that's also a good example of how it's often mostly or partly faked through displacement as well though. your CD and DVD collection has been replaced by round the clock maintenance of the storage and transmission of that data, from the record label or movie studio through various data centers, via a number of middle-men companies all requiring their own ever-changing and complex infrastructures, through a system of caching and routing and cabling to your house, which needs to take place over and over, forever. The only dependencies for your old collection was shelving and the electricity grid, otherwise they were stamped out of plastic once and good for at least a few decades.
There was a lot of plastic stamped out, and there was a round-the-clock distribution system for shipping those pieces of plastic to middle men distributors and stores before they got to you. There's a huge maintenance cost to these cloud services, but there's plenty of evidence that the environmental cost of that maintenance is much lower than the cost of those DVDs.
Is it perfect? No, I'd much rather that a county-or-state library system run the media library and have set of servers and data that were shared and archived and synced with the library of congress. It is by no means more expensive, in terms of cash, middlemen or natural resources, for digital delivery the way that's currently going on over buying DVDs.
Indeed, books to - I always wanted to build a library in my house when I was younger, as the years go by the number of books I have hard copies of gets less and less. Now I just have a bookshelf with reference books, and half of it is empty - everything else on the iPad.
A friend of mine had an entire room dedicated to vinyl LP's, now he has a phone.
It is great that I can carry round a whole library but I used to spend time just fiddling with the books, arranging them, dusting them, taking them out and looking at them. I know I could just build a library, and every now and then I buy some paper copies in a fit of nostalgia, but they just gather dust now. A lot of interests and hobbies are all electronic now.
And the mass of material in your apartment's structure is only one kilogram now, too. Your car weighs a few grams. Your food, milligrams. You only drank 4 millilitres of water last year.
Ephemeralisation applies only to things that are essentially informational, not material. Somehow, despite dematerialisation, the world ends up using more stone and steel every year.
The metaverse, NFTs, crypto, and digital goods are pointed to as the next wave.
Staunch proponents will tell you that we'll be living in VR metaverses, doing work remotely, earning crypto, buying virtual properties, etc.
I'm personally bearish on crypto/NFTs, but kids like buying digital goods in games. And VRChat is blowing up and looking more and more like a threat to Facebook.
