Even if you aren’t, the world is. Companies are obsessed with data. You might have heard of Big Data, but let that be; let’s not get into enterprise IT. Simply speaking, it’s all about data:

• Advertising: Gather info from the customer, his devices, his home, and send him targeted notifications and ads.
• Data security: The organisational network has to be secure against data theft.
• ATMs: Record every transaction on camera, and store it for 30 years (I’m kidding about the 30 years).
• City surveillance and home surveillance: Record people and their daily activities, and store the data. (This is real.)

All organisations are all about data. Examples are futile; it’s kind of an obvious reality.

In a twist, Microsoft is teaming up with genetics startup Twist Bioscience to store data in... in... DNA.

Read that again. They’ve found that DNA is an efficient, long-lasting way to store information — in a more compact fashion than, say, on hard drives or SSDs. About 700 terabytes can go on a single gram.

Which, to us, sounds weird, scary: Living matter storing data?

We’ve known for long that our DNA can store a lot of info. But that’s stuff about our bodies and its workings, not bits and bytes. That article is from a year ago: It says fear of spiders became part of our DNA during evolution. For all the people who speak about Intelligent Design, how could the fear of spiders be part of out physical make-up?

But I digress. “[Using DNA,] you could fit all the knowledge in the whole world inside the trunk of your car,” Twist Bioscience CEO told TechCrunch.

Actually, what’s more scary than the method is the emphasis on data. It seems so all-consuming, as though we’d be dead without it.

We might well be: Every move is recorded, everything archived. Understand it once and for all: The whole point is data. That’s how the world works.

Tags : Surveillance System, big data, Twist Bioscience