Complexity Is Carbon

Some energy infrastructure emits carbon. Some data infrastructure emits complexity.

There is essential carbon emission, like humans exhaling CO2. And there is incidental, non-essential carbon emission, like humans burning fossil fuels.

There is essential complexity in data (and software code), like that pertaining to modeling your subject matter and your application domain. And there is incidental complexity – “incidental is Latin for your fault.” 1.

How can we eliminate incidental carbon emissions from energy infrastructure? Electrify everything.2

How can we eliminate incidental complexity emissions from data infrastructure? Triplify everything.3

References

  1. Rich Hickey, “Simple Made Easy”, Strangle Loop conference (2011). (transcript). ↩︎

  2. S. Griffith, Electrify: an optimist’s playbook for our clean energy future. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2021. ↩︎

  3. G. Schreiber and Y. Raimond, “RDF 1.1 Primer.” World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Jun. 24, 2014. [Online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-primer/ ↩︎