The cost of the cloud
In 2024, 62% of organizations exceeded their cloud storage budgets with 47% of total costs spent just to access or move data. Over 56% of businesses reported that these rising and unpredictable expenses have stalled critical operations. This financial strain on digital infrastructure points to a deeper vulnerability. If so much of our memory, communication, and institutional knowledge lives on systems this volatile, we may be approaching a breach.
As the datasphere adjusts to surges, tech companies have reverted back to a more energy and time efficient vessel, magnetic tape. Once put on the backburner because of modern server storage systems, tape storage is now experiencing a major resurgence. IBM, in partnership with Fujifilm, is leading the charge in high-capacity tape, with the 2023 release of the TS1170 drive and 3592 JF cartridge offering up to 50 TB of native storage, more than double the capacity of previous generations and laying the groundwork for future cartridges projected to reach 580 TB.
This reversion to older forms isn’t nostalgic, it's strategic. In the pursuit of digital longevity, magnetic tape outperforms modern servers in durability and cost efficiency.
In an age obsessed with speed and immediacy, our renewed reliance on tape signals more than just a shift in storage strategy, but it reflects a deeper discomfort with the fleeting nature of digital life.
It is not just data we are at risk of losing, but the ability to communicate it with intention and care.
THE COST OF CONVENIENCE
Communication is as much about the medium as the message. From ink and parchment to stone and bone, different modes of expression carry distinct presence, requiring varying levels of effort, patience, and intentionality. Much like the path of data storage, efficiency is prioritized, and for communication, this results in a culture of fleeting and impersonal exchange. Because of smartphone messaging and the internet, most daily communication is reduced to words flickering across screens, likely to be archived and deleted.
Motorola Pager
In a study analyzing speed theory, this societal shift is traced not to smartphones, but to pagers, devices that normalized continuous reachability and, with it, new forms of social stress and isolation. Saadati et al.’s meta-analysis shows that individuals with internet addiction report significantly higher loneliness scores, while Li et al. found that online interactions during the COVID-19 lockdown often worsened mental health rather than easing it. The problem is not our use of the internet and messaging tools, but our misuse of it. Digital tools often fail to capture the full spectrum of human expression, underscoring a need to redesign how we experience messaging.
Prior to instant messaging, handwriting carried emotional weight and personal identity, as Kim, Son, and Nam note in their study contrasting digital and handwritten text. Gooch and Kelly’s work on gifted holiday cards echoes this, showing how people value tangible traces of effort, like handwriting or handmade gestures. Thinking of communication as a gift offers a start to reclaiming presence.