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Interesting article. I think the people used as examples have overdone it, but...
I now divide the world up into analog and digital. Anything that can be reasonable digitized, I want digitized.
This doesn't mean I don't have furniture, beds and a house (currently), but what it does mean it than I can have choices not available to people previously.
For example, I love reading. So my lifestyle had been philosophically tied to my heavy, rarely movable library. With e-books, the library shrinks and becomes easily movable. I could consider things like RV'ing a few years in my retirement, seeing the countryside, and still being able to read books at night. Or listen to music, or look at old picture of friends and other memories.
The more my digitizable items are digitized, and redundantly backed-up, including offsite storage, the less at-risk those things are to catastrophic damage, (fire, wind, theft). And nowadays, analog things are cheap and available, so even with a catastrophe, I could rebuild a lot cheaper, because there is less thing to have to replace. If I weren't such a happy gardener, I might downsize.
But different people view life differently. I still have things of sentimental value, and I still want analog things, (bed, chairs, table, digital/analog interface devices), and I never expect this to end until I do. But the quantity keeps shrinking.
Back when I was a pre-med, a older fellow student ('Nam vet) had a shelf of jazz record albums 6 feet long, I believe he stated there was 800 albums (or so). Now I can keep the same amount of music (in WAV files - no compression) on a 2.5" hard drive, weighing 6 ounces (2/10 of a kilo), Including case! The records weighted 300+ pounds (150+ kilos)...
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