Dematerialization And Sacramentalism
What happens when we need a thing we've outgrown?
I wrote recently about Sony’s controversial decision to discontinue new PlayStation discs, with games released after January 2028 being distributed digitally only, without physical media.
In that piece I went through the arguments that are typically made in favor of physical media: the ability to sell/trade/borrow/lend; the questions of ownership and the revocation of digital content; the ritual and joy of physically collecting and selecting games.
I also noted that the lineage of home video game consoles is distinct from that of PC gaming; home consoles are really more descended from arcade machines and arcade games, not home computers and computer games. A home console was always a lesser arcade machine, not a lesser home computer. Taking away one of console gaming’s few remaining distinctives—the ability to buy/sell/trade a physical game collection—seems to turn the home console itself into nothing but an inferior PC.
But there’s a higher point here, which I was thinking about in the back of my head, and which I’ve kind of touched on before but also struggled to articulate fully. It has to do with “dematerialization,” which Google defines as “the conversion of physical items into digital or resource-efficient forms.” This can refer to reductions in the resource intensity of a manufactured product, e.g. miniaturization. Or it can refer to something like Sony’s argument for discless PlayStations: the physical media is simply no longer necessary to convey the software. Downloading, streaming, and digital storage have all gotten so much cheaper and better in the last couple of decades that the physical media is now an anachronism.
Purely as a technological matter, this may be correct. Whether the home console market as a distinct segment can survive the end of physical media remains to be seen, and I’m not sure that it can. (Nintendo, though it has both digital only and “game key card” kinda-sorta digital-only games, still very much markets consoles as entertainment machines to play games, not as inferior computers.) But on the question of whether the physical media is still necessary, a aa technical matter, the answer is no.
Beyond all this, however, what I’m wondering is what do we lose with dematerialization? This kind of crystalized for me when I visited a GameStop the other week, at the mall.
When I was a kid, there used to be so many of these stores. FuncoLand, Software Etc., EB Games, GameStop. Often a mall had two of them back then. Those stores were stuffed with stuff: piles of consoles above the counter, racks of old Nintendo cartridges, bins of loose discs for a couple bucks, and complete used copies, and of course new copies, of the current and maybe last-gen games plus current PC games. I spotted some giant big-box PC DOS games at an EB Games once, which they didn’t typically have; I guess someone traded them in and they took them.
Then there were the controllers—used, new, name-brand, off-brand. The peripherals, like the guns, the Super Scope, and whatever other weird third-party controllers and controller-adjacent gimmicky add-ons were made back then which kicked around for the next 5-10 years.
Today, there’s pretty much only GameStop, and it feels like a shell of itself. There are games around the edge of the store and some consoles, but the rest of the sales floor is full of all sorts of various and sundry junk, most of it displayed in a manner upon which a monkey throwing things out of an airplane might possibly improve.
GameStop’s CEO even said, after Sony’s announcement, “Software–it mattered in the past. Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectibles make up over half the business. So it’s totally, totally irrelevant.”
So something we have lost is not just the physical media itself, but the aspect of the physical world within which that media existed—stores, collections, displays—and the diffuse benefits that physicality offered, like the way in which buying, selling, trading, lending, borrowing, browsing, sharing, collecting all had to happen in the real world and involve at least interacting with other people.
So that higher-level point about the end of the PlayStation discs is something like this: the dematerialization of the economy may follow naturally from technological improvements, but it also takes away something very primal from us. Something which we need, but which was supplied so unselfconsciously by the limits on our technology that we only become aware of its necessity once it becomes optional, at which time it takes a conscious act to bring it back, which is very different from the way that it was provided originally.
This is what I mean when I occasionally write things like, playing a vinyl record is “sacramental.” The idea behind the sacraments (if you’re Catholic or a Reformation Protestant) is that they are physical, visible means of invisible grace. The idea being not that God needs the physical sign, but that we do.
In terms of this analogy, I think you could see the digital-only future the way that Catholics and the “higher” Protestants think of American megachurch evangelicalism: an idea stripped of its signifiers, historical form, and continuity with the past. Unbounding God can end up meaning uprooting us.
The difference is that these are matters of doctrine and ritual, not technology. There is no element of obsolescence at play there. But as noted, once technology allows for dematerialization, it suddenly becomes a choice to resist it, to insist on the “sacramental” physicality of the consumer economy, in a way that it wasn’t when physical media/stuff was just the way things were. So to keep these things, we now need a kind of activism or “return” where we didn’t before.
This is also a lot like the tensions around urbanism and families and whether cities are appropriate places to raise children. Both living tightly with less privacy (urbanism), and having lots of kids (pro-family/pronatalism, etc.), were things we just used to do.
Those who don’t want them can opt out, which may be a good thing. But those who do want them now must affirmatively choose them in a self-conscious way. And the necessity of affirmatively choosing a thing that was once the default changes not just the perception of the thing, but possibly even the nature of the thing itself.
In a similar vein, I want to share a bit from this last Friday’s New and Old roundup, on the Amish approach to technology. Since not all of you will have read that, and I think the point is very important, I’m going to end with that segment of the roundup, which was my response to this article on that subject:
As I understand it, the Amish objection to technology isn’t dogmatic, in the way that, say, the Catholic Church’s objection to contraception is. It’s more, as this article notes, a means to an end, while the specifics of the technology allowed, or not allowed, or accommodated to some extent, are flexible, at least theoretically.
The approach here is really about intentionality. This reminds me of the old approach we had to computers, when they were expensive and bulky: typically they sat, if not in a proper home office, in a shared room on a first floor. Using the computer was not private, and it was a thing you had to ask for. (Of course, you could sneak downstairs, or be very quick when you heard someone approaching, or figure out how to wipe search history or even get around parental controls.) But nonetheless.
As computers became smaller and cheaper, that “family computer” model mostly disappeared. In fact, looking back, we are likely to perceive the family computer as an artifact of size (big), expense (high) and novelty (this is new, it’s not for the kids to mess with like a toy), not an actual approach at all.
The Amish difference is choosing how to interact with technology, instead of passively allowing cost and abundance to determine those things. That is fascinating, really: it is an insistence that the mere affordability of a technology does not mean the technology should be adopted or used following the path of least resistance.
“Everybody can have a personal pocket computer because they’re cheap now!”, in other words, is an ideological or philosophical idea, not a purely economic or descriptive one. The Amish approach is ideological or philosophical too, but we are accustomed to thinking of our view as a bare observation of fact, and only of theirs as an idea.
I’m reading a book right now which also has some bearing on this question, from a totally different angle, and I’m going to write one of my quick semi-reviews here when I’m done with it. So I’ll be returning to this topic. I think it’s important and I think many of the things we debate are really about deeper questions like this.
Leave a comment!
Related Reading:
Sacramentalism and Consumerism
I loved collecting concert tickets and tickets to baseball games. They were such a great souvenir and reminder of a great time shared with friends or family. Digital tickets ruin that for me. The dematerialization sucks.
There are actually three main groups of plain people: Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren. One thing that they share in common is that they all come to group decisions on the use of technology rather than adopting it individualistically.
One of my grandfathers was Mennonite, and my other grandparents were Brethren. I became aware of this attitude of basic independence from the dominant culture as a child, even though I was raised 120 miles south of Pennsylvania Dutch country in Washington DC. I was fully aware that both my parents believed that you did not have to accept anything because “everyone else was doing it. " Neither did one have to broadcast your dissent—one simply maintained mental independence at all times.
When I was introduced as an adolescent to the concept of peer pressure, my immediate reaction was, “Oh, really?"
On the other hand, when I heard of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's motto, “Unbought and unbossed," I said, “That's me."