Sairam Venugopalan, Qualcomm
February 1, 2025

A poem about the wonkiness, weariness, and weirdness of information overload.

Inflation has a different connotation in this eerie epistle,

Being a portmanteau of info dilation with all hustle-bustle.

With the rumination here on the intriguing ways of info flood,

That’s adequate to create a throbbing torque in the head.

‘Twas vintage time when eking a nugget was akin to feverish ferreting,

Nothing came on a platter and needed excavation from WWW trotting.

Ransacking catalogued annals in libraries formed the encyclopedia,

As jotting notes and scribbling hints frantically onto papyrus media.

Tracing an acorn in the forest might’ve been easy for a big bird,

But trudging folio swathes in a public library was minefield mired.

Just to offer a stark contrast of how arduous it was to find,

A pearl of data that was a pull of a chestnut-out-of-the-fire kind.

“No pain, no gain, every ounce of effort is worth it,” the self-specter says,

“Parsing and scanning mounds of manuscripts will pay off in rewarding says.”

And so the quest despite a pest in the you-know-what area grittily crusades,

Emerging a victor with precious yield in armor of knowledge grenades.

With the cherishment of a brutal battle for data diadems won,

Holding the head aloft as glistening sand basking under the sun.

All this raving and ranting was parading scene before Web boom,

As grass was greener on the other side of Internet info bloom.

 

Circa the .com bubble, the uphill task to fend resources in parchment was shoo,

Cyberspace, virtual villa of web pages and chronicles was in-vogue woo-hoo.

Search engines were cruise lines such as AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo,

In browsing centers and CRT monitor computers ruled the roost in gung-ho.

Students and scholars, pros and analysts thronged the then-fad,

In their savage hurry to unearth files and details they wanted bad.

Moderated and not too unwieldy it was to amass content from the web,

Making hopes and energy not too easily fallible to droop and ebb.

Floppy disks, printouts, and mail attachments of discoveries galore,

With those findings being of the dire-in-need pointers coming to fore.

With precious wealth of material scooped about a focus area and subject,

Thesis and dissecting research could be done on about just any project.

As the portals and hosted servers mushroomed like spawning bunnies,

Insurmountable was a notion that began to engender in the mind crease,

Plenty suddenly is turning into a nemesis instead of a cushion quarters.

As sifting and fishing through tomes of info was a prickling cactus.

 

As web waters engulfed by spreading their myriad tentacles,

Info overload dubbed Inflation at the start touched pinnacles.

Just as rivers in a spate of filers, servers, and collaboration sites,

Wikis, confluences (literally too), and sounding boards swag kites.

Nothing in life is immune to amusingly peculiar paradoxes,

It must not have been baffling then to see such flummoxes.

From the herculean chore to collect an info-pebble one by one,

We suddenly saw info-blight turn into a glut with text/pixels ton.

Timed-out was a refrain before in paucity of data collectibles,

The same despair was now due to more than necessity blurb bubbles.

Bookmarked pages and favorites folders were bursting at the seams,

As with every drop of a hat or breath inhaled, they got new moonbeams.

Shortcuts, tiny URLs, and slick captions, all fanciful paraphernalia,

As remembering the site pages and web shelves turned into mania.

But the pumping of data continued with unsurpassable might,

Needing one to stave off all odds and put up a brave fight.

As the adage goes, knowledge shared is knowledge gained,

All and sundry in letter, spirit lived to this tenet unrestrained.

Funny as it might seem, mails and missives turned into avalanche,

That even a true tempest might have blushed at the inbox ranch.

 

Virtual machines and logical appliances had their heyday,

As hard disks of physical gear weren’t enough for info-sway.

Expandible memory for add-on space was selling like hot cakes,

As every inconsequential and obscure matter needed silica sakes.

Inflation had spiked to sternly challenge its financial sibling,

Making one split hairs and chew nails as they grappled, hobbling.

Cloud hosted databases and repos as a panacea were keenly sought,

Causing companies selling such novel ware to be avidly bought.

Swelling archives, burgeoning beehives of data treasure troves,

As akin to buzzing bees, flitting each one entangles with hooves.

Fending for factoids and datapoints is terrible colossal time-sap,

Nightmarish moments haunt as the clock ticks to finish up work lap.

Alas! If only dreadful datasets were to be in optimal quotients,

How all the simpler it’d have been to analyze saner proportions!

Worse still, certain emails and threads do endless carousals,

With each one piggybacking another for lack of concrete results.

A + and a ++ to signify a username and a mail list inclusion,

As letter cans bleed under the siege of such mindless diffusion.

Sanity prevails, at times only though, when such mails come to rest,

But not before they’d have been a mind-numbing, eye-popping test.

 

With the age of astounding AI yay leaving one high and dry,

Combing vast tracts of info-lands evokes no tearful cry.

At what cost though, eh? After creating a problem of clutter,

To absolve which needs a vacuum cleaner with AI prompt duster.

As asteroids and comets collide for a vicious wormhole,

Info bytes gleaned from countless corners go into blackhole.

The cobweb turns further convoluted with widgets as banyan vines,

Instant messenger, SharePoint, inboxes, and cloud drive mines.

To first home into a plausible place to start forensic search,

Is in itself no mean task to not be left in a rabbit-hole lurch.

Archaeological drives would have paled out against such info disorder,

A Scotland Yard squad or Sherlock Holmes are called at army border.

Queries, filters, criteria, conditions all flock as help hands,

To do our jobs in any field, coding or InfoDev, as taut rubber bands

Detract the meaningless, extract the profound tidbits,

Is the war cry as Inflation has torn and thrown us into pits.

Keep calm and do your work despite bashing info torrent,

Is the clarion call to salvage one from info Godzilla militant.

What started as a humble discovery of info for curiosity mindset,

Presents a tightrope balancing act to do to proofread and vet.

A salve for the tension of Inflation exploding as a cloudburst,

Is in using tools and widgets with tact and wisdom at best.