Midnight's Machines by Arun Mohan Sukumar

Author:Arun Mohan Sukumar [Sukumar, Arun Mohan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353057084
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

The Dawn of Big Data

‘Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what men fear the most.’

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

In 1995, two young PhD students ran into each other at Stanford, and created an application called ‘BackRub’ that could trawl and index all content on the web. Their story is the stuff of legend. Less well-known is the tale, from 1983, of a frustrated Karnataka-cadre Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who decided to spend the funds allocated to him for a jeep on a computer instead. 46 Sanjoy Dasgupta, the special deputy commissioner at Karwar, a coastal district, had had it with taking ‘arbitrary decisions based on unorganized information’. 47 Locating and pulling out records from the block, district and state levels had become an impossible task. Most of the data Dasgupta sought was manually gathered and fed into their byzantine administrative machinery, from which it never re-emerged. With the computer he purchased—his wife recalls the machine being installed amid the breaking of coconuts and incantations by pujaris 48—Dasgupta computerized land records, loan reports and monitored the progress of village development projects. Through the ‘Karwar experiment’, 49 as he called it, big data was born in India.

The curation of vast troves of information through digital networks did not begin with ‘BackRub’, or Google, as it is known today. Even in the United States, the origin of big data is attributed to the adoption of the Social Security Number (SSN) by its Internal Revenue Service in the sixties, and the subsequent linking by credit-reporting agencies of the SSN to a person’s financial history. 50 But the computer programme developed at Stanford by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was the first successful effort at combing sources of data that, when put together, were capable of unearthing broad trends and patterns otherwise invisible to the naked eye. When Page and Brin brought Google to the world in 1998, four web ‘crawlers’ (bot programmes) were sufficient to map the roughly 500 million web pages in existence at the time. 51 Today, Google’s products alone—Maps, Google+, Chrome, etc.—create data sets that are many times the size of the entire Internet in the nineties. Still, the fact remains that the first ‘Googlers’ had something to work with. Google was created exactly three decades after the engineer Doug Engelbart wowed his Bay Area audience with the ‘mother of all demos’, introducing them to the modern personal computer (PC). 52 Its popularity in the United States—a third of American households had a PC by the early nineties 53—had since made possible the creation of a treasure chest of information, which the search engine farmed effectively.

A civil servant in India of the eighties, Sanjoy Dasgupta had no such luxury. The Internet as it existed in the US was all but unknown in the country. There were no digitized databases and no networks to connect them. Even if such a network could be created, India had few micro-computers and fewer individuals willing to feed them data! The bulk

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