systems along the shiny, green lines of corporate America are completely on the take, for the most part. And we know for a fact that the US government can wiretap anything it wants, and that elite hackers can, in all practicality, access and tamper with anything. I think most of the people I would call friends would agree that none of the above is actually all that unrealistic. Hell, most of it is probable.

…ok, ok…and I think the Kennedy’s killed Marilyn Monroe. Moving on…

There are two things that have come to light recently that, in my opinion, pose a connection that is moderately unnerving at least, potentially terrifying at most. One of them came on the scene very recently, to not much fanfare, and passed by with little actual media coverage. The other one has been around for a few years now, and is massive in scope both currently and potentially.

First, I am talking about Watson, the IBM supercomputer that recently annihilated two geniuses on Jeopardy! I don’t know how many of you reading this actually followed the story or saw that thing in action. Watson is a room of insanely capable servers, powering 1500 Tb of data. It is designed exclusively to interpret English text and facilitate a response to any question posed, within nanoseconds. Watson processes human voice into text and analyzes it for connections to anything and everything that is stored in its brain. It then fires the words it just “read” out into its own data pool. Trillions of calculations are made in a nearly undetectable period of time and Watson, using the interpreted text as search terms, spits out an answer to almost anything.

Watson laid waste to the most decorated champions in Jeopardy! history. I watched it, it wasn’t even close. Over two days, the thing answered 9 out of every ten questions, got two wrong total, and showed off the most amazing advancement in computing of perhaps the last ten years.

IBM wants Watson to hit the field of medicine. Imagine, explaining your symptoms to a computer that searched every word of medical research in all of existence to diagnose you, treat you, and make you well. If it is correct to the 99th percentile when asked about any subject it stores, it would use 99% of doctors opinions, studies and writings to provide, at least statistically, the best answer. The applications Watson could have for education, training and any aspect of data referencing that could ever be conceived are virtually limitless.

The other thing I want to discuss has 500 million users. 50% of them use every day. 700 billion minutes spent per week. 900 million objects interacted with every month, with the average user being directly linked to 80 of them. Average user creates 90 pieces of content per month. Over 30 billion items are shared every month. 25 million applications are stored every day. 70 percent of its users are outside the US. 250 million websites interact with it, with over ten thousand adding to that number every day. Businesses in 190 countries build with it. And over 200 million users interact with it every single day, from their phone.

Yep. Facebook. If I’ve still got your attention, hunker down for a minute. I’ll try to be quick.

Go back and read those numbers again. Seriously…read them again. Did you know how big it was? Did you really know? And those stats come directly from Facebook and not some third party. They post them on the site itself. Honestly, I read these stats for the first time as I wrote this, and I had no idea. Those figures are unquestionably remarkable. Save the Internet, Facebook is the single largest entity of data, ever. As of the most recent publication of information quoted from Jeff Rothschild, the VP of IT at Facebook, the thing operates on 30000 servers, and processes 25 Tb of data daily.

25 Tb is the equivalent of 1000 times the amount of all mail delivered daily by the USPS. Its ridiculous.

And its ridiculously secretive. Those quotes about the data storage and servers come from 2009. They are the most recent ones readily available. Really. Google it. You won’t find anything more recent. Which means its fucking way bigger than that now. Why is that piece of information guarded? Kinda creepy when you think about it. Just like its kinda creepy how you have to click through 18 menus, file an online request, jump through seven hoops and kill a fire-breathing turtle in order to permanently disable a Facebook account…but I digress.

Now think about the world around you. Right now. Egypt probably set off a chain reaction of revolts that won’t stop until the entire Mid-East is in flames. That’s a bit dramatic sure, but we all know what the internal struggles and generations of unrest in those countries make their people capable of. I mean, people attack tanks with rocks, for shit’s sake. They can be an angry bunch even without focusing on how stifling and oppressive their own leaders are. Libya, Yemen. People already saying Saudi Arabia is next. Sure, this may all fizzle and end quietly. In a few weeks or months, everything might be back to relative normalcy in that region. Maybe.

Would you bet on it?

America will end up tied into that shit somehow. And on the heels of a war that pissed off much of the country. And in the middle of a recession. Unions are having rights taken away and they’re uber-pissed. People, in general, are getting more and more cranky. What if, among another bloody, endless war and $7 a gallon gas, Americans finally get mad. Motivated, even. I don’t mean riots and anarchy, just enough unrest to get the government spooked. If they ever needed to, they could reach into the very lives of each and every person they want. It would certainly allow for a substantial amount of knowledge about how to monitor and manipulate a society. Well, anyone in the society that uses Facebook, anyway.

If technology like Watson were fed all of the exponentially growing data that pulses through Facebooks veins, one would have access to a instantly searchable database of everything that was ever said, liked, linked, posted, commented on or created within that community. Every single connection of every single user would be processed in nanoseconds and could create an answer to virtually any question…about anyone. And we know plenty about Facebook’s iron clad privacy, right? Yeah…how’s that been working out?

Maybe it is meaningless. Maybe its already happening. Maybe the ability doesn’t really amount to a whole lot of power the US Government doesn’t already have. Still, if you’re not at least a little unsettled by this idea, I ask you to do one thing.

Go read those numbers again.