dematerialisation

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

Kyba et al., ‘Artificially lit surface of Earth at night increasing in radiance and extent’, Science Advances, 22 November 2017. 32 ‘It’s not your imagination: phone battery life is getting worse’, The Washington Post, 1 November 2018. 33 ‘5G consumer potential – Busting the myths around the value of 5G for consumers’, An Ericsson Consumer & IndustryLab Insight Report, Ericsson, May 2019. 34 ‘Pourquoi la 5G est une mauvaise nouvelle pour l’environnement’ [‘Why 5G is bad news for the environment’], 01net, 26 January 2020. 35 Watch Orange’s promotional video on YouTube boasting the merits of 5G: ‘5G: un réseau pour TOUS et PARTOUT’ [‘5G: a network for ALL EVERYWHERE’]. 36 Interview with Jean-Pierre Raskin, 2020. 37 Interview with Frédéric Bordage, founder of GreenIT.fr, 2018. 38 Interview with Sébastien Crozier, chairman of CFE-CGC Orange, 2020. 39 Ibid. 40 Interviews with Françoise Berthoud, IT research engineer at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), 2019 and 2020. 41 Christopher L. Magee et al., ‘A simple extension of dematerialization theory: Incorporation of technical progress and the rebound effect’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 117, April 2017. The same conclusions were reached in a study on the supposed dematerialisation of 99 world economies: ‘Results show that no countries exhibit a dematerialization of economic activity’. From Federico M. Pulselli et al., ‘The world economy in a cube: A more rational structural representation of sustainability’, Global Environmental Change, vol. 35, November 2015. 42 Read Isabelle Autissier’s preface of Frédéric Bordage’s book Sobriété numérique, les clés pour agir [‘Digital sobriety, the keys for action’], Buchet-Chastel, 2019. 43 Over 12 billion views in 2020, earning 29.5 million dollars. 44 ‘Driving transformation in the automotive and road transport ecosystem with 5G’, Ericsson Technology Review, no. 13, 13 September 2019. 45 Zia Wadud et al., ‘Help or hindrance?

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‘Thus, goods, objects, and foodstuffs existed not in relation to themselves, but in relation to their monetary value, to the point that “commercial trade” would be able to take place without the physical presence of the object being traded.’36 Then came the bill of exchange, ‘at which point money itself was dematerialised to promote trade, and, from the fifteenth century, would become the elemental tool of international trade and the first major step towards the dematerialisation of the world of the economy.’37 Now, with modern technologies, ‘man will task the machine with the ability to think for him, dematerialising in a way his thoughts’ (with the calculator), but also his words (the telephone) and his image (visual media).38 Dematerialisation therefore began well before the advent of computer technology, by replacing animal with metal, metal with paper, and paper with digital media.

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For further reading: Lynne Peskoe-Yang, ‘Analysing Every Second of the Classic Dial-Up Modem Sound’, Popular Mechanics, 2 March 2022. 35 Gilles de Chezelles, La Dématérialisation des échanges [‘The dematerialisation of exchanges’], Lavoisier, 2006. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Keynote by Bela Loto, op cit. We should rather talk about ‘scaling up matter’ — moving from matter to ‘multi-matter’, instead of ‘dematerialisation’ given this ‘multi-materialisation’ we observe. See Florence Rodhain’s La Nouvelle Religion du numérique [‘The new digital religion’], Libre & Solidaire, 2019. 40 ‘Beijing orders state offices to replace foreign PCs and software’, Financial Times, 8 December 2019.

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

Something’s value is what someone is willing to pay for it, goes the standard explanation. If something is in short supply, people will cut back, find a suitable substitute (if such a thing exists) and move on. End of story. Yet the story doesn’t seem to accord with the reality, because this stuff clearly matters. For all that we are told we live in an increasingly dematerialised world, where ever more value lies in intangible items – apps and networks and online services – the physical world continues to underpin everything else. This is not especially evident when you glance at the balance sheets of our economies, which show that, for instance, four out of every five dollars generated in the US can be traced back to the services sector and an ever vanishing fraction is attributed to energy, mining and manufacturing.

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But towards the end of the book there is also a tantalising glimpse of something else: a world where, for the first time since the industrial revolution, we might be able to sustain ourselves without digging much deeper into the earth and exploding mountains to satisfy our demand for commodities. We will never live in a truly dematerialised world; ever since humans picked up stone and fashioned it into tools we have been exploiting the earth and leaving our mark. But we can shrink our footprint. In so doing we could help mitigate the rise of greenhouse gas emissions and confront climate change. The paradox, as you will see, is that getting to that promised land may involve digging and blasting more than we ever have before.

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And in the 1960s at STL, the research wing of Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd, Kao made the breakthrough that would transform long-distance communication, giving birth to the optical fibre era, which is to say the era we’re living in now. It’s hard to overstate the significance of this innovation. All modern communication these days goes, one way or another, via optical fibre. As we waft around the world waving devices that connect wirelessly to local or phone networks it’s easy to convince ourselves that we have dematerialised the information age. Yet none of this – video calls, internet searches, email, cloud servers, streaming box sets – would be possible without something very physical indeed. For, save for the final few yards – between you and your router or between your home and the local exchange – pretty much every mile travelled by data online occurs as beams of light on strands of glass.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
by Diane Coyle
Published 29 Oct 1998

According to the cyber-guru William Gibson, ‘The Internet could one day be seen as being something terrifically significant, something akin to the building of cities ... It’s postnational and postgeographical’.2 Danny Quah, a professor at the London School of Economics, and one of the pioneers of weightless economics, writes: ‘Dematerialised commodities show no respect for space and geography’.3 This is due to a property that he calls ‘infinite expansibility’. Put simply, this means that the use of a dematerialised object by one person does not prevent another from using it. Other people can simultaneously use the word processing code I use as I type this. It is an economic good whose ownership cannot be transferred or traded, but simply replicated — and at almost no transmission cost, in almost no time.

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The fact that there are widespread ‘network externalities’, or benefits from using something that grows with the number of users, in the dematerialised industries will reinforce the superstar trend. For example, the Apple Macintosh operating system has always been acknowledged as better than Microsoft’s by industry experts. But Apple has never broken out of its market niche whereas almost everybody uses Microsoft’s Windows. If almost everybody does, almost everybody always will because it makes life much simpler. The externality put the billionaire into Bill. The mitigating factor in the winner-takes-all trend, Danny Quah notes, is that dematerialisation is also helping to reduce the costs and difficulty of becoming a superstar.

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Of course we still use a lot of the crinkling and jangling stuff in everyday life, but the bulk of the developed world’s monetary transactions take place between computers. The technology for private currencies is already in place. Their emergence waits only for our monetary habits to change. The biggest challenge The dematerialisation of the economy means the structure of trade is changing so that trade rules will have to adapt. It also has the potential to transform what we understand as money. The one thing that will never dematerialise is people. People will be the biggest challenge to the existing international economic order. The economic pressures on the world’s poorest populations, which have led to large flows of refugees and legal and illegal migrants, have already shown signs of becoming one of the most divisive political issues of our times (see Chapter 7).

The Future of Money
by Bernard Lietaer
Published 28 Apr 2013

First, such an economy is literally dematerialising. In 1996, Alan Greenspan noted: 'The US output today, if measured in tons, is the same as one hundred years ago, yet the GDP?" has multiplied by a factor of twenty over that time.' The average weight of one real dollar's worth of US exports is now less than half of what it was in 1970. Even in 'manufactured' goods, 75% of the value now consists of the services embedded in it: research, design, sales, advertising, most of which could be 'delocated' anywhere in the world and transmitted via highspeed data lines. Along with the other factors, this dematerialization process makes it much harder for governments or regulatory agencies to measure, tax or regulate what is going on.

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Once upon a time, when money was mostly gold and silver coins, banks started issuing pieces of paper that stated where the metal was kept. The sentence 'I will pay the bearer the sum of one Pound Sterling' which adorns the Pound bill is still a reminder of the weight and silver content of the metal currency. The next step in the disappearing act is already well under way. The vast majority of our paper money has further dematerialized into binary bits in computers belonging to our bankers, brokers, or other financial institutions, and there is serious talk that all of it may soon join the virtual world. Should we wait until the last paper bill has disappeared into a cyber-purse to wake up to the true non-material nature of money?

The Rare Metals War
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 15 Feb 2020

Courtesy of the internet, the two gurus explain, ‘the vast majority of us will increasingly find ourselves living, working, and being governed in two worlds at once’: the physical world and the virtual world. In the future, there will be more and more cyber-states, declaring more cyber-wars against virtual criminal networks that perpetrate increasingly powerful cyber-attacks.18 Yet this is also a prophecy that promises the utopia of a dematerialised world. Already dematerialisation is synonymous with working from home, e-commerce, electronic documentation, digital data storage, and more. By limiting the physical transportation of information, and migrating from paper to digital, we can disavow our resource-guzzling civilisation and, while we’re at it, slow down the deforestation of the Amazon and the Congo Basin.19 In a nutshell, we are parachuting into a wiser, more moderate age.

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One data centre alone uses as much energy as a city of 30,000 inhabitants to manage the flow of data and run its cooling systems.23 A US study estimated that the information and communication technology sector consumes as much as 10 per cent of the world’s electricity, and produces 50 per cent more greenhouse gases than air transport annually.24 According to a Greenpeace report, ‘were the cloud a country, it would be the world’s fifth-biggest consumer of electricity’.25 This is just the tip of the iceberg, for the energy and digital transition will require constellations of satellites — already promised by the heavyweights of Silicon Valley — to put the entire planet online.26 It will take rockets to launch these satellites into space; an armada of computers to set them on the right orbit to emit on the correct frequencies and encrypt communications using sophisticated digital tools; legions of super calculators to analyse the deluge of data; and, to direct this data in real time, a planetary mesh of underwater cables, a maze of overhead and underground electricity networks, millions of computer terminals, countless data-storage centres, and billions of tablets, smartphones, and other connected devices with batteries that need to be recharged. Thus, the supposedly virtuous shift towards the age of dematerialisation is nothing more than an outright ruse, for there is no end to its physical impact.27 Feeding this digital leviathan will require coal-fired, oil-fired, and nuclear power plants, windfarms, solar farms, and smart grids — all infrastructures that rely on rare metals. Yet not a word about this is uttered by Jeremy Rifkin.

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‘We didn’t realise that we were going to lose more than coffee-cup production, and that the more skilled jobs would be hit much harder economically.’18 Added to this is the pipedream of manufacturing fading into the background in favour of a service economy. The focus should be on knowledge and the immense added value it generates. This belief, echoing the utopia of a dematerialised world discussed in Chapter Two, was heavily subscribed to by the business world at the turn of the twenty-first century. Like Alcatel-Lucent’s CEO Serge Tchuruk, many US and European business leaders could not resist the allure of ‘factoryless companies’. Grey matter was more valued and therefore given more support, to the detriment of the tool that is the lowly factory.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

There were times, such as during the 1990s, when GDP grew at a slightly faster rate than material use, prompting some to hope we were on our way to decoupling GDP from material use altogether. But those hopes have been dashed in the decades since. In fact, exactly the opposite has happened. Since 2000, the growth of material use has outpaced the growth of GDP. Instead of gradually dematerialising, the global economy has been rematerialising. Source: materialflows.net, World Bank Perhaps most disturbingly of all, this trend shows no signs of slowing down. On our present trajectory, with business as usual, we are on course to be using more than 200 billion tons of material stuff per year by the middle of the century, more than double what we’re using right now.

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Escaping the frying pan of climate disaster doesn’t help us much if we end up hopping into the flames of ecological collapse. * Proponents of green growth have a quick response, however. They insist that all we need to do is ‘decouple’ GDP growth from resource use. There’s no reason we can’t just dematerialise economic activity, and keep growing GDP even as resource use falls back down to sustainable levels. They admit, of course, that resource use has historically gone up in lockstep with GDP. But that’s at a global level. If we look at what’s happening in certain high-income nations, which are becoming more technologically sophisticated and rapidly shifting from manufacturing to services, we might find clues to what the future could hold.

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Green growth proponents pointed out that the ‘domestic material consumption’ (DMC) of Britain, Japan and a number of other rich countries has been decreasing since at least 1990, even as GDP has continued to grow. Even in the United States, DMC has more or less flattened out over the past couple of decades. This data was picked up by journalists who were quick to announce that rich countries had reached ‘peak stuff’ and were now ‘dematerialising’ – proof that we can keep growing GDP for ever without having to worry about ecological impact. But ecologists have long rejected these claims. The problem with DMC is that it ignores a crucial piece of the puzzle: while it includes the imported goods a country consumes, it does not include the resources involved in producing those goods.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

Following this logic, the software program that codes our consciousness can be extracted from its biological substrate, downloaded on to a computer and transmitted to the end of the universe at the speed of light. We can thus become immortal and be uploaded to a higher, ethereal, digital plane of existence. Perhaps, then, the ‘purpose’ of a material universe is to arrive at a time when intelligent beings like us can dematerialise it, after they have first dematerialised themselves. This is a curious conclusion. There is something profoundly teleological and apocalyptic about it. In fact, it looks like a rehashed belief in the afterlife for atheists and agnostics. At the gates of digital heaven The Christian resurrection narrative has subtly changed over the centuries.

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But let me return to vitalism and dualism one last time, because their most significant legacy lies not in the proliferation of websites promising magical cures using crystals. They still influence the way we think today of the mind as something separate from the body. Until the time of Galen, the mind was considered a physical thing. There was no disconnection between mind and body. They were one and the same. After Descartes, the mind became disembodied. It dematerialised. Vitalism was the scientific manifestation of dualism. But although vitalism was discredited, dualism was not. The disambiguation of the mind persisted, and became even more pronounced in new metaphors for the brain, as the nineteenth century ushered in technologies that permitted messages to be transmitted from a distance.

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Do numbers exist before we count something? The British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell certainly thought as much, and he was not the only one. But, if so, where is the abode of numbers? Is there another reality beyond the one we perceive with our senses? Diametrically opposed to the mathematical dematerialis-ation view of the cosmos and of the mind sit the doubting Thomases who believe exclusively in a purely materialistic world. The mind, they claim, is a biological phenomenon; it is what living, vigilant brains housed inside craniums create. Nothing else exists beyond what we can observe with our senses and our scientific instruments.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

In a well-insulated house, you can have comparable warmth with much lower consumption of oil or gas. And the critical point here is that lower consumption of oil or gas means fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Thinking in terms of services reveals new ways to decarbonise or dematerialise human activities. When the value proposition of enterprise revolves around the delivery of dematerialised services rather than the manufacture of material products, there is a huge potential to rethink the relationship between economic output and material throughput. ‘Servicization’, this strategy has sometimes been called.4 It’s vital to note that this is not simply another framing of the transformation to ‘service-based economies’ that has characterised development in the rich world over recent decades.

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Simplistic assumptions that capitalism’s propensity for efficiency will allow us to stabilise the climate or protect against resource scarcity are nothing short of delusional. The truth is that there is as yet no credible, socially just, ecologically sustainable scenario of continually growing incomes for upwards of nine billion people. And the critical question is not whether the complete decarbonisation of our energy systems or the dematerialisation of our consumption patterns is technically feasible, but whether it is possible in our kind of society. The analysis in this chapter suggests that it is entirely fanciful to suppose that ‘deep’ emission and resource cuts can be achieved without confronting the structure of market economies.

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For the most part that’s been achieved, as we’ve seen, by reducing heavy manufacturing, continuing to import consumption goods from abroad and expanding financial services to pay for them.5 In fact, we have to be a little careful about any of the sectors for which, in principle, we see some potential for ‘servicization’. Leisure and recreation, for example, is one of the fastest-growing sectors in modern economies and ought in principle to be a prime candidate for dematerialisation. In practice, the way we spend our leisure time can be responsible for as much as 25 per cent of our carbon footprint.6 Yet there is clearly some mileage in the idea. Focusing on service rather than on material throughput offers the potential for a fundamental transformation of enterprise. It is ultimately services rather than stuff that matters to us, whether this is in nutrition or housing or transport or health care, or education, or leisure.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900
by David Edgerton
Published 7 Dec 2006

The second is called a transition to post-industrial, knowledge or information societies, linked to what many called post-modernism, what some Marxists called ‘new times’, and, what capitalist Wall Street gurus called the ‘new economy’.1 In one version peddled in the 1990s, modern economies are becoming ‘weightless’ and ‘dematerialised’. Such accounts resurrect an old argument, as if it had never been made before, that in future it will not be land or capital which will have power, but knowledge. They promise, again, a world where ‘intellectual property’ and ‘human capital’ rule. Yet this stage theory of history, focusing on shares of employment, easily misrepresents the whole.

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Service industries There is no doubt that the rise of employment in the service industries in the rich countries is one of the major economic changes of the last thirty years. A number of analysts have, perversely, identified this growth in service employment with the rise of an ‘information society’, with connotations of weightlessness, or indeed the ‘dematerialised’ economy. This was a fashionable, and misleading, way of saying little more than that service industries now account for very large proportions of GDP and employment.56 This is partly the result of mis-specification because services include a vast range of activities, many of them far from weightless or indeed new.

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Culture has not lagged behind technology, rather the reverse; the idea that culture has lagged behind technology is itself very old and has existed under many different technological regimes. Technology has not generally been a revolutionary force; it has been responsible for keeping things the same as much as changing them. The place of technology in the undoubted increase in productivity in the twentieth century remains mysterious; but we are not entering a weightless, dematerialised information world. War changed in the twentieth century, but not according to the rhythms of conventional technological timelines. History is changed when we put into it the technology that counts: not only the famous spectacular technologies but the low and ubiquitous ones. The historical study of things in use, and the uses of things, matters.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

That apparently simple question led to a lot of investigations, not only of the weights of buildings but also of the “material intensity” of many other things. Along with the civil engineer Siamak Ardekani, they published their initial findings and proposed a research agenda in a 1989 paper called simply “Dematerialization.” It concluded with a call for more research into “whether on a collective basis… forces drive society toward materialization or dematerialization.” Being Unaware of the Lightness Ausubel continued to pursue the “Materialization or dematerialization?” question in subsequent years. The title of his 2015 essay “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment” suggested his answer. Ausubel found substantial evidence not only that Americans were consuming fewer resources per capita (in other words, per person) but also that they were consuming less in total of some of the most important building blocks of an economy: things such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper.

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I thought this was a great question, so I decided to join Ausubel, Goodall, and others in investigating dematerialization. And if absolute dematerialization turned out to be a real and durable phenomenon, I wanted to identify its causes, discuss its implications, make testable predictions about its future, and suggest interventions—changes that individuals, communities, and governments can make—that would help accelerate and spread it. The Great Reversal Fortunately for anyone interested in dematerialization, a lot of high-quality evidence exists about resource consumption over time in America. Much of it comes from the US Geological Survey, a federal agency formed in 1879 and tasked by Congress with “classification of the public lands, and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain.”

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Mencken, “The Divine Afflatus,” 1917 What’s behind the broad and deep dematerialization of the American economy? Why are we now post-peak in our consumption of so many resources? In the next chapters I’ll present my explanation of the causes of dematerialization. First, though, I want to give a short explanation of what the causes are not. In particular, I want to show that the CRIB strategies born around Earth Day and promoted since then for reducing our planetary footprint—consume less, recycle, impose limits, and go back to the land—have not been important contributors to the dematerialization we’ve seen. Since Earth Day, we have demonstrably not consumed much less or gone back to the land in large numbers.

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
by Vaclav Smil
Published 16 Dec 2013

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright About the Author Previous works by author Preface: Why and How Chapter 1: What Gets Included Chapter 2: How We Got Here 2.1 Materials Used by Organisms 2.2 Materials in Prehistory 2.3 Ancient and Medieval Materials 2.4 Materials in the Early Modern Era 2.5 Creating Modern Material Civilization 2.6 Materials in the Twentieth Century Chapter 3: What Matters Most 3.1 Biomaterials 3.2 Construction Materials 3.3 Metals 3.4 Plastics 3.5 Industrial Gases 3.6 Fertilizers 3.7 Materials in Electronics Chapter 4: How the Materials Flow 4.1 Material Flow Accounts 4.2 America's Material Flows 4.3 European Balances 4.4 Materials in China's Modernization 4.5 Energy Cost of Materials 4.6 Life-Cycle Assessments 4.7 Recycling Chapter 5: Are We Dematerializing? 5.1 Apparent Dematerializations 5.2 Relative Dematerializations: Specific Weight Reductions 5.3 Consequences of Dematerialization 5.4 Relative Dematerialization in Modern Economies 5.5 Declining Energy Intensities 5.6 Decarbonization and Desulfurization Chapter 6: Material Outlook 6.1 Natural Resources 6.2 Wasting Less 6.3 New Materials and Dematerialization 6.4 Chances of Fundamental Departures Appendix A: Units and Unit Multiples Units Used in the Text Unit Multiples Submultiples Appendix B: US Material Production, GDP and Population, 1900–2005 Appendix C: Global Population, Economic Product, and Production of Food, Major Materials, and Fuels 1900–2010 Appendix D: Global Energy Cost of Major Materials in 2010 Appendix E Decarbonization and Desulfurization of Global Fossil Fuel Supply, 1900–2010 Decarbonization and Desulfurization of the World's Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES), 1900–2010 References Index This edition first published 2014 © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Registered office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com.

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Chapter 5 Are We Dematerializing? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the verb dematerialize as becoming free of physical substance. This definition has obvious supernatural and spiritual connotations: it has been used in science fiction (in the USA most famously in Star Trek) where objects and persons disappear by means of an unexplained process; dematerialization of Christ's body is said to explain the apparent imprint of torso, limbs, and wounds on the fabric of the shroud of Turin (Berard, 1991); and a famous Yoghi asserted that a man will be free only once he “is able to dematerialize… his human body… and then materialize it again” (Yogananda, 1946).

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Moreover, energy use per unit of GDP may be a common measure of an economy's overall energy intensity but (even when setting aside the uncertainties inherent in converting various energies to a common denominator) a closer look shows that it is fundamentally flawed, that its narrow interpretation gives very limited insights and that it is only a poor proxy for tracing both historical and recent changes of material consumption in growing economies. I will review, deconstruct, and assess all of these dematerialization measures. 5.1 Apparent Dematerializations When explaining dematerialization, the OED should have used the conversion from blueprints to computer-assisted design (CAD) as a far more consequential example of disappearing uses of paper than the replacement of printed stock certificates by electronic versions. That apparent dematerialization eliminated roomfuls of workers at their slanted drafting boards and replaced large numbers of paper blueprints filed in heavy storage steel cabinets with electronic graphics displayed on screens and saved initially on tapes and then on magnetic devices, hard drives, and various portable storage media.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

The objective of reforming the finance industry should be to restore priority and respect for financial services that meet the needs of the real economy. There is something pejorative about the phrase ‘the real’ – meaning the non-financial – economy, and yet it captures a genuine insight: there is something unreal about the way in which finance has evolved, dematerialised and detached itself from ordinary business and everyday life. If buying and selling in the City not only absorbs a significant amount of our national wealth but also occupies the time of a high proportion of the ablest people in society, Humbert Wolfe’s complacency – ‘since it contents them … they might as well’ – can no longer be easily justified.

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But you will also want to include many assets that are valuable and even tradable, but which are not things you can easily touch and feel: a copyright, part of the radio spectrum, an entitlement to walk across someone’s land or to emit smoke or extract water. Some assets – such as software – are on the borderline between the tangible and the intangible. Many goods and services have dematerialised. Possession of knowledge is as important as the ownership of physical property. These intangible assets have far greater significance today than Marx imagined (with wideranging implications). But this extension of the concept of capital should not – at least for present purposes – be taken too far.

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Plans to eliminate the use of paper in Britain failed when it became clear that the banks had given little thought to the effect of the change on their customers.8 The revolution will come. Institutional inertia can slow technological change, but can rarely prevent it altogether. The complete dematerialisation of payments potentially deprives governments and established banking institutions of their traditional mechanisms of control: monopoly of currency issue and access to physical records. The invention of the credit card means that it is no longer necessary to have cash or deposits to make a payment, only a certificate of anticipated future resources sufficient to settle the transaction: a change that is potentially the end of money as we have known it.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

Further ingenious folds and curves introduced yet more reductions in the raw materials such that today the can weighs only 13 grams, or one fifth of its original weight. And the new cans don’t need a beer can opener. More benefits for just 20 percent of the material. That’s called dematerialization. On average most modern products have undergone dematerialization. Since the 1970s, the weight of the average automobile has fallen by 25 percent. Appliances tend to weigh less per function. Of course, communication technology shows the clearest dematerialization. Huge PC monitors shrunk to thin flat screens (but the width of our TVs expanded!), while clunky phones on the table become pocketable. Sometimes our products gain many new benefits without losing mass, but the general trend is toward products that use fewer atoms.

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In 1870 it took 4 kilograms of stuff to generate one unit of the U.S.’s GDP. In 1930 it took only one kilogram. Recently the value of GDP per kilogram of inputs rose from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000—a doubling of dematerialization in 23 years. Digital technology accelerates dematerialization by hastening the migration from products to services. The liquid nature of services means they don’t have to be bound to materials. But dematerialization is not just about digital goods. The reason even solid physical goods—like a soda can—can deliver more benefits while inhabiting less material is because their heavy atoms are substituted by weightless bits.

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one fifth of its original weight: “Study Finds Aluminum Cans the Sustainable Package of Choice,” Can Manufacturers Institute, May 20, 2015. weight of the average automobile has fallen: Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001. In 1930 it took only one kilogram: Sylvia Gierlinger and Fridolin Krausmann, “The Physical Economy of the United States of America,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 16, no. 3 (2012): 365–77, Figure 4a. from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000: Figures adjusted for inflation. Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001. “Software eats everything”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

More critically, because demonetization is also deceptive, almost no one within those industries was prepared for such radical change. Dematerialization. While demonetization describes the vanishing of the money once paid for goods and services, dematerialization is about the vanishing of the goods and services themselves. In Kodak’s case, their woes didn’t end with the vanishing of film. Following the invention of the digital camera came the invention of the smartphone—which soon came standard with a high-quality, multi-megapixel camera. Poof! Now you see it; now you don’t. Once those smartphones hit the market, the digital camera itself dematerialized. Not only did it come free with most phones, consumers expected it to come free with most phones.

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But if the goal is to avoid Kodak’s errors (if you’re a company) or to exploit Kodak’s errors (if you’re an entrepreneur), then you need to have a better understanding of how this change unfolds—and that means understanding the hallmark characteristics of exponentials. To teach these, I have developed a framework called the Six Ds of Exponentials: digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization. These Six Ds are a chain reaction of technological progression, a road map of rapid development that always leads to enormous upheaval and opportunity. So let’s follow the chain reaction. The 6 Ds of Exponentials: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization Source: Peter H. Diamandis, www.abundancehub.com Digitalization. This idea starts with the fact that culture makes progress cumulative.

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For anyone running a business—and this goes for both start-ups and legacy companies—the options are few: Either disrupt yourself or be disrupted by someone else. The Last Three Ds Digitalization, deception, and disruption have radically reshaped our world, but the chain reaction we’re tracking is cumulative. Thus the three Ds that follow—demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization—are far more potent than their predecessors. Demonetization. This means the removal of money from the equation. Consider Kodak. Their legacy business evaporated when people stopped buying film. Who needs film when there are megapixels? Suddenly one of Kodak’s once-unassailable revenue streams came free of charge with any digital camera.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

When a song is downloaded from iTunes or we listen to a track on Spotify (a library of millions of songs hailed as the “twenty-first-century jukebox”), we are experiencing the benefits of “dematerialization.” We are turning products into services, even if we’re not conscious of it. Chris Arkenberg, a regular blogger on technology and culture, wrote, “For the past 20 years, millions upon millions of CDs, DVDs, cases and printed inserts have been consuming resources, fixing materials into unrecoverable or ‘downcycled’ hard media and filling landfills. Apple has fundamentally rewritten this paradigm by dematerializing the content.”3 But the benefits of dematerialization are not just convenience and choice. A recent study conducted by Intel and Microsoft comparing the environmental impact of various forms of music delivery showed that purchasing music digitally on the Internet reduced the carbon footprint and energy usage associated with delivering music to consumers by 40 to 80 percent compared with buying a CD at a retail outlet.4 Another instance of unintended consequences: Most people’s reason for downloading music isn’t environmental friendliness; but nevertheless, downloading is environmentally friendly.

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Brown, Lewis Brown, Tim Bruce, Sandra Bruhn, Wilhelm Buckmaster, Jim Burke, Edmund buy now, pay later Cahn, Edgar Campbell, Colin Cardon, Dominique Carlin, George Carnegie, Andrew Carroll, Lewis car sharing cell phones Chameides, David Chase, Robin Chesky, Brian Chevrolet Cialdini, Robert cigarettes, advertising of Clark, Shelby Clickworkers.com Climate Collaboration Clinton, Bill Clothing Exchange clothing swaps, critical mass in Coase, Ronald coincidence of wants collaboration mass shift from consumerism to stigmas and stereotypes about see also cooperation collaborative consumption: benefits and uses of demographics of evolution and rise of four principles of implications of participant mind-set and role of brand in role of design in rooted in social networks social proof as vital to sustainability as consequence of values redefined by ways to participate in see also mass collaboration collaborative consumption systems designing revenue models for collaborative design longevity as central to collaborative lifestyles coordination in defining of as expanded by Internet peripheral relationships from trust required for commons-based society historical roots of online and off-line as self policing see also belief in the commons; collaborative lifestyles; community communal living community: alternative forms of collaborative individualism balanced with reestablishment of see also collaborative lifestyles; commons-based society Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs Connect & Develop conspicuous consumption see also hyper-consumption consumer choice doctrine of in non-ownership transactions consumer-generated advertising see also Dyfedpotter consumerism doctrine of choice in environmental impact of Etsy as throwback false promises of negative consequences of product lifecycles and PSS as efficient shift to collaboration from social habits of see also hyper-consumerism consumer mind-set: changing of Millennials see also values consumers, dematerialization of Consumption Dreaming Activity cooperation see also collaboration CouchSurfing co-working Cradle to Cradle (Braungart) craigslist Creative Commons credit and credit cards critical mass crowdsourcing see also mass collaboration cul-de-sac communes Cycles Devinci Dallaire, Michel Damour, Jdimytai Daniels, Susan DaveZillion Davis, Bruce Death of a Salesman (Miller) Decisive Moment, The (Lehrer) decoupling Deep Economy (McKibben) deforestation Delanoë, Bertrand Dell, Adam dematerialization design of product lifecycles de Waal, Frans B.

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Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Owning,” posted on his blog Technium (January 21, 2009), www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/01/better_than_own.php. 2. We discussed the ideas of “use by association” in an interview with Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, in May 2009. 3. Chris Arkenberg, “Dematerialize: Change the Ways We Relate to Product & Ownership,” posted on his blog urbeingrecorded (March 27, 2009), www.urbeingrecorded.com/news/2009/03/27/dematerialize-changing-the-ways-we-relate-to-product-ownership/. 4. Christopher L. Weber, Jonathan G. Koomey, and H. Scott Matthews, “The Energy and Climate Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods,” Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University (August 17, 2009), http://download.intel.com/pressroom/pdf/CDsvsdownloadsrelease.pdf. 5.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble. Some people try to solve the impossible equation with the myth of dematerialisation: the claim that as processes become more efficient and gadgets are miniaturised, we use, in aggregate, fewer materials. There is no sign that this is happening. Iron ore production has risen 180 per cent in ten years.11 The trade body Forest Industries tell us that, ‘Global paper consumption is at a record high level and it will continue to grow.’12 If, in the digital age, we won’t reduce even our consumption of paper, what hope is there for other commodities?

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See also drug consumption; global consumption; pathological consumption; pointless consumption assault on the biosphere by consumption machine, 101 as associated with prosperity and happiness, 206 diminishing satisfactions of, 100 of fossil fuels, 87, 153, 204 of paper, 177 rise of, 107, 200 contraception, 73, 74, 75 Coors, Adolph, 16, 219 corporate lobbyists, 26 corporate power appeasing of, 281 media as instrument of, 212 neoliberal think thanks and, 213 politics as operated by, 23 promotion of, 4 Corporation of the City of London, 192 corporation tax, 281 Costa, Antonio Maria, 32, 34, 35 Cotton, Charles, 137 council tax, 282 counter-cultural association, 33 counter life, 24 Cowie, Ian, 216 crime, rise and fall of violent crime, 160–3 Crime and Disorder Act (1998), 28, 70 criminal responsibility, age of, 69 Crompton, Tom, 285, 287 cross compliance, 125 Crow, Bob, 267 Cú Chulainn, 90 cultural diversity, loss of, 97 Curran, Kevin, 267 D Daily Mail, 214, 215, 235, 267, 284 Daily Telegraph, 198, 214, 216, 275 Darling, Alistair, 150 Darwin, Charles, 3, 234 Davey, Ed, 156 Davies, Nick, 33 Dearlove, Richard, 242 Deepwater Horizon disaster, 201 Defending the Dream Summit (2009), 211 dehumanisation, 235 dematerialisation, 177 Democracy Centre, 252 Democrats, in US, 56, 220 demographic transition, 73, 106 Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), 125, 126, 127, 129 depression, rise in, 17 deregulation, 15, 186, 205, 218, 219 Der Lebensraum (Ratzel), 234 Deutsche Bank, 195 dimethyl sulphide, 85 dispersal orders, 30, 70 dispersal powers, 29 Dissertation on the Poor Laws (Townsend), 180 divorce, 60 domestic extremism/domestic extremist, 258, 260, 261 dominant ideology, 3 dominant narratives, 14–15 Drax (England), 172 dredging, 136 drone strikes, 53–7, 255, 256 drug addiction, 33, 35 drug consumption, 34 drugs, legalisation and regulation of, 33–4 drugs policy, 32, 33 drug use as elective, 33 prohibition vs. legalisation of, 35–6 due process, 255, 256 E Eagle, Angela, 149 early boarding, 64–6 Earth First!

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Those reserves, however, can be ‘materialised’ into physical cash. When banks ask, a central bank can delete a promise written down on a computer (reserves) and re-write it instead on a paper bill (cash). Physical cash is the materialised version of a state IOU, whereas digital reserves are the dematerialised version of exactly the same thing in a central bank data centre. Banks can thus interchange digital reserves for cash, and vice versa – they can hand cash back to the central bank and get it re-written on a computer instead. One of the hardest things for us ordinary money users to understand is that when those cash tokens are returned by banks to the central bank, they are not money any more.

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‘Cashless society’ is a euphemism – as uninformative as calling whisky ‘beerless alcohol’ – but the financial industry likes the phrase because it draws attention to something that is absent, rather than to something that is rising to power. Imagine how much harder it would be to market the ‘bank chip society’. Remember that banks retire our cash from circulation, ‘dematerialise’ it into reserves they own at the central bank, and then issue us chips in their data centres, but they are also supposed to run the reverse process. When we request state money, they have to destroy chips, and re-materialise reserves into cash that they send out via ATMs and branches. But banks have begun to present ATMs as a helpful but outdated public service that they are encumbered with running.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

Telephone calls became cheaper and industry took its first big steps towards the use of mobile phones. The result was a world that was far more globalized, but also one in which the production and trade of rich economies became ‘dematerialized’. But that makes it sound like the boats full of shipping containers crossing the oceans held nothing but vapour. In fact, dematerialization boiled down to the increase in the share of the value of the things being produced that was attributable to services.11 Cars crossed the ocean, but much of the value of the cars being produced derived from the designers and engineers and coders who made the car run much more efficiently, reliably and safely than it had in the past.

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The classic example of the phenomenon is the iPod: while components for the iPod were sourced across several countries and final assembly took place in China, most of the value accrued to American firms and workers, and the largest share to Apple itself. Apple did none of the manufacturing, but it did do the design and engineering work. It created the knowledge embodied in the product, which was the most valuable part of it.12 The dematerialization of production represents the rise of know-how and the increased importance of knowing what can be done and how it should be done, relative to the doing itself. In a dematerialized economy, information flow is everything. Social capital is the human coding that governs the flow of information. It can be difficult to distinguish several closely related but fundamentally distinct concepts relevant to work and economic growth.

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It is not clear whether there is an alternative strategy. Supply-chain trade, which allows low-wage economies to manufacture goods without building the broad set of capabilities once associated with industrialization, leaves poorer countries vulnerable to the premature loss of industry as wages rise. But the increasing dematerialization of economic activity described in Chapter 6 is also undercutting the industry-based approach to development that was the closest thing to a reliable ticket out of poverty in the era before hyperglobalization. The value in the goods and services we trade and consume is increasingly derived from the knowledge used to create or provide them, rather than the material or capital equipment or labour used in their production.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
by Juliet B. Schor
Published 12 May 2010

And while weight-reducing innovation is occurring in some products—electronics and camping equipment are obvious cases—not everything is getting lighter. Vehicles, refrigerators, and homes got bigger and heavier. The promise of dematerialization also didn’t take into account the enormous expansion of demand for materials from what has come to be known as the Global South, the countries outside the wealthy Western nations that lack the funds to purchase the latest and most resource-efficient technologies. More generally, dematerialization has been stymied by the failure to incorporate ecological costs, especially for fossil fuels. Western Europe’s relative success in containing material flows is due to smart energy policies that raised taxes and reduced consumption.

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Advertising and media have succeeded in cultivating desire for the Apple logo, the Prada triangle, or the Nike swoosh, even more than for the phone, the bag, or the shoe. Some consumer theorists argue that the emergence of a symbolically driven economy implies that when people crave images and social meaning, the materiality of goods becomes unimportant, which in turn can produce dematerialization. The idea is that we consume images, rather than material products. Virtual possessions in the computer environment Second Life can substitute for offline “stuff.” Others predict the material impact of spending will be reduced through technological change. These are comforting thoughts, because material impact is what drives ecological degradation.

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The consumer theorists are certainly right about one thing. Symbolic value has become far more important. Expanded expenditures on advertising and marketing, the growth of brand value as a corporate asset, and the emergence of fast fashion are all evidence for that view. But, in opposition to theorists of dematerialization, the materiality paradox suggests that the rising importance of symbolic value increases, rather than reduces, pressure on the planet. That’s because sign economies are vulnerable to the dynamics of rapidly changing symbolic value, through the fashion cycle. If what is symbolically valued remains so for only a brief period of time, then replacement goods become necessary.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

Their development over the last century was incredibly fast but also provided time for introducing all sorts of safety standards. There was always a lag, but the standards could still catch up. However, with the rate of change in the coming wave, that looks unlikely. Over the last forty years, the internet grew to be one of the most fruitful innovation platforms in history. The world digitized, and this dematerialized realm evolved at a bewildering pace. An explosion of development saw the world’s most widely used services and the largest commercial enterprises in history spring up in just a few years. All of this was underwritten by the ever-increasing power and fall in costs of computation we saw in chapter 2.

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This process won’t, like the East India Company, come enforced at the barrel of a musket, but it will, exactly like the East India Company, create private companies with the scale, reach, and power of governments. Those companies with the cash, expertise, and distribution to take advantage of the coming wave, to greatly augment their intelligence and simultaneously extend their reach, will see colossal gains. In the last wave, things dematerialized; goods became services. You don’t buy software or music on CDs anymore; it’s streamed. You just expect antivirus and security software as a by-product of using Google or Apple. Products break, get obsolete. Services less so. They are seamless and easy to use. For their part, companies are eager for you to subscribe to their software ecosystems; regular payments are alluring.

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Apple has the App Store, despite primarily selling devices, and Amazon, while operating as the world’s biggest retailer of physical goods, also provides e-commerce services to merchants and TV streaming to individuals, and hosts a good chunk of the internet on its cloud offering, Amazon Web Services. Everywhere you look, technology accelerates this dematerialization, reducing complexity for the end consumer by providing continuous consumption services rather than traditional buy-once products. Whether it’s services like Uber, DoorDash, and Airbnb, or open publishing platforms like Instagram and TikTok, the drift of mega-businesses is toward not participating in the market but being the market, not making the product but operating the service.

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century
by Ronald Bailey
Published 20 Jul 2015

pollution turning point: Anil Markandya et al., “Empirical Analysis of National Income and SO2 Emissions in Selected European Countries.” Environmental and Resource Economics 35 (2006): 221–257. www.environmental-expert.com/Files/6063/articles/9212/1.pdf. “If consumers dematerialize”: Jesse H. Ausubel and Paul Waggoner, “Dematerialization: Variety, Caution, and Persistence,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105.35 (September 2, 2008): 12774–12779. www.pnas.org/content/105/35/12774.full. modern technology enables: Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. New York: Wiley, 2013. the amount of energy: Ramez Naam, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2013.

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The ASE study also cited data from the energy conservation think tank the Rocky Mountain Institute suggesting that “if energy productivity had remained constant since 1970 [when about 68 quadrillion Btu (Q or quad) were consumed], the U.S. would have consumed 207.3 quadrillion Btu in 2007, when it actually only consumed 101.6 quads.” A quad is roughly equivalent to 170 million barrels of oil. While the ever more efficient use of energy and materials results in relative dematerialization—less stuff yielding more value—the overall trend has been to extract more and more materials from the earth and the biosphere. “There can be no doubt that relative dematerialization has been the key (and not infrequently the dominant) factor promoting often massive expansion of material consumption,” writes Smil. “Less has thus been an enabling agent of more.” For example, the 11 million cell phones in use in 1990 each bulked about 21 ounces for total overall mass of 7,000 tons.

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In other words, Americans believe that air pollution is getting worse, as cynical as it sounds, because activists make a living peddling fear. Doing More with Less Jesse Ausubel, head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, and his colleagues point out: “If consumers dematerialize their intensity of use of goods and technicians produce the goods with a lower intensity of impact, people can grow in numbers and affluence without a proportionally greater environmental impact.” In fact, that is happening. Modern economic growth is generally the result of constantly figuring out how to do more with less.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

We develop a framework to conceive of concepts related to transport and accessibility more broadly. In this framework, transport systems are being augmented with a range of information technologies. Fresh flows of goods and information provide a foundational aspect. We discuss large scale trends revolutionizing transport: dematerialization, electrification, automation, the sharing economy, and big data. The culminating chapters provide strategies to shape future debates about infrastructure. Even if transport is not your bailiwick, there is something interesting for you here. We aim for a quick read—and to encourage you to think outside your immediate realm.

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We focus on what has actually happened (Chapter 1), why what is happening is a good thing (Chapter 2), the underlying causes (Chapter 3), how the inevitable conflicts between the timeframes of change keep transportation practice lagging far behind imagined transportation potential (Chapter 4). The second part examines upcoming processes that will shape the future of transportation or its consequences: Electrification (Chapter 5), Dematerialization (Chapter 6), Autonomy (Chapter 7), Mobility-as-a-Service (Chapter 8). While these changes are still mostly too small have been measured in the system statistics. we have begun to see the tip of the iceberg in their transformative potential. In Chapter 9 we look at how even the laggard transit modes will be affected.

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Second we prescribe new design aspects and priorities for rights-of-way consistent with the end of traffic (Chapter 12). Third, we recommend pricing strategies to accelerate the end of traffic (Chapter 13). These might happen, but they cannot happen without active public direction (unlike the technology changes of dematerialization, electrification, sharing, automation, and cloud commuting, which are on trajectories if not entirely independent of public policy interventions, mostly so). Our last chapter charts paths forward for how transport will redeem itself (Chapter 14). There are things that might happen on their own (with a minimal amount of public policy interference).

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil
Published 23 Sep 2019

Again, techno-optimists are not perturbed and cite the recent dematerialization trend as a key shift promised to make a new world possible. But while relative dematerialization, particularly in consumer electronics, has helped to maintain some high growth rates, absolute dematerialization is a different matter. Mass consumption (measured by numbers of people acquiring an item) is also always increased consumption of mass (be it measured by inputs of energy or raw materials). Arguments about the impressive miniaturization (and hence dematerialization) of modern electronics are based on faulty assumptions.

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Yet their annual global flows add up to tens of millions (many industrial chemicals), hundreds of millions (plastic, and, as already explained, ammonia used largely for fertilizers) and even billions of tonnes (steel, cement). This neglect of the world’s material foundations has further intensified with the widely held belief that dematerialization has been on the march, an impression created by the relentless crowding of more components on a microchip, the process captured by Moore’s law underpinning the miniaturization and hence the not only relative but even absolute dematerialization of the modern e-world. Whenever a new product relies on improving microprocessors, the growth of its performance, or decline of its cost, will proceed at rates closely resembling Moore’s law.

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There has not been (because there cannot be) any Moore’s law-like progression in building essential infrastructures, expanding megacities, and manufacturing vehicles, airplanes or household appliances where even reductions of an order of magnitude (that is maintaining the performance with only a tenth of the original mass) are uncommon. While many of these investments and acquisitions have benefited from relative dematerialization (thanks to stronger steels, the adoption of new composite materials, or better overall designs), there has been no absolute dematerialization on a macro level: Progressively lower mass (and hence decreased cost) of individual products, be they common consumer items or powerful prime movers, has contributed to their increased use as well as to their deployment in heavier (more powerful, larger, more comfortable) machines.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

But once photos became digital, those costs vanished. Now you take photos without thinking of them, and the difficulty comes in sorting through too many options. Dematerialization: Now you see it, now you don’t. This is when the products themselves disappear. Cameras, stereos, video game consoles, TVs, GPS systems, calculators, paper, matchmaking as we knew it, etc. These once independent products are now standard fare on any smartphone. Wikipedia dematerialized the encyclopedia; iTunes dematerialized the music store. Etc. Democratization: This is when an exponential scales and goes wide. Cell phones were once brick-sized instruments available only to a wealthy few.

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The development of a user-friendly interface for quantum computing marks a critical inflection point. Maybe, the critical inflection point, but this takes a little explaining.… In BOLD, we introduced “the Six Ds of Exponentials,” or the growth cycle of exponential technologies: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization. Each represents a crucial phase of development for an exponential technology, one that always leads to enormous upheaval and opportunity. Since understanding these stages will be indispensable to understanding the evolution of quantum computing (and the other technologies we’ll be discussing), they’re worth taking a moment to review: Digitalization: Once a technology becomes digital, meaning once you can translate it into the 1s and 0s of binary code, it jumps on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially.

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Well, right now there’s Hololux, a collaboration between Microsoft and the London College of Fashion. Their VR goggles let you shop in mixed reality anywhere in the world. Want to check out the Prada store on London’s High Street—once again, no problem. So, there you have it, a future in which shopping is dematerialized, demonetized, democratized, and delocalized—otherwise known as “the end of malls.” Of course, if you wait a few years after that, you’ll be able to take an autonomous flying taxi to Westfield’s Destination 2028—which might be an experience worth having, so, maybe, it’s not the end of malls. Either way, it’s a top-to-bottom transformation of the retail world.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje
Published 14 Aug 2020

Can national states reclaim capitalism for their wider citizenries? Can Main Street hold its own over Wall Street? This is the claim of some reformist economic thinkers, but it seems unlikely without wider system change in view of the expansionary logic of the M → Mʹ loop which now has few options but to abstract itself from bounded territory and ‘de-materialise’ from sites of actual production like farms and factories in favour of ‘virtual’ connections like computerised financial markets or distribution platforms – what’s sometimes called a capitalist ‘Empire’ where the symbolic economy is further freed to overrun physical reality.126 In that sense, many of the crises outlined earlier might be seen as warnings from the non-symbolic world not to get too dazzled by our symbolic goods.

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The formation of a capitalist world system through the connection of trading empires. The emergence of entrepreneurial industrial capitalism. The transformation of industrial capitalism into monopolistic corporate capitalism. The development of neoliberalism, in practice if not in theory as the deregulated globalisation of capital. The emergence of a de-materialised capitalist Empire. With the possible exception of the first, all these forms of capital are effective generators of symbolic goods, with the result that it’s hard to be a non-capitalist person or society in a capitalist world. The pioneering of modern capitalism in countries like Britain and the Netherlands created strong pressures for others to keep up, which countries like France, Germany, Japan and the United States (and, later, Taiwan, South Korea, Russia and China among others) did by various means.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

The existence of many available facts somewhere in the infinite ocean of the Internet is no help in such an endeavor. Others argue that future generations will learn to make new connections with facts that aren’t held in their heads, that dematerialized knowledge can still lead to innovation. As we inevitably off-load media content to the cloud—storing our books, our television programs, our videos of the trip to Taiwan, and photos of Grandma’s ninetieth birthday, all on a nameless server—can we happily dematerialize our mind’s stores, too? Perhaps we should side with philosopher Lewis Mumford, who insisted in The Myth of the Machine that “information retrieving,” however expedient, is simply no substitute for the possession of knowledge accrued through personal and direct labor.

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Bugs are rapidly squashed.” I ask whether the same principle that works for his engineering classes would work for classes on art history or creative writing. Ng pauses for a beat before replying: “I haven’t seen any evidence that would suggest otherwise.” Nevertheless, MOOCs and the attendant dematerialization of the education process are creating a certain crisis of authenticity. A large Pew Research Center survey found that most people believe we’ll see a mass adoption of “distance learning” by 2020, and many are wondering whether that will brush aside the sun-dappled campuses, shared coffees, and lawn lolling that pre-Internet students considered so essential to their twenty-something lives.

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One can imagine the necessary memory palaces growing larger and larger with each generation, wings and turrets getting stapled onto the sides as we attempt to hold ever more preposterous loads of information. Similarly, the cabinets of curiosities buckle beneath the weight of our discoveries. Both endeavors, though, are very different from the dematerialized and unholdable “cloud” memories championed by Wikipedia and Google. To remember, goes the earlier assumption, you must first digest the outside world and carry it around with you. This assumption pervaded our thinking until very recently. Consider the case of Sherlock Holmes, who described his own prodigious (and pre-Internet) memory in his debut appearance, an 1887 novel called A Study in Scarlet.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

As trees are harvested from dense plantations, which have five to ten times the yield of natural forests, forest land is spared, together with its feathered, furry, and scaly inhabitants. All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An aluminum soda can used to weigh three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce. Mobile phones don’t need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way to cubic inches of compact discs and then to the nothingness of MP3s.

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And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass—even a metronome, outdoor thermometer, and spirit level. Digital technology is also dematerializing the world by enabling the sharing economy, so that cars, tools, and bedrooms needn’t be made in huge numbers that sit around unused most of the time. The advertising analyst Rory Sutherland has noted that dematerialization is also being helped along by changes in the criteria of social status.37 The most expensive London real estate today would have seemed impossibly cramped to wealthy Victorians, but the city center is now more fashionable than the suburbs.

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That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.”21 The dematerialization of life that we examined in chapter 10, for example, undermines the observation that a 2015 home does not look much different from a 1965 home. The big difference lies in what we don’t see because it’s been made obsolete by tablets and smartphones, together with new wonders like streaming video and Skype. In addition to dematerialization, information technology has launched a process of demonetization.22 Many things that people used to pay for are now essentially free, including classified ads, news, encyclopedias, maps, cameras, long-distance calls, and the overhead of brick-and-mortar retailers.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

From Hobbes and Rousseau to Rawls and Habermas in the late twentieth century, political thought has been the ‘victim of a strong object-avoidance tendency’, dreaming up assemblies emptied of stuff, where people meet as if ‘naked’, equipped only with reason.50 It would be foolish to deny parts of the critique – the enlightenment did sponsor the idea of critical reason and undermined folk ideas which, for example, had invested trees and other objects with the power of speech and action. The real question is whether dematerialization captures the overall thrust of modernity and whether it led to a distinctly carefree attitude to things in the West. After all, that the Chinese saw persons and things as one has not stopped them from consuming a lot in recent decades. Nor did Western modernity have a single tradition. Arguments for the authentic self were paralleled and sometimes drowned out by a new fascination with things as handmaidens of knowledge and identity; even Descartes did not believe in a strict dualism between mind and matter or subjects and objects.

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At best, Weber concluded, modern man could hope to die ‘weary of life’.24 Many historians who have written about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have slotted their story into this grand scheme, as another chapter in the growing divide between self and things.25 In his brilliant study of the changing image of abundance in modern America, T. J. Jackson Lears presents this period as a culminating stage in the ‘dematerializing of desire’. Advertisers nurtured a restless self. There was always another new product around the corner promising greater self-fulfilment. New stuff was scarcely unpacked before it was left behind in the purchasers’ never-ending journey to find themselves. Consumer culture, in this view, completed the Enlightenment project associated with Descartes: the creation of a self separate from the physical world, and master of it.26 Disenchantment, it is worth stressing, is an interpretation of modern history based on assumptions about human nature, rather than an account of how people actually engaged with the material world.

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Consumer culture, in this view, completed the Enlightenment project associated with Descartes: the creation of a self separate from the physical world, and master of it.26 Disenchantment, it is worth stressing, is an interpretation of modern history based on assumptions about human nature, rather than an account of how people actually engaged with the material world. If we are concerned with the latter, another story emerges. Rather than ongoing dematerialization, the 1890s–1920s witnessed a renaissance of the material self. The enlightenment story continued, albeit in a different key. The language of the passions, of sociability, refinement and sympathy gave way to a more hands-on, more private relationship with things. Mr Pooter, collecting, crafts and home furnishing, these were all elements of a renewed appreciation of the role of things in the development of the self.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Based in Guiyang, a city 1,000 kilometres to the north-west of Shenzhen, the firm makes the chassis for a new class of autonomous vehicle. The tariffs made everything more expensive. A lesser entrepreneur may have had to raise prices for his first customers. Not so Yu. He had a solution: Pix Moving was using only the most modern manufacturing methods – ‘dematerialised’ techniques. Rather than exporting cars, Yu explained, they ‘export the technique that is needed to produce the cars’.1 Vehicles are not loaded onto container ships and sent to their destination. Rather, the company sends design blueprints over to colleagues in the US, who use additive manufacturing techniques to print components locally.

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Abu Dhabi, UAE, 250 Acemoglu, Daron, 139 Acorn Computers, 16, 21 Ada Lovelace Institute, 8 additive manufacturing, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 Adidas, 176 advertising, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227–8 AdWords, 227 aeroponics, 171 Afghanistan, 38, 205 Africa, 177–8, 182–3 Aftenposten, 216 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil), 77 agglomeration, 181 Air Jordan sneakers, 102 Airbnb, 102, 188 aircraft, 49–50 Alexandria, Egypt, 180 AlexNet, 33 Algeciras, HMM 61 Alibaba, 48, 102, 108, 111, 122 Alipay, 111 Allen, Robert, 80 Alphabet, 65, 113–14, 131, 163 aluminium, 170 Amazon, 65, 67–8, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122, 135–6 Alexa, 25, 117 automation, 135–6, 137, 139, 154 collective bargaining and, 163 Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21), 135–6 drone sales, 206 Ecobee and, 117 Go stores, 136 Kiva Systems acquisition (2012), 136 management, 154 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 monopoly, 115, 117, 122 Prime, 136, 154 R&D, 67–8, 113 Ami Pro, 99 Amiga, 16 Anarkali, Lahore, 102 anchoring bias, 74 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 Angola, 186 Ant Brain, 111 Ant Financial, 111–12 antitrust laws, 114, 119–20 Apache HTTP Server, 242 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 63 Apple, 47, 62, 65, 85, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122 App Store, 105, 112, 115 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data collection, 228 iOS, 85 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 105 media subscription, 112 watches, 112 APT33 hacker group, 198 Aral, Sinan, 238 Aramco, 108, 198 Armenia, 206–7 Arthur, William Brian, 110, 123 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88, 113, 249 academic brain drain, 118 automation, 125–42 data and, 31–2, 142 data network effect, 106–7 drone technology and, 208, 214 education and, 88 employment and, 126–7 healthcare and, 88, 103 job interviews and, 153 regulation of, 187, 188 arXiv, 59 Asana, 151 Asian Development Bank, 193 Aslam, Yaseen, 148 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 asymmetric conflict, 206 AT&T, 76, 100 Atari, 16 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 Aurora, 141 Australia, 102, 197 automation, 125–42 autonomous weapons, 208, 214 Azerbaijan, 173, 206–7 Ballmer, Steve, 85 Bangladesh, 175 banking, 122, 237 Barcelona, Catalonia, 188 Barlow, John Perry, 184 Barrons, Richard, 195, 211 Bartlett, Albert, 73 batteries, 40, 51, 53–4, 250, 251 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Bayraktar TB2 drone, 206 Bee Gees, 72 Bekar, Clifford, 45 Bell Labs, 18 Bell Telephone Company, 100 Benioff, Marc, 108–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 152 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 4 Bermuda, 119 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 55, 100, 160, 239 Bessen, James, 46 Bezos, Jeffrey, 135–6 BGI, 41 Biden, Joseph, 225 Bing, 107 biological weapons, 207, 213 biology, 10, 39, 40–42, 44, 46 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 biopolymers, 42 bits, 18 Black Death (1346–53), 12 BlackBerry, 120 Blair, Tony, 81 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 22 blitzscaling, 110 Blockbuster, 138 BMW, 177 Boeing, 51, 236 Bol.com, 103 Bollywood, 181 Boole, George, 18 Bork, Robert, 114–15, 117, 119 Bosworth, Andrew, 233 Boyer, Pascal, 75 Boyle, James, 234 BP, 92, 158 brain, 77 Braudel, Fernand, 75 Brave, 242 Brazil, 202 Bremmer, Ian, 187 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 87 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 87, 129, 191 Brookings Institution, 130 BT, 123 Bulgaria, 145 Bundy, Willard Legrand, 149 Busan, South Korea, 56 business, 82, 92–124 diminishing returns to scale, 93, 108 economic dynamism and, 117 economies of scale, 50, 92 growth, 110–13 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 linear value chains, 101 market share, 93–6, 111 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24 network effect, 96–101 platform model, 101–3, 219 re-localisation, 11, 166–79, 187, 252, 255 state-sized companies, 11, 67 superstar companies, 10, 94–6 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252, 255 taxation of, 96, 118–19 Butler, Nick, 179 ByteDance, 28 C40 initiative, 189 Cambridge University, 127, 188 cancer, 57–8, 127 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 car industry, 93 carbon emissions, 35, 90, 251 Carlaw, Kenneth, 45 Carnegie, Andrew, 112 Carnegie Mellon University, 131 Catholic Church, 83, 88 censorship, 216–17, 224–6, 236 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 194 Cerebras, 34 cervical smears, 57–8 chemical weapons, 207, 213 Chen, Brian, 228 chewing gum, 78 Chicago Pile-1 reactor, 64 Chile, 170 China automation in, 127, 137 brainwave reading in, 152 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 245 drone technology in, 207 Great Firewall, 186, 201 Greater Bay Area, 182 horizontal expansion in, 111–12 manufacturing in, 176 misinformation campaigns, 203 raw materials, demand for, 178 Singles’ Day, 48 social credit systems, 230 superstar companies in, 95 US, relations with, 166 chips, 19–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 Christchurch massacre (2019), 236 Christensen, Clayton, 24 CIPD, 153 cities, 11, 75, 169, 179–84, 188, 255 Clegg, Nick, 225–6, 235 climate change, 90, 169, 187, 189, 251, 252 cloud computing, 85, 112 Cloudflare, 200 cluster bombs, 213 CNN, 185, 190 coal, 40, 65, 172 Coase, Ronald, 92 Coca-Cola, 93 code is law, 220–22, 235 cold fusion, 113–14 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 Colombia, 145 colonialism, 167 Columbus, Christopher, 4 combination, 53–7 Comical Ali, 201 commons, 234–5, 241–3, 256 companies, see business comparative advantage, 170 complex systems, 2 compounding, 22–3, 28 CompuServe, 100 computing, 4, 10, 15–36, 44, 46, 249 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88 cloud computing, 85, 112 internet, 47–8, 55, 65, 84 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 machining, 43 Moore’s Law, see Moore’s Law quantum computing, 35 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52 conflict, 87, 189, 190–215 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 de-escalation, 212–13 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 institutional change and, 87 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225 new wars, 194 non-proliferation, 213–14 re-localisation and, 189, 193, 194, 209 consent of the networked, 223 Costco, 67 Coursera, 58 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 12–13, 59, 78–9, 131, 245–9 automation and, 127, 135, 136 cities and, 183 contact-tracing apps, 222–3 gig economy and, 146 lockdowns, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 manufacturing and, 176 misinformation and, 202–4, 247–8 preprint servers and, 60 recession (2020–21), 178 remote working and, 146, 151, 153 supply chains and, 169, 246 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 workplace cultures and, 151, 152 cranks, 54 credit ratings, 162, 229 critical thinking skills, 212 Croatia, 145 Crocker, David, 55 crowdsourcing, 143–4 Cuba, 203 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 99, 212 cultural lag, 85 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 CyberPeace Institute, 214 Daniel, Simon, 173–4 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 183 Darktrace, 197 data, 8, 11, 71, 217–19, 226–31, 235, 237–42, 256 AI and, 8, 32, 33, 58, 106 compensation for, 239 commons, 242 cyberattacks and, 196 doppelgängers, 219, 226, 228, 239 interoperability and, 237–9 network effects, 106–7, 111 protection laws, 186, 226 rights, 240 Daugherty, Paul, 141 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroe thane), 253 death benefits, 151 Dediu, Horace, 24, 30 deep learning, 32–4, 54, 58, 127 deforestation, 251 dehumanisation, 71, 154, 158 deindustrialisation, 168 Deliveroo, 154, 163 Delphi, 100 dematerialised techniques, 166, 175 Denmark, 58, 160, 199–200, 257 Deutsche Bank, 130 Diamandis, Peter, 5 Dickens, Charles, 80 digital cameras, 83–4 Digital Geneva Convention, 211 Digital Markets Act (EU, 2020), 122 digital minilateralism, 188 Digital Nations group, 188 Digital Services Act (EU, 2020), 123 diminishing returns, 93, 108 disinformation, see misinformation DoorDash, 147, 148, 248 dot-com bubble (1995–2000), 8, 108, 150 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 DoubleClick, 117 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 Dubai, UAE, 43 Duke University, 234 dystopia, 208, 230, 253 Eagan, Nicole, 197 eBay, 98, 121 Ecobee, 120 economies of scale, 50, 92 Economist, The, 8, 65, 119, 183, 239 economists, 63 Edelman, 3 education artificial intelligence and, 88 media literacy, 211–12 Egypt, 145, 186 Elance, 144 electric cars, 51, 69, 75, 173–4, 177, 250 electricity, 26, 45, 46, 54, 157, 249–50 see also energy Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 email, 6, 55 embodied institutions, 82 employment, 10, 71, 125–65 automation, 125–42 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 dehumanisation and, 71, 154, 158 flexicurity, 160–61, 257 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 lump of labour fallacy, 139 management, 149–54, 158–9 protections, 85–6, 147–9 reskilling, 159–60 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 Enclosure, 234–5, 241 energy, 11, 37–8, 39–40, 44, 46, 172–4, 250 cold fusion, 113–14 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172, 250 gravitational potential, 53 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 storage, 40, 53, 114, 173–4, 250, 251 wind power, 39–40, 52 Energy Vault, 53–4, 173 Engels, Friedrich, 81 Engels’ pause, 80, 81 environmental movement, 73 Epic Games, 116 estate agents, 100 Estonia, 188, 190–91, 200, 211 Etzion Airbase, Sinai Peninsula, 195 European Commission, 116, 122, 123 European Space Agency, 56 European Union, 6, 82, 147, 186, 226 Excel, 99 exogeny, 2 exponential gap, 9, 10, 67–91, 70, 89, 253 cyber security and, 193 institutions and, 9, 10, 79–88, 90 mathematical understanding and, 71–5 predictions and, 75–9 price declines and, 68–9 superstar companies and, 10, 94–124 exponential growth bias, 73 Exponential View, 8–9 externalities, 97 extremism, 232–4 ExxonMobil, 65, 92 Facebook, 27, 28, 65, 94, 104, 108, 122, 216–17, 218, 219, 221–2, 223 advertising business, 94, 228 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228, 239–40 extremism and, 233–4 Instagram acquisition (2012), 117, 120 integrity teams, 234 interoperability, 237–8 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 misinformation on, 201, 225 network effect and, 98, 223 Oculus acquisition (2014), 117 pay at, 156–7 Phan photo controversy (2016), 216–17, 224, 225 platform model, 101 polarisation and, 233 relationship status on, 221–2 Rohingya ethnic cleansing (2018), 224, 225 US presidential election (2016), 217 WhatsApp acquisition (2014), 117 facial recognition, 152, 208 Factory Act (UK, 1833), 81 Fairchild Semiconductor, 19, 21 fake news, 201–4 family dinners, 86 farming, 170–72, 251 Farrar, James, 148 fax machines, 97 Federal Aviation Administration (US), 236 feedback loops, 3, 13 fertilizers, 35, 90 5G, 203 Financial Conduct Authority, 122 Financial Times, 183 Finland, 160, 211–12 Fitbit, 158 Fiverr, 144 flashing of headlights, 83 flexicurity, 160, 257 flints, 42 flywheels, 54 Ford, 54, 92, 162 Ford, Gerald, 114 Ford, Henry, 54, 162 Ford, Martin, 125 Fortnite, 116 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172 France, 100, 138, 139, 147, 163 free-market economics, 63–4 freelance work, 10, 71, 142–9 Frey, Carl, 129, 134, 141 Friedman, Milton, 63–4, 241 Friedman, Thomas, 167 FriendFeed, 238 Friendster, 26 Fudan University, 245 fund management, 132 Galilei, Galileo, 83 gaming, 86 Gates, Bill, 17, 25, 84 gender, 6 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 87 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 226 General Electric, 52 General Motors, 92, 125, 130 general purpose technologies, 10, 45–8 generative adversarial networks (GANs), 58 Geneva Conventions, 193, 199, 209 Genghis Khan, 44 GEnie, 100 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 Germany, 75, 134, 147 Giddens, Anthony, 82 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 Gilbreth, Lillian, 150 Ginsparg, Paul, 59 GitHub, 58, 60 GlaxoSmithKline, 229–30 global financial crisis (2007–9), 168 Global Hawk drones, 206 global positioning systems (GPS), 197 globalisation, 11, 62, 64, 156, 166, 167–71, 177, 179, 187, 193 internet and, 185 conflict and, 189, 193, 194 Glocer, Thomas, 56 Go (game), 132 GOAT, 102 Gojek, 103 Golden Triangle, 170 Goldman Sachs, 151 Goodfellow, Ian, 58 Google, 5, 35, 36, 94, 98, 104, 108, 115, 122 advertising business, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data network effect, 106–7 death benefits, 151 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 Maps, 113 quantum computing, 35 R&D, 114, 118 vertical integration, 112–13, 116 X, 114 YouTube acquisition (2006), 112, 117 Gopher, 59, 100 GPT-3, 33 Graeber, David, 133–4 Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, 102 Graphcore, 34, 35 graphics chips, 34 Grateful Dead, The, 184 gravitational potential energy, 53 gravity bombs, 195 Greater Bay Area, China, 182 Greenberg, Andy, 199 Gross, Bill, 53 Grove, Andrew, 17 GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije), 199 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 182 Guardian, 8, 125, 154, 226, 227 Guiyang, Guizhou, 166 H1N1 virus, 75 Habermas, Jürgen, 218 Hard Times (Dickens), 80 Hardin, Garrett, 241 Harop drones, 207–8 Harpy drones, 207–8 Harvard University, 150, 218, 220, 221, 253 healthcare artificial intelligence and, 57–8, 88, 103 data and, 230, 239, 250–51 wearable devices and, 158, 251 Helsinki, Finland, 160 Herlev Hospital, Denmark, 58 Hinton, Geoffrey, 32, 126–7 HIPA Act (US, 1996), 230 Hitachi, 152 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Hoffman, Josh, 174 Hoffman, Reid, 110, 111 Holmes, Edward, 245 homophily, 231–4 Hong Kong, 182 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 Houston Islam protests (2016), 203 Houthis, 206 Howe, Jeff, 143 Hsinchu, Taiwan, 181 Hughes, Chris, 217 Hull, Charles, 43 Human + Machine (Daugherty), 141 human brain, 77 human genome, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 250 human resources, 150 Hussein, Saddam, 195 Hyaline, 174 hydroponics, 171 hyperinflation, 75 IBM, 17, 21, 47, 98 IDC, 219 Ideal-X, 61 Ikea, 144 Illumina, 41 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 190 ImageNet, 32 immigration, 139, 168, 183–4 Impossible Foods, 69 Improv, 99 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 India, 103, 145, 181, 186, 224, 253, 254 Indonesia, 103 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81, 157, 235 informational networks, 59–60 ING, 178 innovation, 14, 117 Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen), 24 Instagram, 84, 117, 120, 121, 237 institutions, 9, 10, 79–88, 90–91 path dependence, 86–7 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 integrated circuits, 19 Intel, 16–17, 19, 163 intellectual property law, 82 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), 237 International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers, 164 International Court of Justice, 224 International Criminal Court, 208 International Energy Agency, 77, 82 International Labour Organization, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 87, 167, 187 international organisations, 82 International Organization for Standardization, 55, 61 International Rescue Committee, 184 International Telecommunication Union, 55 internet, 7, 47–8, 55, 65, 72, 75, 84–5, 88, 115, 184–6 code is law, 220–22, 235 data and, 11, 32, 71 informational networks, 59–60 localisation, 185–6 lockdowns and, 12 network effect, 100–101 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 platform model and, 102 public sphere and, 223 standardisation, 55 Wi-Fi, 151 interoperability, 55, 120–22, 237–9, 241, 243, 256–7 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 115, 175 Iran, 186, 196, 198, 203, 206 Iraq, 195–6, 201, 209 Ireland, 57–8, 119 Islamic State, 194, 233 Israel, 37, 188, 195–6, 198, 206, 207–8 Istanbul, Turkey, 102 Jacobs, Jane, 182 Japan, 37, 152, 171, 174 Jasanoff, Sheila, 253 JD.com, 137 Jena, Rajesh, 127 Jio, 103 job interviews, 153, 156 John Paul II, Pope, 83 Johnson, Boris, 79 Jumia, 103 just in time supply chains, 61–2 Kahneman, Daniel, 74 KakaoTalk, 27 Kaldor, Mary, 194 Kapor, Mitchell, 99 Karunaratne, Sid, 140–41, 151 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Keynes, John Maynard, 126, 158 Khan, Lina, 119 Khartoum, Sudan, 183 Kim Jong-un, 198 King’s College London, 179 Kiva Systems, 136 Kobo360, 145 Kodak, 83–4, 88 Kranzberg, Melvin, 254 Krizhevsky, Alex, 32–3, 34 Kubursi, Atif, 178 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 206 Kurzweil, Ray, 29–31, 33, 35, 77 Lagos, Nigeria, 182 Lahore, Pakistan, 102 landmines, 213 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 Laws of Motion, 20 learning by doing, 48, 53 Leggatt, George, 148 Lemonade, 56 Lessig, Larry, 220–21 Leviathan (Hobbes), 210 Li Fei-Fei, 32 life expectancy, 25, 26 light bulbs, 44, 157 Lime, 27 Limits to Growth, The (Meadows et al.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA
by Tonny K. Omwansa , Nicholas P. Sullivan and The Guardian
Published 28 Feb 2012

In countries where money means cash and cash typically moves by bus or post, the move to mobile is reducing transaction costs, and increasing the velocity and productivity of money. For the banked, mobile money provides superior speed, convenience and safety. For the unbanked, mobile money forms the beginning of a shadow banking system. For everyone, cash is the enemy—expensive to print, hard to store and move. Dematerializing money is good for people rich and poor, businesses, and governments. Mobile money, e-money, e-float, e-wallets, mobile banking, however you characterize it, is not just a cool app. It’s a killer app, the first for mobile phones in the developing world. It’s also a disruptive innovation that threatens incumbent businesses and is sparking new business formation and entrepreneurship.

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This minor problem, that cash is king, does little to solve the big problem, that cash is the enemy. The M-PESA mobile network is, in fact, less a true mobile channel for e-money than a new store channel to distribute cash outside the banking system. Nonetheless, this transitional phase gives a glimpse of the possibility of truly dematerializing money into electrons. “The key to making this thing successful was not the technology per se, it was more the management of it, how would you get this to work,” former CEO Joseph says today. “And the key to that was the agent network—the people who would be doing cash in and cash out.” THE NETWORK A mobile money service depends on a broad, deep, efficient, and trustworthy network of merchants.

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For the hundreds of millions of small farm-holders, who operate far off the electronic grid in a physical world of animals and vegetables but lack even rudimentary irrigation systems, for the hundreds of million casual labourers, ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* who limp from day to day and job to job (“the poor are rich in jobs”), for the hundreds of millions of micro entrepreneurs who are desperate for capital, and for the hundreds of millions of pastoralists, who pray for rain and suffer when it doesn’t, cash is what they know and need. But cash is their enemy because of the high transaction costs to procure and store and borrow it. Imagine the opportunities that would open up for poor people everywhere if their cash were “dematerialized” and treated purely as information. Digital money—mere digits on a server—is easier to conceal, transport, and deliver than physical cash. Digital money leaves information in its wake, which can be used automatically to build up financial histories for individuals or accounting records for businesses.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

But once its hits the knee of the curve, you are only ten doublings away from 1,000x, twenty doublings get you to 1,000,000x, and thirty doublings get you a 1,000,000,000x increase. Such a rapid rise describes the third D, Disruptive. And, as you shall see in the pages of this book, once a technology become disruptive it Dematerializes—which means that you no longer physically carry around a GPS, video camera or flashlight. All of them have dematerialized as apps onto your smartphone. And once that happens, the product or service Demonetizes. Thus, Uber is demonetizing taxi fleets and Craigslist demonetized the classified ads (taking down a flock of newspapers in the process). The final step to all this is Democratization.

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How will you compete in this accelerated new world? How will you organize to scale? The answer is the Exponential Organization. You won’t have much choice, because in many (and soon most) industries, that acceleration is already underway. Lately, I’ve begun to teach about what I call the 6Ds: Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialize, Demonetize and Democratize. Any technology that becomes Digitized (our first “D”) enters a period of Deceptive growth. During the early period of exponentials, the doubling of small numbers (0.01, 0.02, 0.04, 0.08) all basically looks like zero. But once its hits the knee of the curve, you are only ten doublings away from 1,000x, twenty doublings get you to 1,000,000x, and thirty doublings get you a 1,000,000,000x increase.

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Exponential Organizations Let’s begin with a definition: An Exponential Organization (ExO) is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large—at least 10x larger—compared to its peers because of the use of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies. Rather than using armies of people or large physical plants, Exponential Organizations are built upon information technologies that take what was once physical in nature and dematerialize it into the digital, on-demand world. Everywhere you look you see this digital transformation taking place: In 2012, 93 percent of U.S. transactions were already digital; physical equipment companies like Nikon are seeing their cameras rapidly being supplanted by the cameras on smartphones; map and atlas makers were replaced by Magellan GPS systems, which themselves were replaced by smartphone sensors; and libraries of books and music have been turned into phone and e-reader apps.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

We are steadily substituting intangible design, flexibility, innovation, and smartness for rigid, heavy atoms. In a very real sense our entry into a service- and idea-based economy is a continuation of a trend that began at the big bang. The Dematerialization of U.S. Exports. In billions of dollars, the total annual amount of both goods and services exported from the United States between 1960 and 2004. Dematerialization is not the only way in which exotropy advances. The technium’s ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial. For instance, science (starting with Newton) has been able to abstract a massive amount of evidence about the movement of any kind of object into a very simple law, such as F = ma.

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Every scientific theory and formula—whether about climate, aerodynamics, ant behavior, cell division, mountain uplift, or mathematics—is in the end a compression of information. In this way, our libraries packed with peer-reviewed, cross-indexed, annotated, equation-riddled journal articles are great mines of concentrated dematerialization. But just as an academic book about the technology of carbon fiber is a compression of the intangible, so are carbon fibers themselves. They contain far more than carbon. The philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that technology was an “unhiding”—a revealing—of an inner reality. That inner reality is the immaterial nature of anything manufactured.

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New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 256. 67 “financial and legal advice, and the like”: Richard Fisher. (2008) “Selling Our Services to the World (with an Ode to Chicago).” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Chicago: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. http://www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2008/fs080417.cfm. 68 The Dematerialization of U.S. Exports: Data from “U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services Balance of Payments Basis, 1960-2004.” U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration. http://www.ita.doc.gov/td/industry/OTEA/usfth/aggregate/H04t01.html. 69 rather than manufactured goods (atoms): Robert E.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

the condensed idea More people living alone timeline 2014 40 percent of British adults live alone 2015 Tax benefits for grandparents living with grandchildren 2016 Walmart discontinues “family packs” in USA 2017 Banks offer 100-year cross-generational mortgages 2018 60 percent of 30-year-olds still living at home 2019 Social networks start to establish physical communities 2024 Social robots in 30 percent of single-person households 2026 People living alone own 90 percent of all pets in China 27 Dematerialization The global economy is becoming dematerialized. What this means is that many things that have, or create, value no longer exist in a physical domain. The currency of this new economy is still money, but it’s digital money generated by ideas and information. Furthermore, this shift from physical manufacturing to digital services and virtual experiences has barely begun.

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ISBN 978-1-62365-195-4 Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway New York, NY 10019 www.quercus.com Contents Introduction POLITICS & POWER 01 Ubiquitous surveillance 02 Digital democracy 03 Cyber & drone warfare 04 Water wars 05 Wane of the West ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT 06 Resource depletion 07 Beyond fossil fuels 08 Precision agriculture 09 Population change 10 Geo-engineering THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 11 Megacities 12 Local energy networks 13 Smart cities 14 Next-generation transport 15 Extra-legal & feral slums TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE 16 An internet of things 17 Quantum & DNA computing 18 Nanotechnology 19 Gamification 20 Artificial Intelligence HEALTH & WELL-BEING 21 Personalized genomics 22 Regenerative medicine 23 Remote monitoring 24 User-generated medicine 25 Medical data mining SOCIAL & ECONOMIC DIMENSIONS 26 Living alone 27 Dematerialization 28 Income polarization 29 What (& where) is work? 30 The pursuit of happiness TOWARD A POSTHUMAN SOCIETY 31 Human beings version 2.0 32 Brain–machine interfaces 33 Avatar assistants 34 Uncanny Valley 35 Transhumanism SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER 36 Alt.Space & space tourism 37 Solar energy from space 38 Moon mining 39 Space elevators 40 Alien intelligence DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS 41 Cell phone radiation 42 Biohazards & plagues 43 Nuclear terrorism 44 Volcanoes & quakes 45 The sixth mass extinction UNANSWERED QUESTIONS 46 The Singularity 47 Me or we?

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Moreover, digitalization means that jobs can be broken down into smaller parts, which people can then bid to work on from across the globe, although this often means that price, alongside quality, is driven down to the point where skills become mere commodities. One issue to watch seriously is what this all means for intellectual property. As more and more becomes digitalized and virtualized, there is greater opportunity for abuse, although I would expect the area of copyright eventually to catch up with this. Another example of dematerialization is cloud computing—rather than physically owning or storing something at a set physical location you can simply pay to gain access to it “from the air” on any device you like whenever you need it. This might be business information or it could be films, games, photographs and many other items that used to be physically owned and kept by individuals or institutions.

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 4 Feb 2016

A remarkable example is that of share certificates. Today, all of our share holdings are completely electronic, a switch completed nearly a decade ago. This was made possible by the Depositories Act (1996), which paved the way for the creation of the National Securities Depository Ltd. (NSDL), where digitized or dematerialized share certificates are now stored and accessed electronically. Share trading also moved from open outcry markets with paper trails to electronic trading. When an electronic trade is completed, the shares are automatically transferred from the seller to the buyer. Similarly, our bank accounts have largely become paperless.

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After the economic liberalization of the 1990s, we have built a number of regulatory institutions. Regulators that oversee the financial sector include the RBI, the SEBI and the IRDA. Legislation was also passed that enabled the creation of electronic depositories to hold securities. The NSDL paved the way for dematerialization of share certificates, an essential component of electronic trading; today, NSDL is one of many flourishing stock depositories. These institutions are likely to be restructured and strengthened under the recently established Financial Sector Legal Reforms Commission. We also have regulators for pharmaceuticals, electricity, food, and for monitoring the anti-competitive behaviour of firms in the market.

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This provision of the RTE Act gives us an opportunity to create a voucher system, where poor families are issued school vouchers that can be used by parents to match children to schools in the same way that students are matched to engineering or medical colleges upon completion of standard twelve.16 Lastly, we would like to turn our attention to the question of de-materialization of degrees and skill certificates. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already announced a Digital Locker initiative in which a person’s important records, including educational certificates, will be stored securely in the cloud and can be accessed by government departments as needed.17 Fake resumes are circulating in the job market to an alarming degree, with an estimated one in five resumes in the IT industry being falsified.18 People go so far as to set up fake companies that can provide experience certificates to jobseekers, helping them to inflate their expertise and skills when job-hunting.19 A de-materialized degree combined with Aadhaar-based identification serves as a guarantee for the person’s educational qualifications, increasing trust between jobseekers and potential employers.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

But the weightlessness discourse infects even highly admirable w^riters like Fredric Jameson, who argues in his essay "Culture and Finance Capital" (1998) that capital has become both deterritoriaUzed and dematerial-ized in this "globaHzed" era. AH the weighdess postindustrial nostrums are represented: "profit without production"—in fact, the disappearance of production, except for "the two prodigious American industries of food and entertainment"—and "globaHzation," defined as "rather a kind of cyberspace in which money capital has reached its ultimate dematerial-ization," as messages which pass instantaneously firom one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world.

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

What makes Goux’s approach novel and intriguing, however, is its use of the categories of the real, imaginary, and symbolic (drawn from the work of the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan) to describe this sequence of stages: the real is the state of nature from which we have been severed because of our entry into language; the imaginary is the mirror stage, in which the child misrecognizes itself; and the symbolic is the order of language, through which the rules and dictates of society are given. Goux describes the era of financial capitalism in terms of the third stage, whereby society is dominated by the logic of the token, or the purely symbolic (Goux 1994). According to him, the dematerialization of money therefore reflects deeper changes in the relationship between language and the world, or the symbolic order. It is no accident that money’s dematerialization and the emergence of a “radically nominalist” conception of monetary media have coincided historically with a deepening preoccupation with language theory, a profound concern with the philosophical status of language, and “an unprecedented rupture in the mode of representation” (Goux 1999: 115).

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Likewise, in monetary theory the question of value in general, and monetary value in particular, has been progressively wrenched away from an underlying substance: money’s value has increasingly been understood as relational, not intrinsic. The de Saussurian characterization of money comes into its own in the age of dematerialization, and this notion is demonstrated with particular clarity in the work of Goux. Goux’s work on money combines the de Saussurian, or structuralist, approach to language, as used in anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary analysis,35 with an idiosyncratic interpretation of Marxism, focusing especially on Marx’s account of the genesis of the money form in Capital.36 Goux’s thesis is that, through money, we can understand society’s dominant mode of symbolizing.

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This symbology is the structure through which all processes of exchange and valuation are constituted.37 Thus the connection between money and language is not simply a useful tool of theoretical comparison (as it is in de Saussure’s work, for example) but a “real sociohistorical occurrence” (Goux 1990: 96). On the face of it, this is conventional narrative of dematerialization. Goux describes three stages (from gold, through paper, to the era of credit money) until money emerges as a “pure” token with no connection to an underlying material substance (Goux 1994). What makes Goux’s approach novel and intriguing, however, is its use of the categories of the real, imaginary, and symbolic (drawn from the work of the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan) to describe this sequence of stages: the real is the state of nature from which we have been severed because of our entry into language; the imaginary is the mirror stage, in which the child misrecognizes itself; and the symbolic is the order of language, through which the rules and dictates of society are given.

Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist
by Ray C. Anderson
Published 28 Mar 2011

Today the actual reduction in nylon for that plant’s products averages 17 percent, and the nega-energy generated each year (to the earth’s great benefit) will run that factory for more than two years, for in the meantime the factory has also reduced its energy usage. Strictly speaking, this is not waste control. This is a very careful redesign effort, and it has its own name: Dematerialization through Conscious Design. Incidentally, we do not count our suppliers’ nega-energy in our GHG reductions either. I began by saying that some folks still think there is no business case for sustainability. But it seems to me that there is no business case to be made for ignoring sustainability.

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Our Southern California operation is even reactivating an old abandoned siding, so they can use rail day in and day out. And since transportation costs and energy are both dependent on the weight of the goods being shipped, all efforts to reduce the weight of carpet tiles to save materials and energy, while maintaining—or improving—their performance, pay off in lower transportation costs, too. Dematerialization by conscious design works to reduce transportation impacts as well as upstream energy usage. Our principal designer, David Oakey, has spearheaded this effort. “I was a design consultant for a decade before coming to Interface,” said Oakey. “And while most designers concentrate on the look and feel of their creations, I was just as interested in combining the aesthetics with finding ways to make my clients more profitable.

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When that number is applied theoretically across the entire product line, it turns out that eliminating just 4 percent of the nylon used each year saves enough energy (not used by DuPont) to run the designer’s entire factory for half a year. I have seen that savings grow over the years, until that theoretical 4 percent reduction now stands at a real 17 percent, and it even has a name all its own: dematerialization through conscious design, a concept with far-reaching implications for a voracious industrial system. I’ve seen a multidisciplinary team of engineers, production people, and product designers collaborate to find a new way to produce patterned carpet. The old way was to print the pattern on a plain-colored carpet base.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
by Vaclav Smil
Published 2 Mar 2021

Turbofan engines powering the Boeing 787 in 2018 develop the same maximum thrust with 35% less material than those installed in Boeing 707 in 1958—and it is hard to think of a lighter material for the newest engine fan blades than carbon-fiber composite whose use has also allowed reducing the blade count from 22 to 18 (GE Aviation 2019)—but there can be no turbofan with just a single blade. The net outcome of this relative dematerialization has been an enormous increase in total demand for expensive, high-energy-intensity materials as the material gains were translated into rapidly increasing volume of travel. Planes are lighter, but pkms flown globally had increased about 40-fold between 1958 and 2018, multiply negating any relative dematerialization gains in constructing jetliners (mass/seat, mass/pkm). And this strong growth is expected to continue because air travel has not only been rising rapidly in all modernizing Asian countries but it has been also taking off in Africa: even in the poor sub-Saharan part of the continent the number of passengers had tripled since the year 2000 (World Bank 2019).

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As a scientist cognizant of energetic and material constraints on everything taking place on this planet I marvel at this disregard—and at the arguments that energy and the environment can be increasingly ignored, the notions expressed in currently fashionable talk about decoupling energy and economic growth and about dematerialization of future economies. The unfolding economic and environmental transition cannot succeed unless we recognize the central role of energy and materials and the importance of numerous environmental constraints in human well-being, and unless we come up with fundamentally different approaches to reconcile these imperatives with long-term economic development.

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And this strong growth is expected to continue because air travel has not only been rising rapidly in all modernizing Asian countries but it has been also taking off in Africa: even in the poor sub-Saharan part of the continent the number of passengers had tripled since the year 2000 (World Bank 2019). And this particular contrast between relative dematerialization and continued strong absolute growth of demand for high-quality materials is not an exception but just a specific illustration of a common reality. As already noted, this reality has brought large increases of aggregate and per capita material consumption on national and global scales, and reductions of relative material intensity will not be able to reduce the increased absolute demand for materials in modernizing countries of Africa and Asia, where most of the people will be born during the remainder of the 21st century and where they will hope to improve their quality of life, now comparable to levels achieved in affluent countries three to four generations ago!

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

It highlights the life debt borne by all members of a society towards the ‘social whole’. This can mean either an inherited debt, in societies without a state, or a citizenship debt, in societies that do have a state. The Increasing Dematerialisation of Monetary Supports When we consider money as a unitary phenomenon across history, we can see that its different forms have evolved over time, in a process of increasing dematerialisation. This has not, however, changed money’s deeper, underlying nature as a signifier of belonging to a social order or community. Traditional monies and what we might call ‘paeleomonies’, which were long supported by essential or ornamental goods, were first replaced by metal monies issued by sovereigns, and then by paper money.

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects
by Glenn Adamson
Published 6 Aug 2018

These still and moving images impart the children with (in the words of novelist Zadie Smith) “an experience of self-awareness literally unknown in the history of human existence—outside dream and miracle—until very recently. Until just before now.”6 Chapter 17 THE MYTH OF THE DUMB OBJECT When I lived in London, I had a downstairs neighbor who decided to scan every single book he owned. Then he gave his books away. I visited his apartment as he was nearing the end of this process of dematerialization. He proudly showed me his empty bookcases (which he was also going to get rid of) and told me I could take any title I wanted from the small and shrinking pile of volumes that were left, the last survivals of his once-large library. A newish iPad was propped up on his dining table, loaded with the entire contents of the hundreds of books that he had vaporized from his life.

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The potency of contemporary media, indeed, is precisely its detachment from physicality. This is what permits it speed and malleability. Contemporary relics may have risen in our awareness due to the singular events of 9/11, but more generally, they can be seen as a counterforce to this pervasive dematerialization. One way of understanding the relic is as a type of souvenir, a term discussed at length in a wonderful book called On Longing, by Susan Stewart, from 1984. Stewart writes about objects in relation to psychological narrative. She is fascinated by the “kind of ache” that arises when we care about something deeply, and wants to understand what happens in that moment of longing: a moment when, one might say, we are the opposite of distracted.

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See also specific types of adapting, here endangered, here hands on, being, here immediacy of, here introduction to, here local identity tied to, here luxury, here proficiency, here quality, assessing, here risk-certainty spectrum of, here, here as salvation, here variation in, here The Craftsman (Sennett), here creativity, here crowdsourcing, here cultural divides, crossing, here curators and curating, here, here curiosity, here, here The Daily Dish (blog), here Davidson, Arnold, here Declaration of Independence, here dematerialization, here, here design, craft in, here desire, here Detroit (MI), here Devlin, Es, here diamond jewelry, here, here diamonds cutting, here, here value of, here Diana, Princess, here Dickens, Charles, here digital devices, here digital world, here, here digitization, here, here, here Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Jackson), here doctors, women, here documents, physical, here dollhouses, here Dot Dot Dot, here Dumas, Alexandre, here Eames, Charles, here Eames, Ray, here electronics, recycling through repair, here Elk Drug Store, here empathy, here Empedocles, here encounter, moments of, here environment, material, here environmentalism, here.

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
by Vaclav Smil
Published 4 May 2021

Flat discs with a spiral groove, used on the gramophone, remained dominant for most of the 20th century, until new modes of sound recording came in quick succession. US sales of LPs peaked in 1978, compact cassettes did so a decade later, and then CDs—introduced in 1984—peaked in 1999. Those sales were cut in half just seven years later, and they are now surpassed by music downloads, including free wireless streaming. How would Edison have regarded these dematerialized methods for reproducing sound? Inventing integrated circuits In 1958, 11 years after Bell Labs reinvented the transistor, it became clear that semiconductors would be able to conquer the electronics market only if they could be greatly miniaturized. There wasn’t much progress to be made by hand-soldering separate components into circuits, but as is often the case, the solution came just when it was needed.

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Tires are quintessential products of the industrial age—heavy, bulky, polluting, still extremely difficult to dispose of—but even in our information era they are still needed in ever-higher numbers. Tire companies must meet the worldwide demand for nearly 100 million new road vehicles every year, and for replacements for the global fleet of more than 1.2 billion. Dunlop would be astounded by what he began. So much for the much-hyped dematerialization of our world that artificial intelligence is supposed to have started. When did the age of the car begin? In 1908, Henry Ford had been working in the auto business for more than a decade, and the Ford Motor Company, five years old and already profitable, had so far followed its peers by catering to the well-to-do.

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May 21, 2019. http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/. Concrete facts Courland, R. Concrete Planet: The Strange and Fascinating Story of the World’s Most Common Man-Made Material. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011. Smil, V. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2014. What’s worse for the environment—your car or your phone? Anders, S.G., and O. Andersen. “Life cycle assessments of consumer electronics—are they consistent?” International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 15 (July 2010): 827–36. Qiao, Q., et al.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
by Donella H. Meadows , Jørgen Randers and Dennis L. Meadows
Published 15 Apr 2004

Figure 3-17 shows the recent world production history of steel. Something happened in the mid-1970s to interrupt what had been smooth exponential growth trends. There are several theories to explain that reduction in growth rate. All of them appear partially correct. • The emerging trend toward "dematerialization" was driven by economic incentives and the technological possibility to do more with less. • The oil price shocks in 1973 and again in 1979 made the prices of energy-intensive metals rise sharply, strengthening the incentives to save on energy and materials in all applications. • The same higher prices, plus environmental laws and solid waste disposal problems, encouraged materials recycling

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But the data presented in chapter 3 show no indication of the whole global economy achieving such gains so quickly. If nothing else would prevent such rapid changes, the lifetime of capital plants-the time it takes to replace or retrofit the vehicle fleet, building stock, and installed machinery of the global economy-and the ability of existing capital to produce that much new capital so fast make this "dematerialization" scenario unbelievable to us. The difficulties of achieving this infinity scenario would be magnified in "real life" by the many political and bureaucratic constraints preventing the price system from signaling that the needed technologies can be profitable. We include this run here not because we think shows you a credible future of the "real world," but because we think it tells you something about World3 and something about modeling.

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To change the system so that it is sustainable and manageable, the same structural features have to be reversed: • Growth in population and capital must be slowed and eventually stopped by human decisions enacted in anticipation of future problems rather than by feedback from external limits that have already been exceeded. • Throughputs of energy and materials must be reduced by drastically increasing the efficiency of capital. In other words, the ecological footprint must be reduced through dematerialization (less use of energy and materials to obtain the same output), increased equity (redistribution from the rich to the poor of the benefits from using energy and materials), and lifestyle changes (lowering demands or shifting consumption towards goods and services that have fewer negative impacts on the physical environment)

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
by Jonathan Crary
Published 3 Jun 2013

Everywhere one encounters the complacent and preposterous assumption that these systemic patterns are “here to stay,” and that such levels of technological consumption are extendable to a planetary population of seven going on ten billion. Many who celebrate the transformative potential of communication networks are oblivious to the oppressive forms of human labor and environmental ravages on which their fantasies of virtuality and dematerialization depend. Even among the plural voices affirming that “another world is possible,” there is often the expedient misconception that economic justice, mitigation of climate change, and egalitarian social relations can somehow occur alongside the continued existence of corporations like Google, Apple, and General Electric.

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At present, however, the idea of a divergence between a human world and the operation of global systems with the capacity to occupy every waking hour of one’s life seems dated and inapt. Now there are numerous pressures for individuals to reimagine and refigure themselves as being of the same consistency and values as the dematerialized commodities and social connections in which they are immersed so extensively. Reification has proceeded to the point where the individual has to invent a self-understanding that optimizes or facilitates their participation in digital milieus and speeds. Paradoxically, this means impersonating the inert and the inanimate.

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
by Gabriel Zucman , Teresa Lavender Fagan and Thomas Piketty
Published 21 Sep 2015

But it is not. In fact, central depositories for global securities already exist. The problem is that these central depositories are not truly global (they are national or sometimes regional), and most important they are private, not public. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, securities were gradually dematerialized, and paper titles soon disappeared entirely. This is when modern central depositories were created, simply because there was a need to secure financial transactions and to keep track of who owns what in a computer database (it is difficult to do business if several financial institutions or economic agents in the world claim property rights over the same asset).

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In the United States, for example, it is the Depository Trust Company, founded in 1973, that nowadays keeps all the securities issued by American companies in its safes (the Federal Bank of New York does the same for government bonds). Each bank has an account with the DTC; when one of their clients sells a security, their account is debited and that of the bank of the buyer is credited. Pieces of paper are no longer circulated. Once immobilized in the 1960s, securities quickly were dematerialized: the paper disappeared entirely, and the DTC simply records on its computers the data of who holds what. Every country does the same and has its own central depository. But this system has a defect. Since the 1960s American companies have had the habit of issuing bonds in marks or in pounds sterling, directly outside the US territory, on the German or English markets.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Jan 1997

It fell to Frank Lloyd Wright to realize Thoreau’s dream of a centrifugal house without forsaking the satisfactions of shelter that Bachelard describes. Wright designed houses with strong, compelling centers (“It comforted me,” he said in accounting for his love of massive central hearths, “to see the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house itself”) that nevertheless unfolded outward, pushing into the surrounding landscape and dematerializing their walls—metaphorically scraping off Thoreau’s regretted plaster in order to admit nature once again, though on our own terms now. Outdoor nature for Bachelard is something the archetypal house girds against, or offers refuge from. For Thoreau and Wright and generations of American house builders, the land is what the house wants to embrace.

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Turning to the picture of the Caribbean porch with the thatched roof and nonexistent walls, he talked about the sharp juxtaposition of the low, sheltering roof line and the wide open spaces underneath it. “Isn’t this fantastic? It reminds me of putting the top down on a convertible, that explosion of light and space you get the moment the roof flies up, only here it’s the walls that vanish. Makes me think of Frank Lloyd Wright, too, the way his strong roofs meet those light, dematerialized walls so that the space seems to race outward, right through them. We could do something like that.” I realized that the reason vernacular shacks and barns could cohabit so happily in Charlie’s booklet with examples of sophisticated architecture is that, for him, when they work, both draw on the same elemental feelings about space.

…

The primitive hut had said that the forms and meaning of architecture were derived from nature; House VI was a virtuoso display of architecture as the pure product of culture—of whatever sign system the architect chose to deploy. The primitive hut said that architectural structure was an expression of its materials and how it was made; both the structure and materials of House VI were perfectly silent; there’s no way to tell that there’s a conventional balloon frame under the building’s “dematerialized” surface, a surface that at various times has been clad in stucco and acrylic. The purpose of the primitive hut was to shelter us, to minister to our needs; House VI seeks to destabilize the notion of shelter, to shake us out of our needs. In fact these two contending dreams of architecture were equally unreal; this much now seemed clear.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

It arrived with electronic communications – when even paper became too substantial and too slow for society, and the invention of the telegraph spurred the innovation of electronic money – and it still dominates the way that the man in the street thinks about money. It is the prevailing paradigm, but it is not the truth (a paradigm is a model, remember, not reality). The present, therefore, is about money as information about physical things (paper that represents gold), or, to put it another way, bits about atoms. The future: Money 3.0 The steps to dematerialize money for consumers – those major post-war innovations of payment cards and money market accounts – began to separate payments and banking, just as money separated from value starting with the end of the gold standard in the 1930s and finishing in 1971 when Nixon ended the US dollar’s convertibility.

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These processes will be completed soon and the final step will come with the transition to the mobile phone as the basic platform for financial services, for the simple reason that mobile phones can accept payments as well as make them, thus ending the need for cash to pay individuals. What kinds of innovation will this invention trigger? When money is completely dematerialized, the cost of introducing new currencies will fall to zero: who will stick with sterling when Facebook credits, electronic gold and the Brixton Pound are only a click away? Thus, I claim that the future began back in 1971, when money became a claim backed by reputation rather than by commodities of any kind.

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— Patrick Stewart (as Captain Jean-Luc Picard) in Star Trek: First Contact (1996) The future of money started back in 1971, and the mental model of money that we have now is out of date. We are in a world of fiat currencies and those fiat currencies are ‘pure manifestations of sovereignty conjured by governments’ (Steil 2007b) – or, as I said in the introduction, they are just bits. But there’s more going on than this dematerialization. We no longer need governments to create money, we no longer need banks to move money, and we no longer need cash to make money real. We think we do, but that’s because our mental model is rooted in that present version of money. As former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King has written, both money and banking are particular historical institutions that developed before modern capitalism and owe a great deal to the technology of an earlier age (King 2016b, my italics).

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 15 Jan 2012

“This didn’t just slow down the play,” remembered slot machine pioneer Warren Nelson in 1994, “it kind of suggested a closure, an end to the game … it tempted the customer to cease the play and walk out the door with his winnings.”15 Since hoppers could dispense up to two hundred coins into the machine’s payout tray, they increased “the probability that those coins would be played back into the machine” and at the same time ensured that gamblers could gather the wagering momentum critical to the flow of their play experience. The introduction of bill acceptors to gambling machines further sped up play, allowing players to insert bills of large denomination and draw from credits displayed on a digital meter rather than stop to feed coins in one at a time (see fig. 2.1). Dematerializing money into an immediately available credit form not only disguised its actual cash value and thus encouraged wagering, it also mitigated the revenue-compromising limitations of human motor capacities by removing unwieldy coins from the gambling exchange. “Some players don’t have very good motor skills,” observed a representative from one game design company.16 “If you have a machine that takes five or six nickels, that’s time a player is spending to put in the coins and make sure they register,” a casino marketer concurred.

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When it comes to the contrivance of randomness in games, Malaby notes, there has been a turn from “explicit” means such as dice rolling or deck shuffling to the “implicit” means of computer programming.13 This is certainly the case for gambling machines, whose mechanical components have been superseded by a digital infrastructure. “The commodity of the bet, already ephemeral, is further dematerialized with the move to computerization,” writes the sociologist Richard Woolley.14 Tracing the move from mechanical to digital reveals how the asymmetric relationship between industry and gambler plays out at the miniature scale of the microchip and its programming. MECHANICAL TO DIGITAL: ENGINEERING THE “REALLY NEW GOD” Contemporary gambling machines are close relatives of the coin-operated vending and amusement devices that appeared during the American Industrial Revolution in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, doling out food, gasoline, candy, and occasionally less material goods—magic tricks, fortunes, love tests, or advice.15 Gambling machines distinguished themselves from their coin-operated kin by making money itself the object of reward and by adding an element of chance to the transaction: consumers could not be certain ahead of time how much, if anything, the machine might return.

…

Although bill acceptors and tokenization systems helped to ease penny play, something more was needed to cope with emerging game designs involving as many as five hundred pennies a spin. To derive value from the penny, the gambling industry had to find a way to make the penny itself disappear. In 2000, ticket-in, ticket-out technology (TITO) such as IGT’s E-Z Play inadvertently facilitated the dematerialization of the penny by rendering the insertion of coins (and bills) obsolete. Although players did not immediately embrace TITO, they warmed to the technology as they learned that it could facilitate play on the low-denomination multiline games with which they were then becoming familiar. This gave Aristocrat—which just that year had earned its license to enter the Nevada market—a strong a new foothold in the US market.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 19 Aug 2012

“This didn’t just slow down the play,” remembered slot machine pioneer Warren Nelson in 1994, “it kind of suggested a closure, an end to the game … it tempted the customer to cease the play and walk out the door with his winnings.”15 Since hoppers could dispense up to two hundred coins into the machine’s payout tray, they increased “the probability that those coins would be played back into the machine” and at the same time ensured that gamblers could gather the wagering momentum critical to the flow of their play experience. The introduction of bill acceptors to gambling machines further sped up play, allowing players to insert bills of large denomination and draw from credits displayed on a digital meter rather than stop to feed coins in one at a time (see fig. 2.1). Dematerializing money into an immediately available credit form not only disguised its actual cash value and thus encouraged wagering, it also mitigated the revenue-compromising limitations of human motor capacities by removing unwieldy coins from the gambling exchange. “Some players don’t have very good motor skills,” observed a representative from one game design company.16 “If you have a machine that takes five or six nickels, that’s time a player is spending to put in the coins and make sure they register,” a casino marketer concurred.

…

When it comes to the contrivance of randomness in games, Malaby notes, there has been a turn from “explicit” means such as dice rolling or deck shuffling to the “implicit” means of computer programming.13 This is certainly the case for gambling machines, whose mechanical components have been superseded by a digital infrastructure. “The commodity of the bet, already ephemeral, is further dematerialized with the move to computerization,” writes the sociologist Richard Woolley.14 Tracing the move from mechanical to digital reveals how the asymmetric relationship between industry and gambler plays out at the miniature scale of the microchip and its programming. MECHANICAL TO DIGITAL: ENGINEERING THE “REALLY NEW GOD” Contemporary gambling machines are close relatives of the coin-operated vending and amusement devices that appeared during the American Industrial Revolution in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, doling out food, gasoline, candy, and occasionally less material goods—magic tricks, fortunes, love tests, or advice.15 Gambling machines distinguished themselves from their coin-operated kin by making money itself the object of reward and by adding an element of chance to the transaction: consumers could not be certain ahead of time how much, if anything, the machine might return.

…

Although bill acceptors and tokenization systems helped to ease penny play, something more was needed to cope with emerging game designs involving as many as five hundred pennies a spin. To derive value from the penny, the gambling industry had to find a way to make the penny itself disappear. In 2000, ticket-in, ticket-out technology (TITO) such as IGT’s E-Z Play inadvertently facilitated the dematerialization of the penny by rendering the insertion of coins (and bills) obsolete. Although players did not immediately embrace TITO, they warmed to the technology as they learned that it could facilitate play on the low-denomination multiline games with which they were then becoming familiar. This gave Aristocrat—which just that year had earned its license to enter the Nevada market—a strong a new foothold in the US market.

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them
by Mushtak Al-Atabi
Published 26 Aug 2014

Understanding this trend can be a useful and straightforward technique to Conceive new products, if you already have a product that is made of a conventional material, ask yourself, can I make it out of an adaptive material? This technique can be used to Conceive products that vary from smart furniture that will adapt to the shape of human body and its temperature to airplane wings that can change with different flying conditions. Memory Foam, an Example of a Smart Material (Source: Wiki Commons) 4.2.5.2 Dematerialisation: From Atoms to Bits Many of the products that used to be physical in nature now have an electronic version or have moved into the electronic realm all together. These include books, music, tickets and receipts. A number of services have moved into the virtual space, these include bookstores and other retail outlets.

Thinking in Numbers
by Daniel Tammet
Published 15 Aug 2012

The timing seemed doubly auspicious: October 2011 happened to be the two-hundredth anniversary of Galois’s birth. The museum stands in the fourteenth arrondissement at the lower end of one of the long boulevards that diagram the city. It is an ostentatiously modern building, all shiny glass and geometric steel, bright and spacious, an example of ‘dematerialised’ architecture. Reflected in the glass, scraggly trees denuded of their summer foliage appeared twice. I looked up at the symmetrical branches as I passed and entered. Mathematics and contemporary art may seem to make an odd pair. Many people think of mathematics as something akin to pure logic, cold reckoning, soulless computation.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans
by Mark Lynas
Published 3 Oct 2011

Another piece of good news is that as economies grow they tend to become less resource-intensive per unit of output. In other words, we are constantly getting relatively more efficient in our use of the world’s resources even as the overall level of human consumption grows. This trend toward dematerialization is positive for several planetary boundaries. In the area of nitrogen, for example, Chinese food production rose by nearly 200 percent between 1981 and 2007, for only a 50 percent increase in fertilizer.10 Another study, looking at the same multi-decadal period, found that a 45 percent more affluent world used only 22 percent more crops and 13 percent more energy.11 Of course, in both these cases, absolute resource use went up even as relative use went down—because of economic growth.

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Some basic resources are even being used at lower absolute levels as humanity gets more affluent: Between 1980 and 2006, for instance, a richer world actually used 20 percent less wood. Looking further out into the future, it is perhaps possible to envisage a world economy that enjoys constant growth even as its use of materials is static or even declining, thanks to dematerialization. Technology will help: In consuming music electronically via downloads rather than plastic CDs, we use less oil. E-books and online information dissemination will hopefully eventually reduce paper consumption too. At a conceptual level, what we must surely aim for is a closed-loop economy, where rates of recycling come as close to 100 percent as practically possible, and what is not recycled can be regenerated naturally within the biosphere.

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Energy Information Administration, via http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=90&pid=44&aid=8&cid=regions,&syid=2005&eyid=2009&unit=MMTCD. 10. J. Guo et al., 2010: “Significant Acidification in Major Chinese Croplands,” Science, 327, 5968, 1008–10. 11. J. Ausubel and P. Waggoner, 2008: “Dematerialization: Variety, Caution, and Persistence,” PNAS, 105, 35, 12774–9. 12. Bloomberg, 2010: “China Beats U.S. on Renewable-Energy Investor Ranking,” September 8, 2010. 13. Global Wind Energy Council, 2011: “Global Wind Capacity Increases by 22% in 2010—Asia Leads Growth,” February 2, 2011. INDEX aerosols boundary; sky color and; Asian Brown Cloud; human suffering from air pollution; hydrological cycle and; black carbon; sulfur emissions; solar radiation management Africa: hominids in; endangered animals in; poverty in solar power in shortage of fertilizer; genetic engineering in; safe drinking water in; climate change in; monsoon in growth of economy in agriculture: invention of; threatens rain forest; nitrogen boundary and; organic; Green Revolution; genetic engineering; no-till; intensification of; land use; high-yield; irrigation; water use; pesticides; see also under individual pesticide name agroforestry air travel/aviation Allen, Myles Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area Amazon rain forest Amazon River ammonia production Amu Darya An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming (Lawson) Andes Andreae, Meinrat Antarctic Anthropocene aquaculture aragonite Aral Sea Archer, David Arctic: plastic waste in; habitat destruction in thaw of; tundra; toxics accumulate in; ocean acidification and Argentina Argonne National Laboratory Asia: tsunami, 2004; Homo neanderthalensis; animal extinction and; poverty in wind power in; nitrate pollution in; genetically engineered crops in; protected areas in; urbanization; storm surges in; aerosol pollution in Asian Brown Cloud Aswan Dam Atlantic Ocean: global warming destabilizes circulation of Atlantic Wind Connection Atomic Energy Agency atrazine Australia: extinction in; climate change in; solar power potential; virtual water Great Barrier Reef Australoptihecus Austria Baker, Robert Baltic Sea “Bank of Natural Capital” BASF Berlins, Marcel Better Place “BioBanking” scheme, Malua “Biodiversity Conservation Certificates” biodiversity loss; boundary; accounting systems for; “biodiversity credits” extinction and; Pleistocene overkill; eliminating alien species from islands; and the Earth system; keystone predators; habitat loss; “paper parks”; valuing of natural systems; global “tipping point”; planetary boundary on; offsets; protection measures; biodiversity “hot spots” biofuels biomass BioScience biosphere: monetary value of black carbon Borneo Bosch, Carl Boyles, Justin BP brain: evolution of Brand, Stewart Brazil British Airways Broecker, Wally Brown, Gordon Bush, George W.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

Linking billions of data-gathering and processing nodes to a global, ubiquitous networked computer architecture will have a profound impact on how we interact with our world. It means that our material existence, both within the worlds of natural resources and of human-made manufactured objects, will be far more comprehensively measured, analyzed, and explained, creating an omnipresent, dematerialized understanding of that existence. New, interconnected computing and sensor systems will soon give us a far deeper understanding of how that material world functions—how fast, hot, or cold our devices are; how accurately, efficiently, or reliably they are running; or how long a particular resource, be it a store of electricity, a water source, or a supply of oxygen, will last.

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A complex array of regulations, maritime law, and commercial codes governs rights of ownership and possession along the world’s shipping routes and their multiple jurisdictions. It will be difficult to marry that old-world body of law, and the human-led institutions that manage it, with the digital, dematerialized, automated, and de-nationalized nature of blockchains and smart contracts. What standards will port officials use to confirm that an importer has taken ownership of goods delivered by a shipper when a blockchain’s notion of ownership depends not on possession of physical things but on control over a private cryptographic key associated with a digital record of those goods?

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See decentralized applications (Dapps) Dash data analytics data-stores de Soto, Hernando Debevoise Plimpton decentralization Bitcoin blockchain technology computing data storage energy sector financial sector governance identity innovation Internet and Web Internet of Things ledger-keeping media and content ride-sharing and token economy trust decentralized applications (Dapps) decentralized autonomous organizations. See also DAO, The (The Decentralized Autonomous Organization) delegated proof-of-stake dematerialization Democratic National Committee Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. (DTCC) Devcon device identity model Digital Asset Holdings digital assets Digital Chamber of Commerce Digital Currency Initiative (MIT) digital rights management (DRM) distributed denial of service (DDOS) distributed ledger technology distributed trust systems and protocol domain name system (DNS) dot-com bubble double-entry bookkeeping.

The Unusual Billionaires
by Saurabh Mukherjea
Published 16 Aug 2016

This proved to be a master stroke as the bank’s management sensed that real-time online banking was the future. Microbanker subsequently allowed HDFC Bank to garner large quantities of low-cost deposits by providing payment solutions to capital market players. Stocks were traded in physical form before dematerialization started in the early 1990s, a trend that gathered steam by 1995–96. These dematerialized shares were transferred electronically after trade, but the movement of fund transfers was still slow and in physical form. This did not match the speed of movement in stocks as different exchanges used different banks. For example, if a broker in Delhi sold some stock for a customer, the customer would transfer the sold stock from her/his retail Depository Participant (DP) account to the broker immediately and the broker would electronically transfer the shares to the buyer.

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Paresh Sukhtankar, deputy managing director of HDFC Bank, told me that in the late 1990s, when the business of share settlement was dominated by banks like Bank of India and Canara Bank, Puri and his team thought of an idea to pull away market share from the market leaders. In those days, though the stock settlement was electronic (thanks to dematerialization), the payment cycle was still manual. In 1997, Puri successfully pitched to the exchanges and their members the idea of converting this manual payment process into a real-time electronic processing system. HDFC Bank then targeted the entire supply chain of players in the stock market—investors, brokers, exchanges and custodians—with a highly successful pitch which highlighted that HDFC Bank’s automated settlement would not only reduce the quantum of work associated with manual payment but also reduce the operational and financial risk that various players in the supply chain were facing.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson
Published 14 Jul 2020

The very, very, very shorthand version of it was this: “We don’t have to worry we’re going to run out, because these smart kids at MIT are starting to figure it all out!” So everyone in tech circles could go back to selling ads and printing money and throwing Social Purpose Parties. Wow, that was easy. The less shorthand version of it was that we were “dematerializing” our economy. We were still growing rapidly yet using less molecular matter to do it. By making products that lasted longer, such as cars that stayed on the road fifty thousand more miles, we needed new molecules less frequently. By ordering online from warehouses, we were getting rid of physical storefronts, using less molecular matter.

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In the words of MIT’s Andrew McAfee, “For the first time in human history, we have decoupled output growth from resource consumption.” It’s an absolutely wonderful premise, and it makes people warm in their bellies with good feelings to hear about it. Hug-your-neighbor time. There’s only one little problem with the dematerialization fairy tale. It’s not really true. Inertia is not giving up that easily. New car sales are steady, and those cars are a third more heavy than they were in the ’80s. New boat sales are through the roof. Refrigerators are bigger than ever. Wealth remains the most predictive indicator of resource use.

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Today, with far more sophisticated machines, China is now growing fabulously wealthy by perfecting the process. Factory automation will continue to power this wealth creation for some time. But we still can’t help but wonder—what will be the industrial revolution that follows? We’re not going to dematerialize the world, we’re going to rematerialize it. 11 What’s Your Purpose? Finding a Sense of Meaning in Life Is Linked to Health NPR Epidemiology doesn’t get much love these days. Epidemiologists study people’s health over the long term and try to sort out why they’re falling ill. But in an era of CRISPR babies, longevity drugs, and bioprinting replaceable organs, epidemiology isn’t exciting.

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

He quotes Emile-Auguste Chartier (“Alain”): “My pen is always trying to go through the paper; my writing is like wood sculpture.”12 Yet Heim sees word processing as a profound rupture with this history of material resistance, this push and pull between aching bodies and blank surfaces, instruments, and inscriptions. Others followed him in this regard. For example, Mark Poster influentially yoked electronic writing and electronic media to poststructuralist theory, and spoke in explicitly Derridean terms about computers “dematerializing” the “trace” of writing; he celebrated the “evanescent, instantly transformable” texts thus created.13 Hannah Sullivan, a superb scholar who studies habits of revision in modernist authors like Joyce and Woolf, also accepts this emancipatory logic, noting that “nowadays the cost of revision has fallen almost to zero.”

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“After all this processing of words has taken place, the word processing computer will print out as many copies as you like, letter perfect.”17 We see here the collapse of the superficial appearance of the document with its more ineffable qualities as McWilliams moves us, in the space of a page, from the deepest recesses of Keats’s fertile mind to the veneer of a hard-copy printout. The ideal of perfection thus becomes closely tied to the supposed dematerialization of the written act: a perfect document is one that bears no visible trace of its prior history; indeed, it is as though the document did not have a history, but rather emerged, fully formed in its first and final iteration, from the mind of the author. Transferring this concept to the AMA’s milieu, every business executive signing his name to letter-perfect copy after however many prior drafts produced by the unseen hands of a secretary at her keyboard became a Keats incarnate, the most mundane communications unsullied by any trace of error, happenstance, or hesitancy of thought.18 In literary circles the pretense of perfection was just as often grounds for suspicion and anxiety.

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“The faster I can write, the more likely I’ll get something worth saving down on paper. From the very beginning, I’ve grabbed onto any technology that would allow me to write faster—a soft pencil instead of a hard pencil, ballpoint instead of a fountain pen, electric typewriter instead of manual.”65 Implicit also in Banks’s remarks is a drive toward the dematerialization of inscription, a notion we have already traced back to Michael Heim’s very early observations about word processing. Over and over again, writers reflected upon the speed of word processing: “I worked from a very early age on a typewriter which I was given—a little portable—so I was in one sense prepared for the computer because I never wrote by hand.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

So while biological systems are much more complex than any digital equivalent, exponential trends in the latter will enhance our mastery over the former – something which will increasingly resemble an information good. This will transform our relationships to health and lifespan, not to mention food, nature and how we treat our fellow creatures. That doesn’t mean we will come to consider any of these to be ‘dematerialised’; rather, we will finally grasp the underlying informational rhythms to overcome nearly all forms of disease and feed a world of 10 billion people while using less, rather than more, of our planet’s bio-capacity. Exponential Travel: Understanding the Third Disruption Given the period between the First and Second Disruptions was some twelve thousand years, it might seem remarkable that the Third comes so soon after Watt’s steam engine and the emergence of market capitalism.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

The Port Huron Statement argued that American corporations were not democratically accountable: “It is not possible to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly controls enormous wealth and power.” A new reordering was necessary: “We must consider changes in the rules of society by challenging the unchallenged politics of American corporations.”58 Hayden pointed progressives to capitalism’s weakest point. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter argued that dematerialized, defunctionalized absentee ownership does not summon the moral allegiance that private property once did. Corporations—the bourgeois fortress—become politically defenseless. “Defenseless fortresses invite aggression especially if there is rich booty in them. Aggressors will work themselves up into a state of rationalizing hostility—aggressors always do.”59 As the political scientist Jarol Manheim writes in Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite, for progressives, corporations are the perfect enemy.60 Mills died in March 1962, and the SDS produced the Port Huron in June of that year—three months before publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

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For all its many environmental and social shortcomings, the old economic regime emphasized growth and upward mobility. In contrast the new economic order focuses more on the notion of “sustainability”—so reflective of the feudal worldview—over rapid economic expansion.5 In California, it is being replaced by a new, deeply stratified social order. As Kotkin puts it, the oligarchs of a dematerialized economy who made billions out of information technology (IT), finance, and entertainment have shaped a new kind of postindustrial economy. Its lighter environmental footprint becomes a license to deny those less well adapted or unfortunate a share in its riches and its lifestyle. Antipollution regulation accelerated California’s deindustrialization.

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For all that, tech’s imprint on the American economy is difficult to discern from macroeconomic data: There is no positive correlation between rising internet usage and productivity growth. On the other hand, tech has generated stupendous wealth for the barons who run companies that aggressively exploit the dematerialized nature of much of their output to minimize their corporate tax bills. In 2015, two of the Tech Four were found to have operated an illegal antipoaching ring designed to suppress employee wages. Along with Adobe and Intel, Google and Apple were ordered to pay $415 million to settle a class-action suit.

The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death
by John Gray
Published 11 Apr 2011

In the cross-correspondences the aim was even larger. The dead were given the task of saving the living; the posthumously designed messiah would save humanity from itself. The world might be sliding into anarchy, but progress continued on the Other Side. In Russia there was no Other Side. An entire civilization had dematerialized, and the after-world had disappeared along with it. Weakened by the Great War in Britain, belief in gradual progress was destroyed in Russia. The step-by-step improvement beloved of liberals was simply not possible any more. But the idea of progress was not abandoned. It was radicalized, and Russia’s new rulers were strengthened in their conviction that humankind advances through catastrophes.

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The result was the largest destruction of material goods in modern times (aside from that wreaked during Mao’s Great Famine (1958–62)), possibly in all of history. The devastation of the land by agricultural collectivization exceeded anything experienced in the Civil War, while Soviet industrialization wasted natural resources on a colossal scale. Materialism in practice meant the dematerialization of the physical world. An integral part of this process was the destruction of human life. The Bolsheviks began a type of mass killing not seen before in Russia. The loss of life between 1917 and the Nazi invasion of 1941 cannot be measured precisely. Estimates vary, with figures ranging from a conservative 20 million to upwards of 60 million.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley
Published 27 Dec 2008

For example, when I download an audiobook from Audible.com, the additional (or marginal) cost to Audible or the publisher is close to nil as compared to a physical copy of a book, which costs additional paper, binding, printing, and shipping. Classic economic theory tells us that price should equal marginal cost in a competitive market. Of course, there has never been a pure market as described in Econ 101; but only in this totally dematerialized product setting do we approach a situation where the marginal cost of selling one more of something truly approaches zero. The price-value ratio, then, seems elusive. But, at least on the retail side, we can assess how much we enjoyed the product and how much use we got out of it. However, the situation is even worse for big corporate transactions.

…

It is through this magical endowment of material objects with the powers of relative position that we think we have solved the problems inherent in mass consumption of positional goods—if only fleetingly Never mind the credit card bill that is to come: For now, the magical object has done its job, and we are satisfied (if not quite happy, since the actuality of the thing may be disappointing compared to the idea of owning it in the abstract). So, when people talk about the dematerialization of the economy, what they should be really calling it is a de-necessitation of the economy, as in a deemphasis on basic, physical necessities; or, alternatively, a luxurification or positionification.1∗ This view of the role of goods and services in the new economy stands in sharp contrast to that offered by folks like Chris Anderson, for example, in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Busi- ness Is Selling Less of More.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

In a scripted interview, Sophia announced in that stilted, metallic robot voice we’ve known for ever: ‘I want to14 live and work with humans. So I need to express emotions to understand humans and build trust with people […] I strive to become an empathetic robot.’ Both humans and humanoid machines are currently embroiled in new questions of expressiveness, precisely at the moment when we are dematerialising into their networked world and they are trundling into ours. ‘What they really want is the ability to express empathy,’ Zuckerberg said during a corporate event, speaking not of robots, but of his billion Facebook users and their desire to do more than ‘Like’. I’m not of the strangely austere school that objects to people garlanding their text with emojis.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

This single platform swallowed most all the other things people once had floating around in their pockets and purses, and in so doing it became something else entirely. Once each of the unremarkable acts we undertake in the course of the day—opening the front door, buying the groceries, hopping onto the bus—has been reconceived as a digital transaction, it tends to dematerialize. The separate, dedicated chunks of matter we needed to use in order to accomplish these ends, the house keys and banknotes and bus tokens, are replaced by an invisible modulation of radio waves. And as the infrastructure that receives those waves and translates them into action is built into the ordinary objects and surfaces all around us, the entire interaction tends to disappear from sight, and consequently from thought.

…

We ourselves are no different: some of us prefer the certainty of transacting with the world via discrete, dedicated objects, just as some still prefer to deal with a human teller at the bank. But as the smartphone has come to stand between us and an ever-greater swath of the things we do in everyday life, the global trend toward dematerialization is unmistakable. As a result, it’s already difficult to contemplate objects like a phone booth, a Filofax or a Palm Pilot without experiencing a shock of either reminiscence or perplexity, depending on the degree of our past acquaintance with them. However clumsy they may seem to us now, what’s important about such mediating artifacts is that each one implied an entire way of life—a densely interconnected ecosystem of commerce, practice and experience.

…

See circular economy The Craftsman (Sennett), 111 Creative Commons, 102–3 CRISPR technique, 298 Crossmatch, startup, 198 Crown Heights, Brooklyn neighborhood, 136 cryptocurrency, 8, 115–44, 145, 148–9, 153, 156, 164–5, 177–8, 248, 273, 279, 290, 293, 318 cryptofinance, 180 cryptography, 116, 118–19, 121–3, 129, 146–7, 176, 178–9 “Custom Notifications,” Chicago Police Department program, 235 cybernetic socialism, 191 DAO, The, distributed autonomous organization, 161–81 data subject, 251 Davao City, Philippines, 31, 43, 46 Day, Jeffrey, 63 distributed denial-of-service attacks, 45 “The Dead” (Joyce), 261 Deep Blue, 263–5 Deep Dream. See Google Deep Lab, 314 deep learning. See machine learning DeepMind. See Google de Certeau, Michel, 311 Deleuze, Gilles, 148, 211 dematerialization, 11 Demnig, Gunter, 72 de Monchaux, Nicholas, 101 Demos, 246 Deutsche Bank, 278–9 The Dialectic of Sex (Firestone), 191 El Diario (newspaper), 109 Dick, Philip K., 83, 244 digital fabrication, 85–114 digital rights management software, DRM, 292, 295 DiscusFish/F2 Pool mining pools, 139 distributed applications, 115, 147, 149, 163 distributed autonomous organizations, 161–81, 288, 302 distributed consensus, 126 distributed ledgers, 117, 137, 160, 293 Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), generically, 158 Dodge Charger, 216–17, 221 döner, 71 “Double Bubble Trouble” (M.I.A.), 295 drones, 103, 188, 220, 277–8, 283, 295 DropCam, 281 Dubner, Stephen J., 237 dugnad, 170 Dunning-Kruger syndrome, 260 Dutch East India Company, the, 165 Easterbrook, Steve, 195 Edo, 69 Elemental Technologies, 281 Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre, 110 Eisenman, Peter, 70 Embassy of the United States, Beijing, 51 Eno, Brian, 238 Equal Credit Opportunity Rights, 248 Ethereum/Ether, 148–50, 152–4, 162–3, 168, 175–7, 179 Ethical Filament Foundation, 99 Ethiopia, 194 euro (currency), 100, 131, 136 “eventual consistency,” 134 Existenzminimum, 103 Expedia, 134 EZPass, 59 fablabs, 95, 100, 109–10 faceblindness, 67–8 Facebook, 69, 220–1, 227, 229, 232, 252, 275–9, 281, 284 Aquila autonomous aircraft, 278 Free Basics, 278 Instagram, 278 opacity of Trending News algorithm, 212, 252–3 Fadell, Tony, 276 false positive, truth value, 217, 235, 249 Family Assistance Plan, FAP, 204 Fan Hui, 268 feature engineering, 218 Federal Trade Commission, 248 FedEx, 278 Filabot, 98 Fillod, Odile, 107 Financial Times (newspaper), 177 FindFace software, 240–2 Firestone, Shulamith, 191 Fitbit Charge wearable device, 197 Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (Brown), 103 Flaxman, Seth, 250–1 foamed aluminum, 95 Ford Mustang, 216–17 Forrester, Jay, 56 Fortune Magazine, 257 Foucault, Michel, 35, 70, 160 Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner), 237 Frey, Carl Benedikt, 194 Fully Automated Luxury Communism, 90, 111, 190, 289 gallium arsenide, 47 Galloway, Anne, 82 gambiarra, 291 Garrett, Matthew, 43 General Data Protection Regulation, 249 General Public License, 103 Genesis Block, 125, 139 genetic algorithms, 239, 253 gender of pedestrians, as determined by algorithm, 239 as performance, 239–40 of virtual assistants, 39 geofencing, 27 Gershenfeld, Neil, 95 Ghost Gunner, 108 Giger, H.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

But bloggers were fired, and soon a sense that one must act with decorum online crept in. As blogs took shape, Craigslist, a platform that traded in face-to-face meeting—prospective roommates, bikes for sale—maintained a text-based, simple interface with blue and purple default links. Like blogs, it chipped away at the news business, but as a direct hit, it dematerialized newspaper classifieds, rendering a business model for newspapers obsolete. It looks the same now as it did when it launched in 1995, and in the early aughts, the anonymous bile (and occasional “rave”) found in “Rants and Raves,” and the array of “Missed Connections,” creepy or poignant, seemed like a throwback to the nineties web.

…

A picture with the right filter—fractured yellow, the illusion of a sepia bath—could look like it was taken decades ago, at a time when paper photographs showed their age. Music videos and fashion photographers often artificially aged images for a similar nostalgic effect, but here was the technique available for anyone to tinker with at leisure. It was eerie and exciting; the app wordlessly embodied all the confusion in a moment of rapid dematerialization: record stores were closing and e-books were selling, and both trends seemed inevitable. Instagram, as faux old parlor game, was antithetical to the atemporality of digital images, in which everything years ago, or years in the future, is the same file format, made of the same pixels, and absent the grain and markings of a physical image.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

In the early 1990s, as in the late 1960s, that turn away from the material world helped legitimate the authority of those who controlled information and information systems by rendering invisible those who did not. Networking the New Economy [ 205 ] At the same time, the turn toward imagining the world in terms of dematerialized networks of information helped assuage the increasing sense of helplessness among executives themselves. On the one hand, like scientists at the Rad Lab a half century earlier, executives could call on the rhetoric of cybernetics to justify the pursuit of their professional goals. Like the cold warriors who had long ago scanned their computer screens for signs of incoming bombers, they could imagine the world as an information system and themselves as monitors of that system.

…

Consequently some of the more aware sculptors no longer think like sculptors, but they assume a span of problems more natural to architects, urban planners, civil engineers, electronic technicians, and cultural anthropologists” (34). See also Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture; and Chandler and Lippard, “Dematerialization of Art.” For later assessments of this shift, see Woodward, “Art and Technics”; and Burnham, “Art and Technology.” For a fascinating evaluation of 1960s art and its relationship to shifts in communication technology, as well as an incisive reading of Jack Burnham’s criticism, see Lee, Chronophobia.

…

A History of Modern Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998; 2nd ed., 2003. Chandler, Alfred Dupont, and James W. Cortada. A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Chandler, John, and Lucy Lippard. “The Dematerialization of Art.” Art International, February 20, 1968. Cheal, David J. The Gift Economy. London: Routledge, 1988. Coate, John. “Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community.” January 1998 (rev. 1992, 1993, and 1998). http://www.sfgate.com/tex/innkeeping (accessed February 15, 2001; site now discontinued).

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

In transport, this will mean almost complete electrification of vehicles, and/or the widespread use of hydrogen fuel cells, both based on clean energy sources. To accommodate much higher energy demand, the efficiency of energy consumption in all its uses will have to increase dramatically. This will mean major shifts in patterns of production, distribution and consumption, using digital and information technologies to manage energy demand and ‘dematerialise’ economic output. The design and functioning of buildings and transport systems, and the patterns of towns and cities as a whole, will have to change very significantly. To reduce the demand for energy to extract and transport physical resources, in agriculture and in the manufacture and transport of industrial and consumer products, major changes will be needed in almost all sectors.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions
by David Robson
Published 7 Mar 2019

It was the start of an increasingly public dispute between the two men, and their friendship never recovered before the escapologist’s death four years later.2 Even then, Conan Doyle could not let the matter rest. Egged on, perhaps, by his ‘spirit guide’ Phineas, he attempted to address and dismiss all of Houdini’s doubts in an article for The Strand magazine. His reasoning was more fanciful than any of his fictional works, not least in claiming that Houdini himself was in command of a ‘dematerialising and reconstructing force’ that allowed him to slip in and out of chains. ‘Is it possible for a man to be a very powerful medium all his life, to use that power continually, and yet never to realise that the gifts he is using are those which the world calls mediumship?’ he wrote. ‘If that be indeed possible, then we have a solution of the Houdini enigma.’

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

Houdini was one of the most famous people on Earth during the first quarter of the century, his shows a seamless intermingling of true and false—one day he escaped from manacles by sheer tenacity, the next he appeared to make a five-ton elephant vanish from a giant Broadway stage, his audiences believing or half-believing the fake as well as the real. (If you could now communicate wirelessly, then why not mind reading and giant beasts dematerializing?) Between 1910 and 1930, nearly all of today’s Broadway theaters were built, and Coney Island, reachable by the new subway, suddenly had three big amusement parks. For a century, people had been dumbfounded again and again by amazing new devices. But when an advanced technology came along that was indistinguishable from magic and dedicated to making the pretend seem real and the basis of a big business—that is, movies—a kind of quantum change occurred in the culture.

…

As he wrote, “the ESP or ‘psychic phenomena’ movement began to grow very rapidly in the new religious atmosphere” of the late 1960s, because ESP devotees had always believed that there was an other order that ran the universe, one that revealed itself occasionally through telepathy…psychokinesis, dematerialization, and the like. It was but a small step from there to the assumption that all men possess a conscious energy paralleling the world of physical energy and that this mysterious energy can unite the universe (after the fashion of the light of God)….Even the Flying Saucer cults began to reveal their essentially religious nature at about this time.

…

They form tactical alliances, interbreed, and hybridize. One thing leads to another. Ways of thinking correlate and cluster. Believing in one type of fantasy tends to lead to believing in others. The major general who commanded the army’s paranormal R&D unit starting in the late 1970s—personally attempting to levitate, to dematerialize, to pass through walls, and to mentally disperse clouds—later became a 9/11 truther who’s certain that hijacked planes didn’t bring down the towers or hit the Pentagon. And it’s not only a matter of the patently ridiculous coexisting with the patently ridiculous. Seventy percent of the “spiritual” third of U.S. college students, for instance, also believe the untrue claim that “genetically modified food is dangerous to our health,” whereas among the “secular” third of college students, the majority know that GMO foods are safe to eat.*2 Academic research shows that religious belief leads people to think that almost nothing happens accidentally or randomly: as the authors of some recent cognitive science studies at Yale put it, “individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the main drivers of their exceptional “perception of purpose in life events,” their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

Houdini was one of the most famous people on Earth during the first quarter of the century, his shows a seamless intermingling of true and false—one day he escaped from manacles by sheer tenacity, the next he appeared to make a five-ton elephant vanish from a giant Broadway stage, his audiences believing or half-believing the fake as well as the real. (If you could now communicate wirelessly, then why not mind reading and giant beasts dematerializing?) Between 1910 and 1930, nearly all of today’s Broadway theaters were built, and Coney Island, reachable by the new subway, suddenly had three big amusement parks. For a century, people had been dumbfounded again and again by amazing new devices. But when an advanced technology came along that was indistinguishable from magic and dedicated to making the pretend seem real and the basis of a big business—that is, movies—a kind of quantum change occurred in the culture.

…

As he wrote, “the ESP or ‘psychic phenomena’ movement began to grow very rapidly in the new religious atmosphere” of the late 1960s, because ESP devotees had always believed that there was an other order that ran the universe, one that revealed itself occasionally through telepathy…psychokinesis, dematerialization, and the like. It was but a small step from there to the assumption that all men possess a conscious energy paralleling the world of physical energy and that this mysterious energy can unite the universe (after the fashion of the light of God)….Even the Flying Saucer cults began to reveal their essentially religious nature at about this time.

…

They form tactical alliances, interbreed, and hybridize. One thing leads to another. Ways of thinking correlate and cluster. Believing in one type of fantasy tends to lead to believing in others. The major general who commanded the army’s paranormal R&D unit starting in the late 1970s—personally attempting to levitate, to dematerialize, to pass through walls, and to mentally disperse clouds—later became a 9/11 truther who’s certain that hijacked planes didn’t bring down the towers or hit the Pentagon. And it’s not only a matter of the patently ridiculous coexisting with the patently ridiculous. Seventy percent of the “spiritual” third of U.S. college students, for instance, also believe the untrue claim that “genetically modified food is dangerous to our health,” whereas among the “secular” third of college students, the majority know that GMO foods are safe to eat.*2 Academic research shows that religious belief leads people to think that almost nothing happens accidentally or randomly: as the authors of some recent cognitive science studies at Yale put it, “individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the main drivers of their exceptional “perception of purpose in life events,” their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

Mundane budgetary considerations for the weekly television show precluded that. Instead, the crew used what became the show’s most famous phrase, “Beam me up,” to get the transporter operating. As portrayed in the Star Trek television programs and movies, the transporter locks on a target, scans the image to be transported, “dematerializes” it, puts it in a “pattern buffer” for some time, and finally “transmits the ‘matter stream’ in an ‘annular confinement beam’ to its destination.” “The matter along with the information” is sent out. As Krauss laments, 202 The Resurgence of Utopianism Building a transporter would require us to heat up matter to a temperature a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun, expend more energy in a single machine than all of humanity presently uses, build telescopes larger than the size of the Earth, improve present computers by a factor of 1000 billion billion, and avoid the laws of quantum mechanics.29 According to a 2008 article in Discovery Channel Magazine, phenomena such as Star Trek’s vanishing spaceships, faster-than-light travel, and dematerialized transport were mere dreams when the original series aired but might yet come about.

…

As Krauss laments, 202 The Resurgence of Utopianism Building a transporter would require us to heat up matter to a temperature a million times the temperature at the center of the Sun, expend more energy in a single machine than all of humanity presently uses, build telescopes larger than the size of the Earth, improve present computers by a factor of 1000 billion billion, and avoid the laws of quantum mechanics.29 According to a 2008 article in Discovery Channel Magazine, phenomena such as Star Trek’s vanishing spaceships, faster-than-light travel, and dematerialized transport were mere dreams when the original series aired but might yet come about. Others, however, have criticized Star Trek for making scientific blunders akin to those found in other science fiction television shows and movies over the years. Hence the literal meaning, I might add, of “science fiction.”

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

Programmable signage means lower costs for menu changes, which allows ghost restaurants to try new concepts with lower stakes. Green Summit’s founder says the company loses as little as $25,000 if a new menu bombs. Traditional restaurants could easily spend 10 times that amount or more to try out a new trend like poke. As it grows to industrial scale, the sweeping dematerialization of sit-down dining is spawning its own infrastructure. Between 2012 and 2017, more than $10 billion flowed into last-mile food-delivery startups, like Postmates. But the most interesting action is at the back of the house. While Domino’s dominated the pizza business from suburban strip malls, a group led by Uber founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick is instead snatching up parking garages around the urban core and converting them to shared kitchens and delivery depots.

…

“automated” vehicles, 39 Autonomy (Burns), 214 autonomy, defined, 42 Autophobia (Ladd), 80 Autopilot (Tesla), 26–29 Autor, David, 150, 151, 152, 155 Baidu, 54 Bezos, Jeff, 221 Big Dog (Boston Dynamics), 79 big mobility, 239–47 bike sharing Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 dockless bike-share, 64–65, 66, 67 docks, 64 Lime Bike, 67 microsprawl and, 202 rebalancing problem, 64–65 smartphone apps, 64 Vélib system (Paris), 63 VeoRide, 67 “white bikes,” 63 Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 “block captain” ushers, 78 Bloomberg Philanthropies, 214 Blue Apron, 141, 145–46 Blue Gene/L (IBM), 36 Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism, 193–94, 196, 242 Boston Dynamics, 79 Bostrom, Nick, 236–37, 238 Brooks, Rodney, 235 Brown, Joshua, 28 Burns, Larry, 214 buses bus rapid transit (BRT), 69–70, 72 CityPilot system, 72 driverless city buses, 216 platoons and platooning, 69–70, 70–71 software trains, 70–71, 70–72, 197, 200–201, 202, 204, 206 BVG (Berlin), 216 CalPers, 182–83 Calthorpe, Peter, 202 Caltrans, 170 carbon emissions AVs as tool for reducing, 19, 137 driverless shuttles and, 105 from manufacturing of clothing, 148 microsprawl and, 200, 202, 203, 204 platooning and, 68 software trains and, 72 Careem, 177 car-lite communes, 14–15, 60, 121, 244, 253, 254 Charles I (king), 161 Charlier, Frederic, 170–71 Cheetah 3 (MIT), 79 Chicago parking-meter contract, 173 Chin, Ryan, 62–63 Christine (King), 42 circular economies, 146–49, 196, 221 Citi Bike docks (New York City), 64 CityMobil2, 102–5 CityPilot system, 72 civic caravans, 73–75, 76–77, 77, 199 Clarke, Randy, 72 ClearRoad, 169–72, 216 clothing AirCloset, 148 carbon emissions from manufacturing, 148 in circular economies, 148–49 Rent the Runway, 140–41, 145 CloudKitchens, 140 coal and Jevons effect, 143–45 Coal Question, The (Jevons), 144 code and programming for AVs malleability of, 228, 245, 248 pushing code, 227 role in shaping driverless revolution, 227–28, 247–49 writing compared to coding, 226–27 see also computers and self-driving vehicles Cody (IDEO), 125 cognitive tasks and automation, 150–51, 151, 152–53 complete streets (shared streets), 208–9 computers and self-driving vehicles data exhaust, 108–12 data logged daily, 35, 108 microtransit mesh, 107–8, 111, 157 Pegasus onboard AV computer, 35–36 scan, study, and steer as basic tasks, 34–38 supercomputer location under seat, 84 vehicular variety increase, 53 see also code and programming for AVs; deep learning; reprogramming mobility computer vision, 152, 230, 231 congestion pricing at the curb, 223 electronic tolling, 169–72 mobility policy and, 182 in New York City, 165–67, 167, 168, 172–73 speculation or perverse incentives, 172–73 support for, 167–69 Uber, 179, 181 Vickrey’s study of, 165–66 weaponization by speculators, 17 see also financialization of mobility continuous delivery compared to historical shopping habits, 115–16, 120–21 and last mile logistics, 121–29 costs decline in twentieth century, 130 deskilling of delivery, 124 effect of instant delivery, 218 efficiency improvements and rebound effect, 145–47 free or cheap delivery and, 116–17, 204 freight AVs and, 125–26 fulfillment centers, 121, 123, 132, 136–37, 152, 158 impact on jobs, 155 impact on local businesses, 140–42 kippleization and, 142–43 nighttime delivery, 128–29, 130 overview, 120–21 package lockers and, 127, 130, 219, 221 piggybacking deliveries, 126–27 same-day delivery, 119, 123–24, 132–33, 138 see also e-commerce conveyors in circular economies, 148 deep learning, 57 Kiwibots, 57 last-mile deliveries, 124–25 maintenance, repair, and remote monitoring, 132 overview, 56–57, 60–61 Starship conveyors, 55–56, 57, 125, 192 Coord, 232–33 Cops (TV show), 24 Coresight Research, 117 core (urban core), 187, 188, 188–96, 194–95 Costco, 116 Could This Be You (TV show), 24 creative destruction, defined, 137 Credit Suisse, 117 cruise control, 24–25, 26 curb pricing and curb-access fees, 220–21, 222–23, 232 Curbs API, 232–33 Cushman & Wakefield, 117 Daimler, 6, 68, 69, 72, 190 Daley, Richard, 173 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenges, 6–7, 68, 104, 133, 230 data collaboratives, 233 data exhaust, 108–12 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 57 deaths caused by motor vehicles, 9, 38, 156 deep learning advances in, 39, 42 computer power consumption, 37 conveyors, 57 fleet learning, 37 human intelligence tasks (HITs) required, 41 limits of, 235–36 neural networks, 36–37, 84, 235 occupancy grid, 37 overview, 36–37 and task model, 152 training, 37, 41, 153, 235 see also artificial intelligence; machine learning Deliveroo, 56, 124 delivery, continuous. See continuous delivery delivery costs decline in twentieth century, 130 delivery density, 218 dematerialization of sit-down dining, 135–40 desakota, 187, 189, 205–8, 206–7 Dickens, Charles, 162 Dickmanns, Ernst, 6 Dick, Philip K., 142–43 Didi, 176–77 digital cameras in AVs external scanning and navigation, 6, 27, 34, 35, 41 for monitoring drivers, 29, 31, 227–28 disabled people and the elderly benefits from AVs, 9–10, 241 rovers and, 67, 70–71 Segway’s S-Pod and, 67 SilverRide, 95 taxibots, 183 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

How the City Really Works: The Definitive Guide to Money and Investing in London's Square Mile
by Alexander Davidson
Published 1 Apr 2008

Until August 1996, the LSE handled its own settlement of share trades, but not very efficiently. Following the 1986 market deregulation known as Big Bang, trading volumes exploded through the late 1980s, which put extra pressure on the LSE’s Talisman settlement system. The LSE decided to replace Talisman with Taurus, which was designed to bring about compulsory dematerialisation of all UK corporate securities. Critics said it tried to satisfy too many conflicting market interests. On the advice of two management consultants, the LSE abandoned Taurus in March 1993 and decommissioned Talisman in April 1997. At the LSE’s request, the Bank of England established a securities settlement task force chaired by its director Pen Kent, which recommended a phased introduction of more cost-effective settlement for UK equities, including the introduction of rolling settlement.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

Exactly what we’re doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture, produce more cement and heap up more landfills with waste from the additional stuff we would produce and consume, all of which will pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these things because our economic system demands endless exponential growth. Switching to clean energy will do nothing to slow this down. The Degrowth Imperative If we peel back the false promises of dematerialisation and carbon capture, it becomes clear that the problem is much deeper than most are willing to admit. Our present economic model of exponential GDP growth is no longer realistic, and we have to face up to this fact. This presents us with a very difficult conundrum when it comes to development and poverty reduction.

Polaroids From the Dead
by Douglas Coupland
Published 1 Jan 1996

Julia Roberts reports in People magazine, “My relationship does not fall under the Freedom of Information Act.” While one assumes that the famous have unlisted home numbers, other aspects of their lives become unlisted to the point of public outrage. Many stars are simply refusing to hand out any private details. Revelation is no longer an issue of “privacy” but of dematerialization—fear of becoming a living ghost. We have reached a point where the limits of fame seem to have been finally articulated. Inasmuch as we have learned limits of corporate growth: GM circa 1988; IBM circa 1987; we have perhaps also learned the new growth limits of fame: Michael Jackson circa 1993; Madonna circa 1992.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Published 13 Sep 2021

During the pandemic, the list of who was considered “essential” made it apparent who is most integral to the global factory system. Those who made our goods and those who delivered them were both essential; those who worked in hospitality, travel, and many other parts of the service economy were not. No matter how much an economy “dematerializes” itself, making and exporting software and intellectual property instead of steel and fabric and cars, dumping money and workers into health care, finance, marketing, and an ever-expanding and ever more abstract assortment of knowledge work, we still have to eat and house and clothe ourselves.

…

A machine spits out a piece of tape of just the right length, and I use it to seal the bottom of the box. Then I, an anonymous packer, put in items destined for an anonymous customer, along with some packing material. These days, the packing material is usually plastic pouches filled with air, about as dematerialized as packing material can get. Then I tape the top of the box, apply a sticker with a bar code on it spat out by a different machine, and drop it on yet another conveyor. Our fully Taylorized, maximally efficient packing sequence is complete, all waste expunged from our every action, the entire process as quick and effortless as it could possibly get, short of the replacement of Cliff and thousands like him by robots.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

In March 2008 Bear Stearns, one of the big investment banks, collapsed because of its exposure to subprime mortgages. The Federal Reserve arranged for J.P. Morgan Chase to take it over at a bargain price. And six months after that, another big investment bank, Lehman Brothers, went bankrupt for the same reason. Suddenly it looked as if the entire investment banking business was about to dematerialize. This was a direct result of deregulation. The end of Glass-Steagall had brought the investment banks direct competition from commercial banks and pushed them to take more risks; the SEC had failed in its new mission of guarding their stability; and the ban on regulation of derivatives had permitted them to take on enormous debt in order to trade in volatile new instruments they didn’t fully understand.

…

In February 2016, the day after LinkedIn released a fourth-quarter report for 2015 that showed its profits and membership growing more slowly than it had predicted, its stock price dropped by sixty points, or 44 percent of its value, in just a few hours. Hoffman didn’t know exactly what had happened; he assumed that a couple of big institutional investors had decided to dump their entire holdings in LinkedIn in response to the fourth-quarter report. More than $10 billion in the company’s value had dematerialized in one trading day. Hoffman was far too much the committed game player to find the role of principled loser attractive, and he was aware that, with more than three hundred million members at that moment, LinkedIn was still at the lower edge of the scale an online network company needed to achieve lasting success.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

‘It is time to re-examine the pursuit of economic growth at all costs,’ concludes US energy economist David Murphy; ‘we should expect the economic growth rates of the next 100 years to look nothing like those of the last 100 years.’39 Furthermore, some in the prepare-for-landing crowd doubt that the weightless economy can be as dematerialised as its name implies, given the material- and energy-intensive infrastructure that underpins the coming digital revolution.40 Others, meanwhile, doubt that the weightless economy will contribute as much to GDP growth as the growth optimists expect. A wide array of online products and services like software, music, education and entertainment are already available almost for free because, thanks to the Internet, they can be created and reproduced at near-zero marginal cost.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

Within that the world had smaller revolutions – the 1IR and 2IR and their subsets: from water mills to steam factories to Fordist oilor electricity-powered factories; from canals to trains to cars to planes. But they are part of a broader pattern. Around 1970 something new began with de-industrialising, de-materialising economies and a slowing growth after the end of the ‘special century’.62 A shift became evident in technology, capitalism, society and culture.63 ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, went live in 1969. Intel's first microprocessor was launched in November 1971, two hundred years after Richard Arkwright's mill at Cromford in Derbyshire ignited the Industrial Revolution.64 Two years later came the first instance of genetic engineering.

Architecture: A Very Short Introduction
by Andrew Ballantyne
Published 19 Dec 2002

The pulpit seems to float on air in an agitated way, and even the pews are ornately carved so that they seem to go along with the general exaltation of the spectacle. It is a total all-enveloping work of art – the German word for it is Gesamtkunstwerk. There is the same concern for precious things and for dematerialization of the architecture as in the medieval era, but it is pursued here in a different architectural language, with different technical means. Behind and beneath all the ornament there is still an idea of classical order – Roman columns and entablatures are in there somewhere, giving a basic discipline, which then seems to have been stretched, shaken, and draped with festoons.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

Diamandis talks about the Six Ds of digital disruption, arguing that the insurgent companies are: Digitized, exploiting the ability to share information at the speed of light Deceptive, because their growth, being exponential, is hidden for some time and then seems to accelerate almost out of control (we will look at exponential growth in chapter 5) Disruptive, because they steal huge chunks of market share from incumbents Dematerialized, in that much of their value lies in the information they provide rather than anything physical, which means their distribution costs can be minimal or zero Demonetized, in that they can provide for nothing things which customers previously had to pay for dearly Democratized, in that they make products and services which were previously the preserve of the rich (like cellphones) available to the many.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

Without the taste for silk, there would have been no gypsy moths in North America. Without the preference for detached housing, there would still be congestion, perhaps, but more economical congestion. Without the love of oceanside living, shore erosion yes, but no social disruption. Even more promising than diversification and dematerialization is an attitude that has not yet found its rightful name. It is the substitution of cunning for the frontal attack, and it is not new. It began with immunization against smallpox—as we have seen, a folk practice long before Edward Jenner introduced it to medicine—and continued with the vaccines of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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On the road, finesse means a calmer approach to driving, improving the speed and economy of all drivers by slowing them down at times when impulse would prompt accelerating. It can mean moving more traffic by metering access to some roads and even closing off others. (Some German analysts have written of the "softening," Besdnftigung, of traffic.) Diversification, dematerialization, and finesse are far from a rejection of science. To the contrary, it is science that points us away from crude reductionism and counterproductive brute force toward technologies that improve human life. But the improvement has a cost. As the Red Queen said in Through the Looking Glass, we are no longer in the "slow sort of country" where running gets one somewhere: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

Shadow of the Silk Road
by Colin Thubron
Published 1 Jan 2006

Then out of the wastes, where the last camel-thorn died and a range of pure sand surged across the skyline, I saw what appeared to be a scatter of low buildings high on the dunes, with a thicket of prayer-flags above them. Someone had tried to re-excavate a well in a hollow at the dune’s foot–this must have been the spring which Stein had noted–but the sand was sliding in again, and when we loosed the donkey it found nothing to drink. As we climbed the long, soft slopes, the buildings dematerialised before our eyes. Like fantastical theatre-sets they thinned into skeletal fences enclosing graves. Their frames had shredded into fragments, or toppled wholesale. Some ancient storm might have raged and subsided there. Now the slope was bathed in a stark brightness. In front of us the flagpoles multiplied over the hill, sunk in the sand like the pennants of drowned tents.

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
by Rolf Potts
Published 24 Dec 2002

Less Is More: The Art of Voluntary Poverty — an Anthology of Ancient and Modern Voices Raised in Praise of Simplicity, edited by Goldian Vandenbroeck (Inner Traditions, 1996) Quotes and essays on the value of simplicity, from the likes of Socrates, Shakespeare, Saint Francis, Benjamin Franklin, and Mohandas Gandhi, as well as the Bible, The Dhammapada, Tao Te Ching, and The Bhagavad Gita. Dematerializing: Taming the Power of Possessions, by Jane Hammerslough (Perseus Books, 2001) An examination of “possession-obsession” and how it negatively affects our personal growth, creativity, and relationships. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau The philosophical account of Thoreau’s experiment in antimaterialist living.

Hollow City
by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

A REAL ESTATE HISTORY OF THE AVANT-GARDE 89 Bob Kaufman reading from book at the Coffee Gallery, pher Imogen Cunningham c. 1959. Photograph by his first photograin C. J. audience, Snyder; courtesy Shaping San Francisco. Visual art has two audiences, those who semi-public spaces actually buy it. calls lobbies, galleries at — and it in public and who will those "the dematerialization of the art object," site-specific, public, outdoor works that were ketplace. Recently a at least initially number of numbers of artists making performance, film- and video-based and artists not easily continue to moved into the mar- have taken up the Internet as an immaterial arena for art (while others have taken great look Since the 1950s adventurous artists have been pursuing what Lucy Lippard ephemeral, —museums, will make it up as a salesroom).

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

This is why we set “Dreaming in Plenitude” in Australia, where renewable energy has grown ten times faster than the world average. THE MATERIALS REVOLUTION: TOWARD INFINITE SUPPLY We are experiencing what Peter Diamandis calls “dematerialization,” or an age in which many physical products are made obsolete as their capabilities are absorbed by software and platform products like mobile phones. Recent examples include radios, cameras, maps and stand-alone GPS systems, camcorders, and encyclopedias. As dematerialization occurs at increasing speed, previously expensive products become effectively free. In chapter 4, “Contactless Love,” we discussed the power of synthetic biology in drug discovery and gene therapy (such as CRISPR), which will reduce healthcare costs, improve treatment efficacy, and increase human longevity.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Published 25 Feb 2020

Buy from companies that are public about their values, have made commitments to sustainability, and are part of organizations that certify they are following through on their pledges. The impact will be significant. Vote with your money. Most important, eliminate waste. Apply the old-fashioned adage of reduce, reuse, recycle. When we need to buy things, our choices should be informed and enlightened. * * * — Dematerialize. Consider how we made the change from vinyl, cassette tapes, and CDs to downloading or streaming music. Technology in many instances now allows us to do without material objects while still enjoying the services that they provide. Less can be more. In the near future, even individual ownership of cars may cease to exist as the dominant paradigm—the transportation we need might be offered by shared vehicles, probably self-driving and certainly electric.33 One day consumers may come to define themselves not as owners of products but as beneficiaries of systems of service delivery.

Hotel Du Lac
by Anita Brookner
Published 14 May 1993

Now they sat after lunch, becalmed, the only two people contemplating these few square metres of flat cobbled ground, the only sounds the faint whine of a distant car and a mumble of music from a wireless deep in the recesses of the restaurant, perhaps from the kitchen, perhaps from the little sitting room at the back, where the owner might retire to read his newspaper before opening up again for dinner. But who came here? In Edith’s mind, Mrs Pusey and Monica and Mme de Bonneuil, the hotel itself with its elderly pianist and its dependable meals, seemed to be at the other end of the universe. The mild and careful creature that she had been on the lake shore had also disappeared, had dematerialized in the ascent to this upper air, and by a remote and almost crystalline process new components had formed, resulting in something harder, brighter, more decisive, realistic, able to savour enjoyment, even to expect it. ‘Who comes here?’ she asked. ‘People like us,’ he replied. He was a man of few words, but those few words were judiciously selected, weighed for quality, and delivered with expertise.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
by Doug Henwood
Published 30 Aug 1998

Nietzsche might have enjoyed these pleasures. For Brown, debt is a sickly tribute paid by the present to the past. (Of course, we postmoderns often see — consciously or not — credit as a way to steal from the future.) But for a partisan of the body. Brown was nonetheless guilty of the ancient psychoanalytic habit of dematerializing its needs. As the eady analyst Paul Schilder (1976) — who rightly lamented the absence of a psychoanalysis of work — noted, "When one looks over large parts of the psychoanalytic literature one would not conceive the idea that one eats because one is hungry and wants food for sustaining one's life but one would rather suppose that eating is a sly way of satisfying oral libido....

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But modern science has mathematized money. Aside from doomsayers, survivalists, and other goldbugs, the monetary functions of dehydrated filth are all but forgotten. Even paper money is getting scarce — only about 10% of the broadly defined money supply (M2). Most money now lives a ghostly electronic life. With this dematerialization of money has come at least a partial banishment of the guilty sadomasochism of the anus. That banishment was seen at its fullest in the 1980s, when fantasy ruled the financial scene; in the early 1990s, the repressed made a partial return, but the mid-1990s saw a relapse of exuberance. But the psychological dethronement, however complete or incomplete, of anality and guilt has an interesting analogue in the cultural and social transformations that so trouble American reactionaries.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

Due to an anomaly stemming from the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the 120 residents of Angle Township in Minnesota actually live within Canadian territory and use a phone booth jointly run by U.S. and Canadian customs to report their comings and goings. 7. See “More Neighbours Make More Fences,” The Economist, Sept. 15, 2015. 8. “Why Walls Don’t Work,” Project Syndicate, Nov. 13, 2014. 9. Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (MIT Press, 2007), p. 157. 10. Ron Boschma and Ron Martin, “The Aims and Scope of Evolutionary Economic Geography” (Utrecht University, Jan. 2010). 11. Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (Anchor, 2012). 12. In the dense but influential treatise Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000), the American scholar Michael Hardt and the Italian dissident Antonio Negri posit globalization as an unregulated and all-consuming force that has no fixed locus. 13.

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Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, 2014. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. A New World Order. Princeton University Press, 2005. Smil, Vaclav. Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems. MIT Press, 2007. ———. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Wiley, 2013. Smith, Laurence C. “New Trans-Arctic Shipping Routes Navigable by Mid-century.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 13 (2013). Smolan, Rick, and Jennifer Erwitt. The Human Face of Big Data. Against All Odds Productions, 2012. Soll, Jacob. The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

The more pessimistic predictors, meanwhile, generally assume a global “tragedy of the commons” in which we greedily consume ourselves to death at an all-you-can-eat buffet of natural resources. Generally, people will be people, so which way we head will largely be determined by politics and by technology. At least in one regard—the “stuff factor,” so to speak—technology is already driving a tremendous and positive change, a global process of “dematerialization” that has replaced billions of tons of goods with digital products and human services. Thus it is that wall-to-wall shelves dedicated to records and compact discs have been replaced by streaming music services; people who once needed vehicles for once-in-a-while travel now open an app on their phones to request a ride share; and entire wings of hospitals once used for storing patients’ records have been supplanted by handheld cloud-connected tablet computers.

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See vision blocked carotid arteries, 191, 193 blood monitoring of, 186, 188, 190–91, 304 and Sinclair’s personal regimen, 304 See also blood glucose; blood pressure; blood sugar blood glucose, 100, 101, 123 blood pressure, 93, 94, 95, 184 blood sugar, 93, 123–24, 132, 188, 190, 191 Blue Zones, 88, 97 Bober, Eva, 43 Boguski, Mark, 176–78 bone loss, 52 bone marrow transplants, 17–18 Bonkowski, Michael, 62, 66, 295–96 Boston Children’s Hospital, 75, 200 Boston, Massachusetts hospitals in, 75, 76, 108, 200 jobs in, 255 Sinclair arrival in, 105–6 bowhead whales, 55–56, 57 Brady, Tom, 73 BRAF inhibitor, 10 brain, 12, 22, 78, 172, 297, 298 breathing biosensors/trackers for, 189 See also lungs Brenner, Charles, 135 Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 75 Brimley, Wilford, 208 bristlecone pine trees, 53–54, 56 “brown fat,” 108–9, 110–11, 214 Brunet, Anne, 299 Buck Institute for Research on Aging, 299 Budnik, Bogdan, 295 Buettner, Dan, 88 Buffett, Warren, 252 Bush, George W., 301 bushwalking, 307, 308, 309–10 butein, 128, 130 butterflies, 37 butylated hydroxytoluene, 15 c-Myc genes, 163, 167 Calment, Jeanne, 215 calorie restriction (CR), 91–99, 100, 105, 106, 111, 125, 130–31, 133, 158, 173 See also diet; fasting Campbell, Keith, 16 Campisi, Judith, 152, 156 cancer and average lifespan, 77 and biosensors/trackers, 188, 194 causes of, 62, 149, 200 change in thinking about, 10 as characteristic of aging, 67, 79, 80 cost of innovative medicine for, 273 and death as a choice, 279 death from, 74, 125–26 diagnosis of, 177, 178–79, 186, 213 and diet, 95, 101 and elderly, 253 fight against, 9, 28, 42, 72, 79–80 funding for research about, 267, 268 and genetics, 71 and geroncogenesis, 79 immuno-oncological approaches to, 156 incidence of, 77 as inevitable and irreversible, 80 and metformin, 125 in mice, 155–56 and nitrates, 114 ongoing research about, 9–10, 66, 295, 298 and organization of modern medical culture, 76, 77 pharmaceuticals for, 9, 176, 179, 184 and precision medicine, 178, 180 and radiation, 114 and reprogramming, 166, 172 and resveratrol, 132 and senescence, 67, 151, 152, 153 and Sinclair’s mother, 70–71, 72, 79 and sirtuins, 24 survival rates for, 10 symptoms of, 138 and technology, 177, 186 and telomeres, 149 testing for, 49 treatment for, 9–10, 81 vaccines for, 155–56 and why it happens, 9–10 and yeast studies, 30 Cannon Street Railway Bridge (London), 234–35, 236 Capelli, Peter, 251 capillaries: and reversing of aging, 63 CAR T-cell therapy, 178, 179 carbon, 37 carcinogens, 114 cardiovascular disease, 77, 99, 101, 125 See also heart disease/problems Carlson, Anton, 95–96 carnitine, 99 “carrying capacity” of planet, 220–25, 239–43, 283–90 cars, 187, 206, 273–74, 283 Carter, Jimmy, 179 Cas9, 49, 287, 297 catalase, 118 cataracts, 32, 52 caterpillars, 37 Celexa, 183 celiac disease, 182 Cell (journal), 25, 41 cells and attempts to explain life, 118 change in, 58–60, 61, 62 copies of, 5 differentiation among, 36 and evolution of aging, 4, 5 ex-differentiation of, 60 and exercise, 104 and fasting, 96 “fate” of, 59 identity of, 58–60, 61, 62 number of enzymes in, 118 resetting of age of, 54 and sirtuins, 43 cellular scale: and exercise, 102–3 centenarian study, 96–97 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 102 Cepko, Connie, 294 cerebral vascular disease, 92 CETP, 126–27 chameleon lizard, 12 chaos, 38, 47, 118, 119 Charpentier, Emmanuelle, 286–87 checkpoint blockade therapy, 179 chemotherapy, 9, 48, 76, 139, 141, 154, 182, 183, 185, 273, 296–97 chickenpox, 202 childbirth, 70, 153 children and aging of babies, 115 death of, 248, 286 genetically altered, 174–75, 233 and great-grandparents, 292–93 healing of, 74 and senescence, 153 See also birth rate; childbirth China, 57, 97, 248, 275 cholera, 235–36, 237, 265 cholesterol, 93, 94, 124, 134, 191 chromatin, 21, 154, 155, 179 chromosomes, 36, 149, 159, 182, 296 chronic illness, 280 Chua, Katrin, 43, 44–45 Church, George, 206, 287, 294 Chwalek, Karolina, 295 Clarke, Arthur C., 262–63 climate and broken DNA, 44 and concern for future, 261, 293 and consumption, 285, 286, 287, 289–90 and global carrying capacity, 240 and population growth, 220–25 research about, 258 as threat, 285 cloning, 15–16, 23, 159, 161, 162, 306 cnidarians, 297 coastal flooding, 224 Cobbett, William, 237 Cocoon (movie), 208 code of life, 27–28 Cohen, Haim, 45 communication, cellular, 17, 22–23, 45, 161–62 Congress, U.S., 226, 265–66, 267 consciousness, 5 consumption and “carrying capacity” of planet, 283–90 climate and, 285, 286, 287, 289–90 and concern about the future, 293 and death of “stuff,” 283–84 “dematerialization” and, 283 of food, 284–86 genetic modification and, 284–86, 287 and genome editing, 286–87 natural life cycle and, 301 and population growth, 283–90 and technology, 283–90 Cook, Tim, 252 Cooney, Michael, 295, 296 COPD, 77 Copeland, Royal, 110 Copine2, 298 Coppotelli, Giuseppe, 298 Cornaro, Alvise (Luigi), 90 cosmic rays, 7 Coumadin, 183 CR Society International, 93 Crimmins, Eileen, 78 crisis mode, evolution and, 16–18, 19, 20–23 CRISPR, 287, 297 Crouch, Ian, 208 Cruise, Tom, 208 cryotherapy, 110 CT scans, 44 Cutting, Windsor, 109 Cyteir Therapeutics, 42 cytokines, 150, 152, 155 cytoplasm, 155 DAF-16 genes, 56–57, 66 dairy products, 88, 100 DALY (disability-adjusted life year), 78–79 Das, Abhirup, 297 dasatinib, 154 Dawes, Ian, 30–31 Dayal, Pratika, 278 de Cabo, Rafael, 100, 124, 132–33 death acceptance of, 10–13 aging as cause of, 67–70, 72 average age of, 78 and biosensors/trackers, 191 causes/reasons for, 10–13, 62, 67–70, 72, 89 chance of, 69 of children, 248, 286 as choice, 278–82 and deterioration, 69 and diet, 286 diseases and, 89 impact on population growth of, 245, 247 inevitability of, 119 internal clocks and, 69–70 and Law of Human Mortality, 69–70 lifestyle and, 89 and mortality tables, 246 from motor vehicle accidents, 205 and NAD, 134 prediction of, 69–70 prevention of unnecessary, 180 scientific mandate for, 264 of “stuff,” 283–84 and sugar, 44, 124 universal model of life and, 41 See also specific disease defibrillators, 78 delayed aging: benefits of, 256–59 dementia, 52, 68, 77, 78, 80, 81, 125, 134, 150 See also Alzheimer’s; memory dentistry, 271, 297–98 “designer babies,” 174–75 DeStefano, Susan, 294–95 Deursen, Jan van, 152 diabetes in Australia, 275 and biosensors/trackers, 188 cause of, 150 as cause of death, 68 as characteristic of aging, 79, 82 cost of innovative medicine for, 273 diet and, 95 and elderly, 253 and guanide/guanidine, 123–24 and healing, 74–75 incidence of, 77 as inevitable and irreversible, 80 insurance coverage for, 232 metformin and, 124–27 and NMN, 136 ongoing research about, 295 and organization of modern medical culture, 76 sirtuins and, 24 STACs and, 136 and sugar, 123–24 treatment for, 18, 81, 124–27 type 1, 18, 123 type 2, 68, 123, 124, 136 and wounds, 74–75 diagnosis in the future, 213 ongoing research about, 299 and precision medicine, 176–80 and technology, 181–86 See also specific disease Dickinson, Richard, 31 diet advice about, 88 “best,” 88 biosensors/trackers for, 188, 190, 191, 192 and death, 286 and disease, 91 DNA and, 91 epigenetics and, 91 and exercise, 103, 104–5 impact on lifespan of, 88, 89–95, 97, 99, 101–2, 106, 111, 113–14 and longevity, 26, 88, 129 and self-knowledge, 182 and Sinclair’s personal regimen, 304, 307 sirtuins and, 25 and stress, 113–14 studies about, 91–95 survival circuit and, 24, 91, 98, 99, 102 and technology, 214 temperature and, 106, 111 and universal regulators of aging, 148 vegetarian, 101–2 weight and, 95 and what we eat, 88, 99 See also calorie restriction; fasting; food digital information, 20, 23, 60, 160 digoxin, 183–84 dimethyl biguanide, 124 dinitrophenol, 109–10 discrimination, age, 251–53, 254, 258–59 disease aging as, 67–70, 80–84, 264, 268–69, 270, 299, 302–3 Barzilai study of, 66–67 and beginning of aging, 70–75, 79 and benefits of delayed aging, 257 biosensors/trackers and, 188, 192, 193–94 communicable, 273 cost of fighting/treating, 258, 273 and death as a choice, 279–80 definition of, 80, 266 and diet, 91 focus on individual, 75–80 and FOXO gene, 57 funding for research about, 268–69, 273, 299 in the future, 261, 265 increase in, 77 and Law of Human Mortality, 67–70 and NAD, 24 ongoing research about, 298 and organization of modern medical culture, 75–80, 77 prediction about surviving, 71 and shift from miasmatic theory to germ theory, 237–38 sirtuins and, 24 and technology, 243 and universal model of life and death, 41 and universal regulators of aging, 148 WHO list of, 68, 124 See also diagnosis; treatment; specific disease “Disposable Soma Hypothesis” (Kirkwood), 11–12 divisions and health care as a right, 277–78 in income, 231–34, 277–78 DNA and attempts to explain life, 118, 119 biosensors/trackers and, 189, 191, 194 characteristics of, 20 complexity of, 159 consumption and, 287 cutting of, 48, 49, 51, 287 and diagnosing disease, 201 and diet, 91 as digital information, 20 and economic divisions, 232 and epigenetic landscape, 58 and epigenome, 36 and evolution of aging, 4, 7 and funding for aging research, 271 helicases, 33 “junk,” 27–28, 154, 295 and mapping human genome, 27–28 metformin and, 126 methylated, 169, 170, 171, 181, 306 nuclear, 15, 16 ongoing research about, 294 packaging of, 24, 37, 41, 47, 119 and piano analogy, 37 and precision medicine, 178, 179, 180 and reprogramming, 159, 169, 170, 171 and self-knowledge, 181 sequencing of, 178, 179, 181, 194, 197, 201, 232, 294 and sirtuins, 24 as storing and copying information, 14, 20, 44, 47, 114, 160 survival circuit and, 44, 47 and technology, 181, 186, 213 and telomeres, 149 and threats to humans, 197 and understanding aging, 117 and universal model of life and death, 41 and why we age, 14, 15, 16, 20 and yeast studies, 30–35, 38, 39, 40–44, 152 See also DNA, broken/damaged; DNA, repair of DNA, broken/damaged as cause of aging, 13–14 causes of, 44, 46–47 and climate, 114, 115 and epigenetics, 38, 59, 60, 61, 137 and evolution of aging, 5, 6, 7, 26 and nitrates, 114 number of, 44 ongoing research about, 297 reprogramming and, 162, 171, 174 and resveratrol, 132 retrotransposons and, 154, 155 senescence and, 150, 152, 155 sirtuins and, 43, 128, 137 and smoking, 79 and stress, 112, 113 sugar and, 44 and survival circuit, 44, 45, 46–47, 48, 50, 52, 57, 162 and telomeres, 149 and universal model of life and death, 41 and why we age, 17 and yeast studies, 35, 42, 43, 152 DNA methyl-transferases (DNMTs), 59 DNA, repair of and evolution of aging, 5, 6, 7 ongoing research about, 296, 298 and retrotransposons, 155 and sirtuins, 24, 25, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 137 smoking and, 79 and stress, 113 survival circuit and, 44, 45, 47 and telomeres, 149 and TOR gene, 25 DNP (2, 4-dinitrophenol), 109–10 doctors and biosensors/trackers, 192 and funding in aging research, 269 lack of aging knowledge of, 88 misdiagnosis by, 177, 178, 179–80, 213 as only conduit for diagnosis, 185 and patients at center of their own care, 180 and physician-assisted suicide, 280 and technology, 176–77 and treatment as a right, 272 video home visits by, 186 wait time for, 185–86 dogs, 42, 161, 164 Dolly (cloned sheep), 16, 159, 161 Dongsheng Cai, 105 double helix, 28 Doudna, Jennifer, 286–87 doxycycline, 165, 166, 167 drug overdoses, 78 drugs.

Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
Published 15 Mar 1999

Trout, you are free, you are free.” He arose shamblingly. I might have shaken his hand, but his right hand was injured, so our hands remained dangling at our sides. “Bon voyage” I said. I disappeared. • • • I somersaulted lazily and pleasantly through the void, which is my hiding place when I dematerialize. Trout’s cries to me faded as the distance between us increased. His voice was my father’s voice. I heard my father—and I saw my mother in the void. My mother stayed far, far away, because she had left me a legacy of suicide. A small hand mirror floated by. It was a leak with a mother-of-pearl handle and frame.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression
by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean
Published 9 Nov 2012

She is drawn more to the technological materialism of Kittler and his attention to the detail of code, with his insistence on the central importance of changes in voltage, treating signifiers as voltages and the signified as “interpretations that other layers of code give these voltages.”60 Further layers of translation from machine code to higher-level languages result in a chain of relations between signifier and signified based on the ability of the machine to recognize the difference between zero and one. Hayles considers code to determine actions with little ambiguity, although she does admit to the existence of noise with higher-level languages. For her purpose, she has problems with de Saussure’s “dematerialized view of speech” and Derrida’s “linguistic indeterminacy,”61 as neither seems adequate to describe computational processes and actions. Yet what Hayles appears to overlook, Vocable Code 35 in her reliance on Kittler’s technomaterialism, is her earlier insistence that machines have bodies too.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid
by Franck Frommer
Published 6 Oct 2010

In its 2008 study of the level of household computer ownership, the Centre de Recherche pour l’Étude et l’Observation des Conditions de Vie (CREDOC) showed that “two thirds of the French population has least one computer at home (66 percent), and 17 percent even have several.”45 Whereas more than 90 percent of upper-level households are well supplied, only 61 percent of workers are. This suggests that for almost one child of a worker out of ten, the paperless class is not for tomorrow, that the virtual school will leave them by the roadside. The two teachers also discuss the way digital workplaces call into question their own profession in the sense of dematerializing exchanges, a gradual obliteration of the time and space of the school, which is becoming a school “without walls.” Then there’s the “Big Brother” aspect of these exchanges, which will eventually make it possible to record and store information on students and their parents, transferable to any government department beyond the education service if the need arises.

The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living
by Brock Bastian
Published 25 Jan 2018

This is captured in the quote below from the mountain climber Lionel Terray, reflecting on the moment he found himself in difficulty: ‘My personality left me, the links with the earth were severed; I was no longer frightened or tired; I felt as though transported through the air, I was invisible, nothing could stop me, I’d reached that state of intoxication, of dematerialization …’15 This link between states of mindful awareness and the sense of ‘being on the edge’ in extreme sports helps us to understand why people seek out and enjoy these experiences. In her phenomenological investigation, Carla Willig finds that suffering, mastery and skill, and being in the present, are all factors that motivate people to take part in extreme sports.16 People become aware of themselves in a new way, in a way that transcends their reflection on their future or past selves, and which brings them into direct contact with their moment-by-moment experience of the world.

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll
Published 15 Jan 2010

Presumably there is some French avant-garde film that has already used this technique. The real universe is not an avant-garde film. We experience a degree of continuity through time—if the cat is on your lap now, there might be some danger that she will stalk off, but there is little worry that she will simply dematerialize into nothingness one moment later. This continuity is not absolute, at the microscopic level; particles can appear and disappear, or at least transform under the right conditions into different kinds of particles. But there is not a wholesale rearrangement of reality from moment to moment. This phenomenon of persistence allows us to think about “the world” in a different way.

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—Richard Wagner, Parsifal Everyone knows what a time machine looks like: something like a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back. For those of a younger generation, a souped-up stainless-steel sports car is an acceptable substitute; our British readers might think of a 1950s-style London police box.76 Details of operation vary from model to model, but when one actually travels in time, the machine ostentatiously dematerializes, presumably to be re-formed many millennia in the past or future. That’s not how it would really work. And not because time travel is impossible and the whole thing is just silly; whether or not time travel is possible is more of an open question than you might suspect. I’ve emphasized that time is kind of like space.

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice
by Pierre Vernimmen , Pascal Quiry , Maurizio Dallocchio , Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi
Published 16 Oct 2017

It factors in the non-rational side of investors’ behaviour. Small companies, since the limited number of investors interested in their shares means that their liquidity is low and that their share prices could shift away from a stable value for long periods. Notes 1 Time deposits represented by a dematerialised negotiable debt security in the form of a bearer certificate. 2 It would be a miracle if the positions of hedgers were to correspond exactly! Bibliography For more on the macroeconomic topics covered in this chapter: J. Gurley, E. Shaw, Money in a Theory of Finance, The Brookings Institution, 1960.

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They are the safest of all investments given the creditworthiness of the issuer (governments), but their other features make them less flexible and competitive. However, the substantial amount of outstanding negotiable Treasury bills and notes ensures sufficient liquidity, even for large volumes. These instruments can be a fairly good vehicle for short-term investments. Certificates of deposit (CDs) are quite simply time deposits represented by a dematerialised negotiable debt security in the form of a bearer certificate or order issued by an authorised financial institution. Certificates of deposit are issued in minimum amounts for periods ranging from one day to one year with fixed maturity dates. In fact, they are a form of short-term investment.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

Today the vast majority of the Web is built by amateurs, semipros, and people who don’t work for big technology and media companies. We talk a lot about the “weightless economy,” the trade in intangible information, services, and intellectual property rather than physical goods (the weightless economy consists of anything that doesn’t hurt your foot if dropped upon it). Yet as big as the economy of bits may be, that dematerialized world of information trade is a small fraction of the manufacturing economy. So anything that can transform the process of making stuff has tremendous leverage in moving the global economy. That’s the making of a real revolution. Let’s return to Manchester to consider how that might work in the real world.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
by William Davies
Published 11 May 2015

The political hope that perhaps the human benefits of dialogue and workplace empowerment might be more thoroughly recognized turns into disappointment, as performance management and health care are fused into a science of well-being optimization. And yet there are radical political economists for whom the de-materialization of contemporary work represents an opportunity for a whole new industrial model.36 The shift towards a ‘knowledge-based’ economy, in which ideas and relationships are key sources of business value, could be the basis of entirely new workplace structures in which power is decentralized and decisions taken collaboratively.

Beyond Weird
by Philip Ball
Published 22 Mar 2018

But if you’re clever about it, you can transfer unknown information in the quantum state of one particle into that of another, if the two are entangled. The second particle then becomes a replica, but in the process the information is necessarily erased in the first. To all intents and purposes, it then looks as if the first particle has vanished from its original location and reappeared elsewhere. It hasn’t really performed any dematerialization; but if the replica is genuinely indistinguishable from the original, the result is the same. That’s why, when this possibility was first recognized in 1993 by Asher Peres and Bill Wootters, who proposed to call it ‘telepheresis’ (loosely, ‘long-distance manifestation’), Charles Bennett suggested a more catchy name: quantum teleportation.

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge)
by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox
Published 22 Jun 2015

The road builders, however, were patently aware that the day would come when the philosophy of “as if ” would necessarily be stalled by its materialization into a physical road with discernable, if not ultimately describable, effects. As we have seen, many ethnographies of expert practice and the use of numbers have become enchanted with how numbers work as forms of abstraction, carrying and producing meaning in dematerialized ways, with powerful political effects. However, focusing on numbers as abstractions risks erasing the material practices that in many respects work to stall the potential of numbers to become abstract worlds unto themselves. In what follows we show how in engineering the philosophy of “as if ” works as an explanation for the power of numbers to tame and manage unstable material worlds only if we specify the feasibility study as a particular phase of construction within which such numerical practices apply.

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Published 14 Apr 2013

These institutional innovations protect the regeneration of nature, labor, and capital and also help to stabilize incomes on the consumer side, which fuel the mass consumption that keeps the industrial machine running and growing. The flip side of this story of material growth and success is the rapid depletion of our common resource pool. Although the introduction of new technologies has reduced the material footprint of economic value creation to some degree, the dematerialization of industrial production has been surpassed by the total growth rate of the overall economy. The net result is that our extractions from the earth have continued to grow until the present day. In 2005, for example, 58 billion metric tons of materials entered the economy to keep our global industrial production running (one metric ton equals 2,204.6 pounds).

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans
Published 6 Mar 2018

Have you read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?” PART THREE The Early True Believers Chapter Eleven MISS OUTER BORO The Internet exists at the confluence of culture, code, and infrastructure. As the technology historian Janet Abbate writes, “Communications media often seem to dematerialize technology, presenting themselves to the user as systems that transmit ideas rather than electrons.” This makes the boundary between users and producers, and between software and hardware, so porous as to be effectively permeable. As the story of hypertext shows, technology alone isn’t enough to change the world—it has to be implemented in an accessible way and adopted by a community of users who feel enough ownership over it to invent new applications far beyond the imagination of its architects.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years
by Mike Berners-Lee
Published 27 Feb 2019

It is the wider ripples of our actions that matter most. Plastic Wonderfully useful, conveniently cheap and devastatingly durable. Yet another example of a great invention that has been used without enough care. Most gets discarded to landfill or scattered across land and sea, where it falls apart but does not dematerialize. So, we are stuck with it for all time once it is out there. (See pages 55–58.) Population Not the root of all our problems, as some people think: 12 billion careful people could live well on planet Earth, whereas 1 billion careless people couldn’t. (See Does it all come down to population? on pages 149–151.)

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

The evil aliens, though, can fly right through the asteroid belt because they have amazing technology that dematerializes their ships, and lets them pass through the asteroids. Eventually, the good guys capture an evil alien ship, and go exploring inside it. The captain of the good guys finds the alien bridge, and on the bridge is a lever. “Ah,” says the captain, “this must be the lever that makes the ship dematerialize!” So he pries up the control lever and carries it back to his ship, after which his ship can also dematerialize. Similarly, to this day, it is still quite popular to try to program an AI with “semantic networks” that look something like this: (apple is-a fruit) (fruit is-a food) (fruit is-a plant).

…

This isn’t to say that no mere machine of silicon can ever have the same internal machinery that humans do, for handling apples and a hundred thousand other concepts. If mere machinery of carbon can do it, then I am reasonably confident that mere machinery of silicon can do it too. If the aliens can dematerialize their ships, then you know it’s physically possible; you could go into their derelict ship and analyze the alien machinery, someday understanding. But you can’t just pry the control lever off the bridge! (See also: Truly Part Of You, Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles, Drew McDermott’s “Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity.”1) The essential driver of the Detached Lever Fallacy is that the lever is visible, and the machinery is not; worse, the lever is variable and the machinery is a background constant.

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain
by Werner Loewenstein
Published 29 Jan 2013

A photon, for example, visible as it comes from the sun to us, becomes invisible when it strikes an atom; its energy is used up for shifting an electron of the atom to a farther orbit. And it’s not just a matter of becoming lost to sight. The photon particle actually changes character and converts into a virtual photon—a dematerialized one, as it were. And when the electron shifts back to a near orbit, the photon rematerializes and is given off by the atom as a visible particle. Figure 5.1. The Photon Spectrum. The electromagnetic wavelengths are given in meters (m) and angstroms (Å) on a logarithmic scale. Atomic radii are of the order of 10-10 m.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander
Published 1 Jan 1977

I have described the way the retina collects impressions emanating from dots. The picture is formed only after it is well inside your brain. The image doesn't exist in the world, and so cannot be observed as you would observe another person, or a car, or a fight. The images pass through your eyes in a dematerialized form, invisible. They are reconstituted only after they are already inside your head. Perhaps this quality of nonexistence, at least in concrete worldly form, disqualifies this image information fronl being subject to conscious processes: thinking, discernment, anal- ysis. You may think about the sound but not the images.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

“My focus to design was the kinesthetic approach,” she said, describing a method that emphasizes sensorial engagement. “We as human beings need to be stimulated with our senses, very physically. With sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound.” When computers first captivated the design world in the 1980s, Sebregondi observed designers increasingly seduced by dematerialized, exclusively visual experiences. Over the long term, these left people wanting something more tangible. “Over [the past] thirty years that [digital dream] became a reality. But we discovered it wasn’t only a wonderful thing. We really need physical objects and experiences.” During the summer of 1995, Sebregondi was sailing off the coast of Tunisia on the yacht of her friend Fabio Rosciglione.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 29 Mar 2015

Schüll quotes an industry innovator saying, “This didn’t just slow down play, it suggested a kind of closure, an end to the game … it tempted the customer to cease the play and walk out the door with his winnings.” On the other hand, a hopper full of coins was more likely to be fed back into the machine, so the gambler could “gather the wagering momentum critical to the flow of their play experience.” Cashless gambling, in which money has been dematerialized into magnetic swipe cards, has “further helped to overcome impediments to play associated with money insertion.”9 Access to the zone is a function of access to cash, and though Nevada law prohibits the integration of ATM functions into the slot machine itself, other jurisdictions are more forward-looking and allow limitless transfers from the gambler to the casino at the site of play, as long as funds (or credit cards) are available.

The Rapture of the Nerds
by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Published 3 Sep 2012

So, basically, you murdered me, kidnapped me, imprisoned me, and sent me into a kangaroo court for nothing.” Huw grinds her not-teeth. “Actually, not nothing. Worse than nothing. You did all that and managed to make things worse for the entire human race, assuming you haven’t murdered everyone else in order to get them to testify about how they should be spared dematerialization and coercive uploading. Nice work, Bonnie.” Bonnie looks suitably stricken. Huw feels one tiny iota better. “Good-bye, Bonnie,” she says, and sets off across not-space. Somewhere in this shard, there’s bound to be a way out, or at least a helpfile. * * * Of course, as Huw eventually realizes, going in search of a helpfile is only the start of an interesting and distracting quest for enlightenment that is likely to end in tears, a nervous breakdown, or a personal reboot.

Data and the City
by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle
Published 2 Aug 2017

As global trade required ‘modern’ organization through the early part of the twentieth century, the Bretton Woods agreement was signed in 1944 by committed countries in order to maintain exchange rates to a fixed value in terms of gold. On its failure in 1971 – due to the dollar’s inability to retain value in the light of a global recession – the detachment of monetary value from a mineral ore to a new system of floating exchange rates ‘de-materialized’ money (Harvey 1990). As the representation of value continues to become further abstracted from goods and services, for example, through electronic BACS transfers and online and mobile banking, we soon arrive at the role of money in society today. In the abstraction of value from a material representation to a promissory token, both time and identity become obfuscated.

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.
by Robin Sharma
Published 4 Dec 2018

“Because they’ve reached a level of individual maturity that allowed them to see the futility of spending their days chasing objects that count for nothing at the end. And they had cultivated their characters to such a degree that they no longer had the common need of most to fill the holes within themselves with distractions, attractions, escapes and luxuries. The more their appetite for superficial possessions dematerialized, the more hungry they became for substantial pursuits like honoring their creative vision, expressing their inherent genius and living by a higher moral blueprint. They viscerally understood that being inspirational and masterful and fearless are all inside jobs. And once true power is accessed, external substitutes pale in comparison to the feelings of fulfillment this treasure provides.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
by Richard Heinberg
Published 1 Jun 2011

This is not to say these countries have only smooth sailing ahead (Japan in particular is facing a painful adjustment, given its very high levels of government debt), but they are likely to fare better than other nations that have high domestic levels of economic inequality and that have gotten used to high growth rates. Sweden is now home to a number of eco-municipalities. Inspired by economist Torbjörn Lahti and by Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of the Natural Step Movement, these formerly depressed industrial towns have made an official and deliberate commitment to “dematerialize” their economies and to foster social equity.45 Övertorneå, Sweden’s first eco-municipality, saw a 20 percent unemployment rate during the recession of the early 1980s and lost 25 percent of its population (prior to becoming an eco-municipality), but now boasts a thriving ecotourism economy based on organic farming, sheepherding, fish farming, and the performing arts.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
by Diane Ackerman
Published 9 Sep 2014

But, for a change, we know the exact causes of the extinction, having created them ourselves—climate change, habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, big agriculture, acidifying the oceans, urbanization, a growing population demanding more natural resources—and we’re in a position to stop them, if we set our collective mind to it. So, as species dematerialize around us, worldwide efforts are under way to collect and protect the DNA of as many as possible before it’s too late. Two brave doomsday efforts have been leading the way. One is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a remote and heavily guarded underground cavern tucked four hundred feet inside a sandstone mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, in the secluded Svalbard archipelago, which lies about eight hundred miles from the North Pole—a James Bond destination safe from both man-made and natural disasters, even melting ice caps (it’s 430 feet above sea level), tectonic activity, or nuclear war.

Bit Rot
by Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016

Tie these quotidian data hits within the longer time framework matrices of Wonkr, Believr, Grindr, Tinder et al., and suddenly you as a person becomes something that’s humblingly easy to predict, please, anticipate, model, forecast and replicate. Tie this new machine intelligence realm in with some smart 3D graphics that have captured your body metrics and likeness, and a few years down the road, you become sort of beside the point. There will eventually be a dematerialized duplicate you. While this seems sort of horrifying in a Stepford Wifey kind of way, the difference is that instead of killing you, your replicant meta-entity will merely try to convince you to buy a piqué-knit polo shirt in tones flattering to your skin at Abercrombie & Fitch. This all presupposes the rise of machine intelligence wholly under the aegis of capitalism.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 17 Feb 2015

To hear the click and the whoosh, to detonate that button, and feel the play of it as you depressed it, and then to see the image materialize, at first like a faint and mysterious echo of the face of Jesus on the Turin shroud, and then to crystallize into a fully realized photograph with depth and colour range, produced an overwhelming urge to see the magic repeated. Yielding to the urge, you had to use more and more of the extremely expensive instant film. Photography had become a temporary epiphany. This was the closest that analogue technology had ever come to delivering the weightlessness and the dematerialized qualities of digitalization. It removed so many of the technical steps, and the waiting, even though it still depended on physical, chemical and mechanical processes. But it also produced an enormous amount of waste as a by-product of the process – boxes, paper, foil, chemicals – that ended as landfill.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

Money used to pay for the benefits attached to citizenship need not be derived only from production realized in the particular locale that is formally attached to citizenship, or to be received by people who live there (because the country itself may contain foreigners who by the same token may be receiving their citizenship rent from another country). We thus see that citizenship as an economic asset can be, in principle, degrounded, or dematerialized, from the land to which it applies. 4.1b Citizenship as an Economic Asset Like every rental income that is received over a period of time, citizenship rent can be transformed into an asset by discounting likely future yields. (In the case of citizenship, this period typically lasts until the death of the holder but in some cases, as with survivors’ pensions, may last even longer.)

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

Like the other guests, I sat in my own booth, paged through a book, and wrote in a notebook. No one inside was looking at their phones, in part, I felt, because the space still seemed to exist in the time that it was originally built. It rewarded attention to the physical details and the atmosphere, beyond what could be picked up in an iPhone photo. The dematerialization of portable technology and the Internet just didn’t suit it. Rokuyosha contrasted with a café I found elsewhere in Kyoto. Weekenders was a place I discovered on Google Maps by searching for cafés; it was marked by a large dot on my iPhone, which I could still use all the time because I had paid Verizon for Internet access abroad.

The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
by Sonia Shah

If you poke one with a stick, or give it a little kick, a smoky cloud of spores will explode from the interior, leaving behind nothing but an empty, crinkled shell. The narratives used to justify antimigrant policies turned out to be similarly bloated and hollow. With even the lightest scratch to their surfaces, they dematerialized into a cloud of smoke. Although the number of unauthorized immigrants36 entering and living in the United States had been falling since 2007, government reports and antimigrant politicians portrayed the criminality of migrants in the United States and along its borders as similarly emboldened, as if strengthened by some invisible current from across the Atlantic.

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age
by Robert D. Kaplan
Published 11 Apr 2022

The link between Justinian, Theodora, and the beardless Christ, flanked by winged angels and Saint Vitalis in the vault of the apse, is so intense as to be almost seamless. Rarely has there been such a fusion of heaven and worldly power. This is religious art, and realism is eschewed. The facial features are all two-dimensional and distorted. The eyes are too large, the noses too long—so that even the emperor and empress on earth are depicted as saints. Dematerialized, they are presented as abstract symbols for veneration. We look at them and see God. Empire, to be successful, requires unquestioned moral legitimacy. America has failed at this, and this is something for the emerging Chinese to keep in mind. In Byzantium (Eastern Rome) that moral legitimacy rested inside the Church itself because the Church and the state were nearly one.

Democracy Incorporated
by Sheldon S. Wolin
Published 7 Apr 2008

Rearmament would be financed to an important extent by cuts in social spending, while the costs of national security would be largely borne by the less well-off.25 The lasting effects of the Cold War encounter included not only the elimination of the USSR but also the containment and rollback of the social and political ideals of the New Deal. The unifying ideology for the masses was a “dematerialized” one, a combination of patriotism, anticommunism, and—in the new nuclear era—fear. The Democrats, the party most closely identified with New Deal social and economic reforms, were the original, most enthusiastic cold warriors. A new species of liberalism came into being: the “Cold War liberal” who was resolutely anticommunist and convinced that “national security” constituted the nation’s highest priority.26 The Cold War liberal even discovered the political utility of a civil religion.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

These approaches may also allow us TEckNolo€jy EMuUres NATURE 193 to make plastics that break down organically. A biodegradable plastic, or even one that is easily recyclable, would go a long way toward solving our landfill problems. Plastic in our dumps now could be around for thousands of years. It's a dumb way to package juice. Better to create a package that can dematerialize like a paper bag. The original biotechnology, the granddaddy of them all, was agriculture. In the past, we have improved agriculture in three main waves: by developing pesticides, by fertilizing, and by breeding better plants. In all three of these areas, today's biotechnology is poised for big enhancements.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili
Published 14 Oct 2014

So does this establish the quantum in quantum biology? Enzymes have made and unmade every single biomolecule inside every living cell that lives or has ever lived. Enzymes are as close as anything to the vital factors of life. So the discovery that some, and possibly all, enzymes work by promoting the dematerialization of particles from one point in space and their instantaneous materialization in another provides us with a novel insight into the mystery of life. And while there remain many unresolved issues related to enzymes that need to be better understood, such as the role of protein motions, there is no doubt that quantum tunneling plays a role in the way they work.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

Even if the expert does not dominate the meeting in this overbearing way, the spatial organization of public consultations stifles exchange.1 There is usually a document, which almost no one in the room has read, accompanied viva voce by a slide presentation, the images clicking over too fast to dwell on. The physical setting can work against engagement; a raised rostrum facing rows of chairs transforms the public into spectators, as in the ancient pynx. So, too, the carefully made models displaying the proposal in all its perfection come with a look-but-do-not-touch message. The result is to dematerialize the proposals themselves; the public cannot get engaged in how the proposals would feel, physically, or would lodge in people’s experience over time. The consultation format is a very bad way to handle conflict. Outrage – shouting down the man at the podium in his suit and tie, armed with his laser pointer, his graphs, his stats – is the logical if extreme way in these circumstances to speak truth to power.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

The size of these supporting casts varies, but art production and circulation nevertheless depend on a broad network of workers even as those workers’ participation is mystified. 31 Conceptual artist Kerry Guinan drew attention to the breadth of art worlds with an exhibition that included a collaboration with factory workers in the Dominican Republic, who manufactured the canvases commonly bought at art stores in Ireland, where she lived. “The factory workers each signed a blank canvas and shipped it over to Ireland and I exhibited them,” she explained. “This work was questioning the labor that is behind everything that we produce, even dematerialized conceptual art like the type that I do.” For Guinan, her work “is always revealing power relations in a very experiential way to myself and to everyone involved in it.” 32 Art worlds are always stretching, bending, changing, and even dying. Would-be artists compete for the privilege to be considered such; there is often an oversupply of workers for the art work considered creative.

Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
Published 1 Jan 1980

Our language is impoverished; there seems to be no suitable name for such a new physics. Both “paraphysics” and “metaphysics” have been preempted by other rather different and, quite possibly, wholly irrelevant activities. Perhaps “transphysics” would do. *If a fourth-dimensional creature existed it could, in our three-dimensional universe, appear and dematerialize at will, change shape remarkably, pluck us out of locked rooms and make us appear from nowhere. It could also turn us inside out. There are several ways in which we can be turned inside out: the least pleasant would result in our viscera and internal organs being on the outside and the entire Cosmos—glowing intergalactic gas, galaxies, planets, everything—on the inside.

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World
by Deyan Sudjic
Published 27 Nov 2006

And it was Couturier who put forward Le Corbusier’s name for the two great religious commissions of his career: the pilgrimage church of Ronchamp in south-eastern France, and the Dominican monastery of La Tourette. Together, they served to set a new model for contemporary religious architecture, with strongly sculptural forms and a sense of sanctuary and enclosure, as well as an appropriation of natural light to reveal and conceal architectural forms, creating a sense of dematerialization, and mystery. Couturier’s commissions encouraged Catholic dioceses around the world to experiment with more challenging architects. And the Catholic Church has shown continuing interest in attempting to present itself as part of the contemporary world in architectural terms. It’s an impulse that can be seen in the Vatican’s celebration of the second millennium with Richard Meier’s Dio Padre Misericordioso jubilee church in suburban Rome, after an international competition in which other architects, including Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, were also asked to compete, or in the monks of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic, who commissioned John Pawson to build Eastern Europe’s first new monastery in a century.

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics 2007
by Sylvere Lotringer, Christian Marazzi
Published 2 Aug 2005

The directly social dimension of labor-within which dimension there is no further distinction between "complex" and "simple" lebar, though the concept of Immediate production is In fact, the distinctive aspect of this fantasy-land socialization is a sort of "struggle for recognition" on the part of unhappy minds: unrepressed individuality must be embraced with atl needs and desires by other individualities, If only on the leUers-to-lhe-edi\or page of the newspaper. Antagonism is de-materialized and constantly reduced to the pastime of critical reflection on the inauthenticity of dally life; In the background looms the all-powerful category of commodity-form (the crisis of which is not perceived in the realm of production), which constrains and inhibits reciprocal recognlUon in relationships based on domination.

Tesla: Man Out of Time
by Margaret Cheney
Published 1 Jan 1981

Religious dogmas are no longer accepted in their orthodox meaning, but every individual clings to faith in a supreme power of some kind. We all must have an ideal to govern our conduct and insure contentment, but it is immaterial whether it be one of creed, art, science or anything else, so long as it fulfills the function of a dematerializing force. It is essential to the peaceful existence of humanity as a whole that one common conception should prevail. “While I have failed to obtain any evidence in support of the contentions of psychologists and spiritualists, I have proved to my complete satisfaction the automatism of life, not only through continuous observations of individual actions, but even more conclusively through certain generalizations.”5 He said that whenever friends or relatives of his had been hurt by others in a particular way, he himself felt what he could only characterize as a “cosmic” pain.

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline
Published 15 Feb 2011

“Sorrento,” I said, trying to hide the fear in my voice, “I want you and your bosses to know something. You’re never going to find Halliday’s egg. You know why? Because he was smarter than all of you put together. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or who you try to blackmail. You’re going to lose.” I tapped my Log-out icon, and my avatar began to dematerialize in front of him. He didn’t seem surprised. He just looked at me sadly and shook his head. “Stupid move, kid,” he said, just before my visor went black. I sat there in the darkness of my hideout, wincing and waiting for the detonation. But a full minute passed and nothing happened. I slid my visor up and pulled off my gloves with shaking hands.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
by Gretchen Bakke
Published 25 Jul 2016

Most important, we’d like this means of “being electric” to come from nothing, to be transmitted by nothing, to cause no damage, and to work always and wherever. This abiding cultural attachment to electricity only makes the unwieldy ways in which we have to move in order to access it all the more salient. If only we could dematerialize the infrastructure while simultaneously making power ambient—ever present, never sought—then perhaps we’d have an electricity system better suited to the present and better oriented toward a future that meshes with the data-driven and data-dependent beings we are becoming. The question is, of course, how to do this.

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better
by Annie Leonard
Published 22 Feb 2011

The initial extra material or financial investment to make this change systemwide will be far outweighed by the costs saved on reduced extraction of new materials. Our most brilliant minds can and should be let loose on cutting-edge industrial design that focuses not on improving just speed and style, but on dematerializing—using fewer resources. For example, digital music has replaced tons of vinyl records, plastic cassettes, and CD jewel cases. Sleek flat-screen TVs and monitors are replacing old washing machine-sized ones. Packaging has been made thinner, lighter. In lots of arenas, resource use per product is decreasing.

Ayn Rand Cult
by Jeff Walker
Published 30 Dec 1998

Nathanial [sic] Branden . . . has his patients make an audiotape describing the depth of their problems just before beginning the Callahan Techniques. That way they can listen to the tape after the treatments work if they don’t believe what caused the change.” In Tinsel Town specifically and California generally, alleged phobias are often as much an ornament of personality as therapy is, so naturally when a phobia dematerializes so easily as to call its prior existence into question, some clients might prefer to label theirs a passing phobia that faded away on its own. But when your therapist has recorded you inventorying your symptoms before all the Callahan tapping and rolling begins, it becomes difficult to deny that you had a serious problem.

Narcotopia
by Patrick Winn
Published 30 Jan 2024

Even federal courts ruled it “troubling” that the US government found Horn’s case “credible enough” to pay him millions but never punished any officials involved in the debacle.18 Huddle went on to serve as US ambassador to Tajikistan. The CIA promoted Brown to one of its most desirable posts: East Asia division chief. But whatever the damage done to US integrity, nothing could compare to the suffering CIA sabotage brought upon Saw Lu. IN THE SUMMER of 1993, as his dream dematerialized, Saw Lu discovered a deeper plane of suffering. He’d known many varieties of pain. Voltage fired into sensitive places. Metal paring flesh down to the white meat. But never before had Saw Lu been rendered so pathetic in the eyes of his own people. It terrified him more than any torture chamber.

Surfaces and Essences
by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
Published 10 Sep 2012

His “instinctive sense of cosmic unity”, as Hoffmann dubbed it, eventually led him to the radical notion that nature’s internal consistency — that is, the uniformity and simplicity of the laws of physics — required that any material object (i.e., any normal mass), whether an electron or a cannonball, should be able to “melt” into strange mass carried off by escaping light rays, much as does the inert energy stored in a battery, or much as the frozen assets latent in an estate might turn into liquid cash. This was truly a shocking idea, because it meant not only that solid, massive physical objects could literally dematerialize and vanish (or, if we run the scenario in reverse, that such objects could materialize out of nowhere), but also that any such metamorphosis would necessarily be accompanied by the sudden, simultaneous appearance (or disappearance) of a phenomenal amount of energy. Indeed, it was the phenomenal amounts of energy involved that made the newly-revealed full meaning of Einstein’s equation stunning and even surrealistic.

…

Thus, far from emerging as a consequence of known equations, the “speed of gravity” was an unheard-of notion; to suggest that gravity had a speed was to verge on spouting absurdities. For this reason, a physicist of that era might well have declared, “It wouldn’t be necessary to wait eight minutes for the bad news to reach us. Mother Earth would react immediately to the sudden dematerialization of the sun. After all, it would have no reason to continue to follow its quasi-circular orbit around a star that had ceased to exist and thus would no longer be exerting any tug on it. The earth would be like a dog whose leash had suddenly been cut: instant freedom!” On the other hand, another physicist of the era might well have argued the exact opposite — namely, that it would take time to detect the far-away sun’s demise, a conclusion based on the intuitive belief that no event can have an instant effect on objects arbitrarily far away from it.

Eon
by Greg Bear
Published 2 Jan 1985

Outside the Thistledown, black space and stars and Moon and poor battered, burned, winter-besieged Earth, where few if any were even thinking of the asteroid or the possibility of rescue. How could there be rescue from such total misery and death? History had passed them by. The asteroid’s overhauled Beckmann drive engines prepared for. their part in the drama, stockpiling reaction mass to be slung out and dematerialized in the combined beams. They would reduce the kick of the separation, and the combined kick and counter-thrust would maneuver the Thistledown into a circular orbit around the Earth, at an altitude of some ten thousand kilometers. The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid began their acceleration, in an apparent suicide run to smash themselves against the seventh chamber cap.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
by Michael Pollan
Published 22 Apr 2013

The albumen proteins in the whites of eggs can hold air much like gluten does, allowing the cells of gas whipped into it to expand dramatically when heated. For the base, instead of calling for an equivalent number of yolks to carry the flavor, or cream, the recipe called for yogurt, which made for a soufflé (the word of course means “blown”) even more dematerialized than usual. Its flavor was powerful yet largely illusory, the result of the way the essential oils played on the human brain’s difficulty in distinguishing between information obtained by the sense of taste and that provided by the sense of smell. Each weightless bite amounted to a little poem of synesthesia—a confusion of the senses that delighted.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

p. 345 ‘human energy use over the past 150 years as it migrated from wood to coal to oil to gas’. Ausubel, J.H. 2003. ‘Decarbonisation: the Next 100 Years’. Lecture at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, June 2003. http://phe.rockefeller.edu/PDF_FILES/oakridge.pdf. p. 346 ‘Jesse Ausubel predicts’. Ausubel, J.H. and Waggoner, P.E. 2008. Dematerialization: variety, caution and persistence. PNAS 105:12774–9. See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/earth/21tier.html. p. 346 ‘carbon-rich oceanic organisms called salps’. Lebrato, M. and Jones, D.O.B. 2009. Mass deposition event of Pyrosoma atlanticum carcasses off Ivory Coast (West Africa).

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America
by Tony Horwitz
Published 1 Jan 2008

Stumbling into one, we found a man in a suit with a scale model of the Faro on his desk. This turned out to be the Faro’s administrator, Teódulo Mercedes, one of the many people I’d phoned repeatedly without success. He seemed as startled to see us as we were to find him: an official caught in the act of doing his official job. Worried he might somehow dematerialize, I jumped straight to the object of my quest. Who, I asked, was buried in Columbus’s tomb? Teódulo chuckled. “It is Columbus, this is certain,” he said, without specifying Christopher or Diego. “But let us talk of other things.” The Faro’s 45,850 cubic yards of concrete, for instance, and 125 bathrooms.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Published 4 Apr 2016

In fact, it’s none of those things. A quarter of all Internet traffic at present is handled by a single corporation, one that manages to stay almost entirely out of the headlines. This Massachusetts-based company is called Akamai, and they’re in the caching business. We also think of the Internet as abstract, dematerial, post-geographic. We’re told our data is “in the cloud,” which is meant to suggest a diffuse, distant place. Again, none of these are true. The reality is that the Internet is all about bundles of physical wires and racks of metal. And it’s much more closely tied to geography than you might expect.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

A boring, clichéd, but essential behavior: keeping all of my articles, and all new books except those I read for pleasure, in electronic form. I used to swim in a vortex of paper, and since I live in several places and travel a lot, I always missed what I needed. Not only are electronic versions searchable, but—since we may have reached “peak stuff”—I’m participating in the great dematerialization of life, which will help the environment rebound. In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? Email from strangers or distant acquaintances seeking time-consuming favors, often ways of leveraging what they think is my (in fact dubious) influence and power. It’s said that rich people and beautiful women never know who their friends really are.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge
by Vernor Vinge
Published 30 Sep 2001

Another dark face appeared. “From Sharn, from the empire. But … after ten thousand years, how can he be the same … Aydricks! Remember the Primitive Arts man, he was famous, he spent …” the voice blurred, “ … got to get him out of the comm system! He knows the comm-sat codes, he can—” The ghostly face dematerialized entirely. Aydricks looked wildly at the unmoving peddler, back at the remaining governors. Wim saw more faces appear, and another face flicker out; the same man … “Stop him, Aydricks!” The woman’s voice rose. “He’ll ruin us. He’s altering the comm codes, killing the tie-up!” “I can’t cut him off!”

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

A joint report published in 2003 by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Commerce, entitled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, concludes, “The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.”30 How could technology accomplish this vision in the face of our civilization's crisis of consumption? The cornucopians are ready with answers. Consider, for example, the ubiquitous smartphone. Incorporating the functions of a camera, radio, telephone, music center, compass, navigation system, and endless other devices, this “represents the great dematerialization of modern civilization, well ahead of any imminent collapse of natural resources,” writes cornucopian M. J. Kelly. Turning to agriculture, cornucopians offer a vision of animal protein bioengineered in factories rather than obtained from animals grazing in the fields, just as synthetic fiber has mostly replaced wool.

Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil
Published 11 May 2017

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smil, V. 2013d. Should We Eat Meat? Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Smil, V. 2014a. Fifty years of the Shinkansen. Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, December 1, 2014. http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/shinkansen.pdf. Smil, V. 2014b. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Chichester: Wiley. Smil, V. 2015a. Natural Gas: Fuel for the 21st Century. Chichester: Wiley. Smil, V. 2015b. Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smil, V. 2015c. Real price of oil. IEEE Spectrum 26 (October). http://www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/10.OIL_.pdf.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
Published 1 Jan 2010

In this case, the IMF has a point. We have every reason to believe that we do indeed stand on the brink of epochal changes. Admittedly, the usual impulse is to imagine everything around us as absolutely new. Nowhere is this so true as with money. How many times have we been told that the advent of virtual money, the dematerialization of cash into plastic and dollars into blips of electronic information, has brought us to an unprecedented new financial world? The assumption that we were in such uncharted territory, of course, was one of the things that made it so easy for the likes of Goldman Sachs and AIG to convince people that no one could possibly understand their dazzling new financial instruments.

The Dreaming Void
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 1 Jan 2007

“Of course.” The Artful Dodger changed course slightly, curving around the massive dark rock of the High Angel’s core toward the stem of the Raiel dome. Large dark ovals were positioned at the base, just before the point where the pewter-colored shaft fused with the rock crust. One of the ovals dematerialized, revealing a featureless white chamber beyond. The Artful Dodger nosed inside, and the outer wall rematerialized behind it. “Please stand by for teleport,” the High Angel said. Corrie-Lyn looked startled. “Once again,” Aaron said, “and yet still without any hope of you paying the slightest attention, let me do the talking.”

The Fabric of the Cosmos
by Brian Greene
Published 1 Jan 2003

Teleportation in a Quantum World In conventional science fiction depictions, a teleporter (or, in Star Trek lingo, a transporter) scans an object to determine its detailed composition and sends the information to a distant location, where the object is reconstituted. Whether the object itself is “dematerialized,” its atoms and molecules being sent along with the blueprint for putting them back together, or whether atoms and molecules located at the receiving end are used to build an exact replica of the object, varies from one fictional incarnation to another. As we’ll see, the scientific approach to teleportation developed over the last decade is closer in spirit to the latter category, and this raises two essential questions.

The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells
Published 31 Aug 1996

Thus, the showcase of networking production, the Italian knitwear multinational firm, Benetton, was overtaken in 1995 by its American competitor Gap mainly because of its inability to follow Gap’s speed in introducing new models according to evolving consumer taste: every two months, as compared with twice a year for Benetton.30 Another example: in the software industry in the mid-1990s firms started to give away their products for free, over the line, in order to attract customers at a faster pace.31 The rationale behind this final dematerialization of software products is that profits are to be made in the long term, mainly out of customized relationships with users over development and improvements of a given program. But the initial adoption of such a program depends on the advantage of solutions offered by a product over other products in the market, thus putting a premium on the quick availability of new breakthroughs, as soon as they are generated by a firm or an individual.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

Our public institutions are disintegrating, while the institutions of the traditional left—progressive political parties, strong unions, membership-based community service organizations—are fighting for their lives. And the challenge goes deeper than a lack of institutional tools and reaches into our very selves. Contemporary capitalism has not just accelerated the behaviors that are changing the climate. This economic model has changed a great many of us as individuals, accelerated and uprooted and dematerialized us as surely as it has finance capital, leaving us at once everywhere and nowhere. These are the hand-wringing clichés of our time—What is Twitter doing to my attention span? What are screens doing to our relationships?—but the preoccupations have particular relevance to the way we relate to the climate challenge.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

Economic history has become rather distant from history because many economic historians have embraced economic thinking over historical thinking and have focused on the application of neo-classical econometrics. As a result it is nearly silent on production, firms, entrepreneurs, labour and has become a dematerialized, abstract commentary on economic statistics. This development can be seen by comparing the successive editions of relevant volumes of the Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1981, 1994, 2004, 2014). However, this approach has been very productive, not least in being an element in undermining what declinism thought needed explaining – a serious long-standing failure or decline of the economy, a feature of many economic histories from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

In the meantime, we note that many of the most important positive potential effects of ubiquitous computationally intensive, point-to-point energy flows are on “non-Stack” industries. The Climate Group's Smart2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age report issues confident, sunny scenarios for carbon savings from ICT in five critical areas: smart grids, transportation, dematerialization, buildings, and information management. The key interventions include the more nimble transmission grids as discussed above, distributed energy storage systems, congestion pricing, vehicle-to-grid charging and energy storage, teleconferencing, desktop virtualization, building and facility management, fine-grain metering, and supply chain and logistical optimization.

I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
by Tom Wolfe
Published 9 Nov 2004

Explosions of quickness and power-and Perkins goes around him, over him, under him-three more baskets that seem to occur with such suddenness that Jojo-Jojo-Jojo-- And then the dreaded horn sounded. No longer inside the STATIC pearl.back into the world, where all was politics, judgment, and abrasion. The dreaded horn had sounded! The noise had not really died down all that much, but now the crowd was no longer dematerialized in an atomic fog. Jojo could see individual faces, even though he went to some pains not to look into them. He was conscious of the Cottontop Box at midcourt, the Pineapple Grove. "Yo! Jojo!" A young voice from a section of the stands above the rich old people. "Which way'd he go? You're money, Jojo!

Great North Road
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 26 Sep 2012

The multiple curving ridges of varying sizes that interlocked all over them in seemingly random patterns bestowed the appearance of a sea creature’s shell, convincing her they were living configurations rather than technological. It was hard to tell because they were phasing in and out of spacetime; random sections would dematerialize to sketch their original profile with sharp emerald and orange laserlight sparkles, as if photons were interchanging with atoms. Their haze made peering through the gloom of the chamber difficult. When she did squint, she could see that the wall at the far end was made up from big rectangular window sections that looked directly out into space.