Well like Seth I didn't do very much today besides read stuff. I read William Gibson's new book Pattern Recognition. It's a departure from his normal Cyberpunk oevre but only in the sense that its not set in the immediate future in favor of a time roughly the same as our own. The books good and I'd recommend it to anyone that enjoys good literature. Enough of a review.
The characters in the book are all what count as the cutting edge of what we would call being "wired" they have cell phones, i-macs, broadband everything, and slick jobs. A large part of their life exists on the internet. The plot of the book is moved along by their investigation of a series of artisitically exceptional short video feeds that someone releases on the internet anonymously.
Gibson sort of out of hand notes the lack of materialism of these cutting edge people. They don't care about have much stuff because all the important "things" exist on the net.
As more and more of our life centers around abstractions anchored by ones and zeroes it needs to be asked in what sense are we no longer materialistic. There is very little out there that we can possess that is digitial (Everquest "Sword of Mystical Impotence Slaying" aside). However while it is encouraging to imagine a world without Cadillacs and built in gas grilles, to breath easier because of the digital revolution would miss the point. While our parents may have lusted after possessing things, it could be just as harmful as lusting after understanding.