there’s a certain beauty to digitization and dematerialization that i don’t think gets appreciated. we actually have sloughed off earthly bonds! gotten rid of things that don’t matter to us, contingencies, frictions, cruft, weight.

i only see people reflect on this to lament it — there was a certain seriousness that has been lost. the old frictions forced us to stay grounded, material reality intruded upon us and kept us sane, necessity kept us responsible, illegibility gave us privacy, true luxury is now what is physical and offline, etc.

but there’s also the fact that (some of us) literally got what we wanted — to be ethereal, to live in a world of frictionless information flows and endless choice. it’s easy to make a mess with all this abundance and flexibility…but it’s worth remembering that this was once precious and infinitely desired. the butterfly spreading its wings.