Global data created per year

It turns out that the more information humanity creates—all those emails, videos, cat photos, and cryptocurrency ledgers swirling through the digital ether—the more people seem to drive home having consumed several mojitos. One would have thought these two variables inhabited entirely separate universes, yet here they are, moving together like a couple who discovered they both like the same obscure podcast. The correlation is so unnervingly strong that you begin to wonder if the universe is not merely absurd but actively pranking us.

This is a 2020 ghost story in two datasets. Global data creation leapt as video calls, streaming, and remote work exploded — and impaired-driving fatalities rose too, counterintuitively, because emptier roads encouraged faster driving and lockdown drinking pushed more people behind the wheel after one too many. They aren't the same story, but they share a country mostly locked indoors, occasionally lurching outside with tragic timing.

We've made ourselves so relentlessly productive—generating data at the speed of light, driving at the speed of terrible judgment—that even our worst habits scale with our best accomplishments. The data doesn't know what it means. Neither do we, really. We just keep moving together.