The shrinking of nearly everything that can be rendered digitally has taken the gravity out of materialism. Is the invisible giving us a new kind of power?

Materialism on the Wane?

“Materialism”—getting and spending. Want not—waste a lot. Which boys have the best new toys? It’s our acquisitive, wealth-oriented drive to own physical things—the more, the bigger, the more expensive, the better. As if nothing else mattered, or even existed. But wait—there’s a ghost in the machine. From the very fountainhead of technology itself, something a lot more like spirit than matter is pouring into everyday buying and selling. It’s actually hard to own it, and there are lessons to be had—once we get past the glitter. A halfway house between material and spiritual...could that be—“digital”?

What’s Happened to Musical Recordings?

Consider what’s happened to musical recordings. Parents or grandparents purchased them as big, clunky cylinders for their gramophone. Over time that cylinder became a vinyl disk, then a tape, and finally a CD. But now it’s a—nothing—almost. Increasingly, you download music and don’t acquire any directly visible “thing.” Owning your favorite songs or symphonies no longer means possessing them as a particular physical object.

And the files you do purchase, the invisible coding that allows various devices to play the recordings you own—these are phantoms, slippery in the extreme. They can evaporate in a spastic flash of overheated electrons, or else be duplicated and sent on in little more than a few seconds. For next to nothing, by the way, and quite literally to millions. Millions who are—oops!—NOT OWNERS. There’s no way to repossess either. But hey, because modern recordings can disappear so easily, you almost have to copy them somewhere.

So where do the creators and sellers of the music draw the line? Are two or perhaps four backup copies the legitimate limit? From their perspective, and that of our culture as a whole, the work of writing, performing, and distributing music has to be supported. Otherwise, we are all impoverished. That makes perfect sense. On the other hand, as the buyers, you and I know that our entire music library—which could easily have taken thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to collect—can now be lost forever when an aging Windows XP machine no longer boots.

Digital Complicates Owning

Do you see what a tangle this is for getting and spending? Owning material “things” was so much simpler. And now, when you do own—what’s to display? How, these days, do you show off your wealth? Think of a grandiose collection of musical performances that 25 years ago took up the whole wall of a home library and boomed out of gigantic sub-woofers. Today it resides in a tiny two by four inch gizmo and squeaks privately out of earbuds. And this is not just about music. Distribution systems that download a pattern and replicate the thing are the future. Books, paintings, videos, photographs, even simpler physical objects are all moving in this direction. Obtain the file and “print” the thing on site as needed.

The Paradigm is Changing

Size and weight, sheer physical presence, used to signal us about stature in individuals. The bigger, more ponderous, more expensive the possessions—the higher the stature of the owner. But now, digital gets continually smaller, cheaper, and less visible. The higher your stature, the less you have to display for it. And over time, the less you paid for it. Your acquisitions are, more and more—less and less “substantial.” These contrary patterns undermine materialism, and beg for a new paradigm.

Newton gave us the “clockwork universe.” The perfect, objective machine, the same for all observers, ticking onwards into eternity—ideal, really, for buying and owning. Einstein and Bohr twisted that around. In the extremes, space curves, speed shrinks length and stretches time, and distant, disconnected particles mirror each other’s behavior. Still, we don’t actually experience these extremes, so our trickle-down, everyday worldview has been stuck back with the objective clockwork. Until digital, that is.

Digital Brings Home Extremes

In dealing everyday with digital, we face extremes of speed, miniaturization, resonance, and complexity that are dismantling the familiar patterns of the materialist’s world. Software is not quite “spirit,” but it is certainly a “subtler energy.” In it we capture something closer to pure form—the relatively “disembodied” essentials of things. These don’t behave at all like “objects.” Indeed, if we look at how they do behave, there are lessons, and perhaps the next great model for how our reality works.

A Different Kind of Universe

Digital connects everything to everything via networks. We don’t see these connections, but they are vast and they are there. Billions of imperceptible “vibrations” come together to create the Internet we experience. Thus what’s inside of and between things—what’s less visible—holds the real power. Different browsers render the same code differently. Some folks have Flash and see animations; others don’t. And they are both right. All observers also contribute to and change the network. So it’s always shifting, always evolving, never finished.

A Network Universe

Alter the language here slightly and you’ve got the yogic, or holistic, or Native American view of reality. “All my relations” connect to and support this very moment. What’s real is not “objects,” but rather the web—all these interconnections, and the ever-shifting dance of awareness. Not an object-oriented, clockwork universe any more—rather, it’s a network universe. A universe with far more respect for the unseen—and a much less support for materialism.