Opening Cross: They Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab, But I Said ‘No, No, No... Unless There’s Data in Rehab’

If you find yourself explaining everyday events in terms of data rather than the opposite—comparing complex data problems to everyday occurrences to make them easier to understand—then there’s a chance you’re a data addict. And as you become more addicted to the data, isolating yourself from the everyday, you begin filling the time between each fix by explaining ordinary events in ways that make sense only to other data addicts.

For example, when someone this week described how they had once been mis-identified by the US Transportation Security Administration and waved through the pre-screened lane at an airport, I responded “Aha, the TSA has faulty reference data!” When the same person described how multiple times they had forgotten to remove bottles of water or toiletries from their carry-on bag, yet been waved through the security checks regardless, I lamented quality control, and how it is subject to human error.

Then I realized I may be taking my data obsession too far. So I began consciously trying to ignore the parallels between everyday life and data. But I soon realized that data is everywhere. And not only do we observe and harness it, but it observes and harnesses us to create more data for us to observe. Eventually, after weeks of absence, someone stopped by to check on me, and found me in a fetid room, the walls scrawled with binary code, rocking in the fetal position and gibbering incoherently with The Matrix playing in a constant loop on the TV.

The concerned individual called a doctor, who diagnosed me as having FITS, and prescribed a strict dose of The Roberts Group to clean up my data problems. They say the first stage of treating an addiction is recognizing that you have one. And recognizing this can be enlightening: How often have you seen traders cling to their Bloomberg terminals, even though their needs could be met with something far cheaper and less addictive (“I can give it up anytime… but just one more chat!”)? In the same way, many firms are going through their own data rehab process, forcing users to understand how much data they use, how often they use it, and the damaging impact on their bottom line, then empowering those users to self-certify and justify purchases, making them responsible for their actions.

Emerging from my data rehab, I felt refreshed and normal again, no longer feeling obliged to compare every one of life’s details to some aspect of market or reference data. But it didn’t last long: everyday objects served as a constant reminder of my data habit. The microwave in my kitchen made me think of the microwave networks increasingly dominating low-latency connectivity, such as those from Quincy Data or Perseus Telecom, which is now the proud owner of TLV Networks, which operates a microwave network between CME Group and IntercontinentalExchange.

Escaping my data-infested kitchen for an outdoor space, I found the sky filled with clouds, which only served to remind me of Maple Securities USA, which has abandoned the ultra-low latency world of microwaves and co-location for a cost-effective and flexible managed Proximity Cloud run by SpryWare.

And with temptation all around, complying with one’s new regime can be difficult without constant validation and verification—for example, unless you have a tool like Kinetix Trading Solutions’ Pre-Trade Verification module to guide you through the morass of different rules and requirements.

Perhaps the lesson I can learn from my rehabilitation and relapse is that giving up data is just as impossible as the idea of giving up breathing air or drinking water. Data truly has become the Matrix-like reality behind the world in which we live. And perhaps in the broad scheme of things, being a data addict isn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing is not recognizing the addiction for what it is, and being unable to change our data consumption habits for the better.