[gumby]

I continue to be amazed by how much effort over the years went in to moving and managing random physical objects around (money, file folders, books, etc). There have been two parallel processes, one optimizing the process (e.g. containerization, JIT delivery, et al) the other eliminating the physical stuff (e.g. files as data, money as data etc). Both processes are at their core ones of abstraction, though all sorts of vestigial traces remain (e.g. calling directories "folders", or even the term "file").

When I go to offices I feel that a lot of that subject matters (physical stuff) has merely been replaced by people moving data around (copying entries into a spreadsheet, for example, or writing reports). That's what we'll get rid of next and again, I believe it will be through a process of abstraction.