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90% of the World's Data Was Created in the Last Two Years

90% of the World's Data Was Created in the Last Two Years

By Utkarsh Sahariya

27 February 2026·1 min read

We now generate more information every couple of days than humanity did from the dawn of writing to 2003. This piece looks at where all of it actually goes, who owns it, and why that ownership is quietly becoming one of the defining questions of the century.

The numbers deserve a second, slower look. The figure everyone keeps quoting is technically true and almost completely misleading, because it quietly leaves out the one variable that actually drives the outcome. Put that variable back into the equation and the whole story changes shape in front of you.

History rhymes here in a way that is hard to ignore. We have seen a version of this before, in a different industry and a different decade, and the way it played out then tells you a great deal about how it is likely to play out now. The mechanism, it turns out, is much older than the technology.

So what changes next? The second-order effects are where this gets genuinely interesting — the knock-on consequences that nobody is pricing in yet, precisely because they are still one step removed from the obvious story. Those quieter effects, not the headline itself, are the ones actually worth watching from here.

The world, explained — not just reported.

The biggest stories broken down, the things everyone missed, and one question worth arguing about — a few times a week, no fluff.

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