The curse of the bit dump … 
I wonder where it will end. Everyone is speaking of big data and even
I take part in it.
At first I thought we might end up something like in "Muell", a comic book by Juan Gimenez picturing a world where only a very small part is still habitable and all the rest of it looks like a big dump. Funnily, that is not going to happen. At least I think that we are going in a different direction that has to do with our fascination for big data, which is closely related to "messyism": Stupidly collecting things we no longer need.
A not so long time ago everything would at some point simply disintegrate because the material would not last forever. With the industrial revolution we invented more and more durable materials and now we have this volatile bit which is going to haunt us even longer, because we make it stick in our data centers. Already most of Europe and parts of the rest of our world are covered with data centers. We will need even more if we don't look back at how our ancestors handled information.
Partly due to lack of storage, but also for the sake of simplicity and understanding information was boiled down, filtered and then came part where it was stored (drawn or written down mostly). That's the point where I think we need to think again and focus on the part where understanding and filtering reduces the amount of information.
Still, there is this wish to keep up with the speed of our time and having it all available. At the speed we produce data, the analytics tools that evolve will lose in the end if we try to catch up the bit dumps already there.
We have a chance though to keep the pace by shifting away from big data storage analytics to real-time data analytics that simply keeps our level of knowledge, the insights from our continuous data streams, up-to-date at all times.The resulting data will be much less and much more informative than all the bit muell it came from and it will in the end protect us from ending up to look like Coruscant, a planet of data centers.
