The Price of Quill and Ink

What a medieval historian, a calligraphy pen and a data centre have in common.

It had been a long time since I picked up a calligraphy pen.

I first started when I was nine, but recently I found myself coming back to it, thinking again about ink, paper, and what it means to write something down with care.

Not long after, I spoke to a research student in medieval history who is training to become an archivist. She spends her time thinking about what deserves to be kept, how it should be preserved, and why it matters.

When I told her what I do, helping communities understand the physical systems behind the digital world, data centres entered the conversation too.

The Scribe and the Server

Medieval scribes did not capture everything.

They could not.

Vellum was expensive, ink cost money, and time was finite. Every word committed to parchment was a deliberate choice, a quiet statement that this thought or record deserved to outlast the person writing it.

The filter was built into the process.

Nobody questioned the price of quill and ink during war or famine. Not because the cost did not matter, but because the value of what was being preserved felt obvious, almost sacred.

Communities understood that memory needed a home and knowledge had to be housed somewhere.

The scribe was the infrastructure of their age, and nobody asked why the monastery needed more ink.

But today, the printing press, photography, and the internet have turned every one of us into a scribe.

We each carry our own endless manuscript of photographs, voice notes, messages, and documents, captured and stored without much thought at all.

The filter is gone.

Not because we consciously removed it, but because the cost became invisible. Storage got cheaper, devices got bigger, and platforms became very good at making keeping things feel effortless while deleting them felt risky.

So we kept everything.

And somewhere in that shift, from deliberate preservation to endless accumulation, we stopped asking the question the medieval scribe faced every day:

What is actually worth keeping?

The Buildings on the Street

This is where it begins to connect to the conversations communities are having now.

Data centres are becoming more visible. More local. More contested.

Communities are asking legitimate questions about the energy, water, land, and noise these buildings require to exist near them.

But there is a quieter question sitting underneath that debate:

Who is filling these buildings?

The answer, largely, is us.

Our unread emails, backed-up devices, old photos, shared videos, and cloud-stored documents we have not opened in years.

But it scales up quickly from personal habits to corporate life too: the duplication, over-retention, and digital sprawl of organisations holding onto versions of versions of files out of caution, habit, or convenience.

Waste exists at every scale.

The connection between our digital behaviour and the physical buildings required to support it has never really been made visible.

Unlike the medieval scribe who could see the ink running low, we cannot see the storage filling up.

We do not question the cost of digital storage because it remains hidden from view.

The Environment and the Question of Enough

But the cost is there.

In the energy needed to keep servers running. In the water used to cool them. In the land required to house them. In the carbon generated to power it all.

None of this is an argument against data centres.

It is an argument for understanding them.

For making the invisible visible.

For helping people see the connection between the life they live digitally and the infrastructure required to sustain it.

Because you cannot make informed choices about something you do not understand.

And right now, most people do not realise that their digital life has a physical address.

What Deserves to Last?

The archivist I spoke to understood something instinctively that the modern data centre debate has not quite named yet:

Preservation is not neutral.

Every archive is a series of choices about what goes in, what stays out, and what is allowed to fade.

The medieval scribe made those choices consciously. The archivist makes them professionally.

The question is whether we, as individuals or organisations, are making them at all.

Not as a moral judgement. Just as a genuine curiosity.

When did you last review what you are paying to store?

When did you last think about what you would actually miss if it disappeared?

These are the kinds of questions a scribe would have understood immediately, because they knew something we may have forgotten:

Not everything deserves to outlast the moment it was created.

Sometimes the most powerful act of preservation is choosing, carefully, what to let go.

From Calligraphy to the Cloud

I picked up my pen again after that conversation.

Ink to paper, letter by letter, feeling the weight of the stroke.

And I thought about the scribes. About the archivist. About the data centres. About all of us, generating more in a single day than a medieval monastery might have produced in a year.

The impulse underneath it all is beautiful and deeply human.

We want to remember. We want things to last. We want the moments that matter to have somewhere to live.

But the invisibility of the cloud has made us careless.

I opened my phone as I put the pen down.

Right now, I have 1,389 unread emails sitting in an old inbox and my cloud storage is at 92% capacity, clogged with screenshots, old photos, and various digital artefacts I have decided are too important to delete and too unimportant to organise.

I am the scribe filling the servers up, one thoughtless click at a time.

The question worth sitting with is not whether we have the right to store everything.

It is whether we have ever really stopped to notice what we are choosing to keep.

And what that choice costs.

Imagination is infrastructure.

And so is memory.