Recently found this article by Bruce Sterling, via Pizza SEO. I love his section on eliminating unimportant physical objects:

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers’ marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe — along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space. “Everything else” should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong *to* you, but it does not belong *with* you. You weren’t born with it. You won’t be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity.

I’m personally a big fan of just eliminating everything you haven’t used, touched, seen or thought about in over a year, or over six months even. Put it in a free box on your corner, post a note on Craigslist of Freecycle and just be done with it.

Sterling’s idea is cool, though, because it’s a nice emotional bridge for people who aren’t ready to just pull the rip-cord on the objects they own. Plus it adds in the extra sci-fi element, the notion that actual physical objects can be reduced to pure data - data from which the object itself can be reproduced as needed. I suspect that this way of thinking will become more and more prominent as people grow more accustomed emotionally to interacting with files and other intangible digital objects.

I was writing about this under the heading of “proximity” a while back: the nearness of objects and data to you in physical time-space… more on that soon.