Etherealization

In college, a friend of mine wrote a paper on how society seeks to etherealize every aspect of life--communication, hardware, even human interaction reduced, reduced, and reduced again, with the end goal being what software is, a mere "specter", or imaginary thing. In a response to Derrida's Specters of Marx, Antonio Negri began to analyze from the perspective of the "Marxist-Deconstructionist" divide:

When the analysis passes from the hermeneutic and ontological viewpoint to the experience of the political, the picture given is terrible. The conspiracy against Marxism and the world evangilization of the free market, the construction of the global power 'without place' and 'without time', the structuring of the 'end of history', the media's colonization of consciousness and the impoverishment in the quality of work, the emptying out of meaning from the word 'democracy'--within individual countries and in international relations--these represent only a few of the hegemonic orders of capitalism in one phase of the spectral reconstruction of the real. How does one circulate within this new determination of being? .... It's at this crucial point that a discourse on ethical resisitance unravels, one that reflects on the experience of the gift and of friendship, that feels a certain affinity with the messianic spirit and reaffirms the undeconstructability of the idea of justice.

"The Specter's Smile" - Antonio Negri, in Ghostly Demarcations - Derrida, Eagleton, Jameson, Negri et al

While I don't agree with all of Negri's commentary (particularly his insistence upon the exploitaion and suffering of the Marxist agenda, though there is a certain worldwide sense of fear towards the extreme leftist end of things), one can empathize with a certain spirit of hesitancy to do away with that which is tangible. For me this was a semi-nostalgic desire to retain my cd collection and resist the wave of ipodification that swept the world in the past 5 years.