Introduction

A few days ago, I found myself shredding old paper documents. Personal papers, correspondence, archives from a professional life that dates back to when digital technology either did not exist or was just beginning. A simple, almost mechanical gesture that made me stop and reflect.

How much paper have I consumed over all these years? How much have I accumulated, stored, and now destroyed? And above all: what has really changed with the shift to digital?

Today I hardly use paper anymore. My documents exist on servers, in the cloud, in redundant backups. But this transition, which was presented to us as environmental progress, hides costs we rarely consider.

The paper era: a legacy to reconsider

For decades, paper was the medium for everything: contracts, letters, archives, memories. The paper industry had an enormous environmental impact: felled trees, consumed water, polluting chemical processes. There is no nostalgia in this observation, just a statement of fact.

Yet paper had a characteristic that today seems almost paradoxical: it existed without requiring continuous energy. A paper document, once produced, stayed there. You could read it, store it, destroy it. Its environmental impact, however significant, was exhausted over time.

The digital promise

In the 1990s, we were told that the future was the “paperless office.” An office without paper. Fewer felled trees, less waste, more efficiency. Digital appeared clean, light, almost immaterial.

It was a seductive promise. And it was partly kept: today we can manage in a few gigabytes what once required entire rooms of archives. But that promise concealed a cost that we did not see then and still struggle to perceive today.

The invisible cost

Digital data does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in servers that consume energy twenty-four hours a day, in data centers that require continuous cooling systems, in network infrastructures that span continents. Unlike paper, data requires energy to continue existing.

And then there is the hardware: devices that become obsolete in a few years, rare minerals extracted under often problematic conditions, electronic waste we do not know how to dispose of.

The point is not that digital is worse than paper. The point is that its impact is invisible. We do not see the servers, we do not perceive the consumption, we do not touch the consequences with our own hands. And what we do not see, we tend to ignore.

The acceleration of artificial intelligence

Into this scenario comes artificial intelligence, which amplifies everything exponentially.

Training a large language model requires enormous amounts of energy. But it is not just the training: every query, every conversation, every computation requires concrete computational resources. Millions of requests per day, multiplied by millions of users.

And here a question emerges that we rarely ask ourselves: who decides where to allocate this energy? Who establishes computational priorities? For what purposes are we employing such vast resources?

The problem is not just how much energy we consume, but who decides how, where, and for what it is used.

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a governance issue that we have not yet seriously addressed, too focused on the potential of AI to question its material weight.

Rhetoric and its contradictions

We live in an era in which “save the environment” has become an omnipresent slogan. Companies proclaiming their sustainability while expanding ever more energy-hungry infrastructures. Climate conferences reached by private jet. Consumers purchasing “eco-friendly” products on platforms that generate millions of tonnes of logistics emissions.

This is not an accusation. It is an observation about ourselves, myself included. We entrench ourselves behind symbolic gestures — the reusable bag, the green server, recycling — while feeding a system that moves in the opposite direction.

This does not mean those gestures are useless. It means we must not confuse them with a solution.

Individual choices: necessary but insufficient

I have chosen to use servers powered by renewable energy. It is a conscious choice, consistent with my values. But I do not delude myself that this changes the global picture.

Individual decisions operate at the margins of an economic system built on perpetual growth, planned obsolescence, and continuous consumption. An individual who chooses carefully is like someone emptying the sea with a spoon while others open new dams.

The spoon is not useless. But we must not delude ourselves about its reach.

I refuse the green rhetoric that absolves us without asking anything of us. I refuse the illusion that our individual choices, alone, can reverse a systemic trajectory. But I also refuse the alibi of disengagement: if individual choices are not enough, this does not mean they do not matter. It means they must be made with awareness, not with the illusion of solving, but with the responsibility of not making things worse.

Beyond the individual: governance, ethics, responsibility

Individual awareness is a starting point, not a destination. If the problem is systemic, the responses must be systemic too.

This is where governance comes into play. Not as a slogan or a blank delegation to institutions, but as a set of rules, standards, and accountability mechanisms that define who is responsible for what.

The European AI Act, for example, introduces for the first time transparency obligations and risk assessment requirements for artificial intelligence systems. It is a significant step, but still largely focused on risks to fundamental rights and safety, less on environmental impact. The energy sustainability of AI models is not yet at the centre of the regulatory debate. Yet it should be.

Then there is an ethical question that precedes the law: the responsibility of those who design, develop, and distribute high-impact technologies. It is not just about complying with rules, but about questioning the consequences of one’s choices before a rule imposes them. Ethics is not an external constraint: it is an internal compass.

And finally, there is a professional responsibility. Those who work in the technology sector, in law, in consulting — those who help shape digital infrastructures — have a role that goes beyond the individual assignment. Every technical choice, every architecture, every contract carries implications that accumulate. Neutrality does not exist: we are always part of the system, and we can choose how to be within it.

No proclamations are needed. What is needed is coherence between what we know and what we do. What is needed is for awareness to become an operational criterion, not just a private reflection.

Living without illusions

We cannot return to the Stone Age, nor would it make sense to do so. Digital technology and artificial intelligence are here to stay, and they will bring benefits we cannot yet imagine. I am neither an apocalyptic nor a nostalgic.

But I refuse to pretend. I refuse the green rhetoric that absolves us without asking anything of us. I refuse the illusion that our individual choices, alone, can reverse a systemic trajectory.

Renouncing illusions, however, does not mean renouncing responsibility. They are two different things.

Awareness does not change the system by itself, but it changes the way we exist within it. It allows us to act without hypocrisy, to choose without self-deception, to look at reality for what it is.

In a world that seems to be interested in something else entirely, perhaps that is already something. Or perhaps it is just the point from which to start asking the right questions again.

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