Ephemeralization is Buckminster Fuller's 1938 term for the long-run tendency of technology to accomplish "more and more with less and less — until eventually you can do everything with nothing." In the Age of Abundance framing it is a direct intellectual ancestor: a claim about falling material intensity per unit of human benefit. The modern renaissance of the concept is driven by the observation that software, photovoltaics, and biotechnology are each ephemeralizing categories that had seemed stubbornly material.
Fuller's original argument
Fuller observed that a telephone conversation in 1930 required tons of copper and rooms of switching equipment, while by 1960 the same communication used a fraction of the copper and a fraction of the energy. Generalized, his claim was that human well-being could be decoupled from resource extraction if design intelligence kept compounding. The argument was ignored for decades because mid-century industrial economics treated matter as the cheap input and labor as the constraint.
Modern renaissance
The rediscovery of ephemeralization tracks three trends: the dematerialization of media into bits (Near-Zero Marginal Cost), the learning-curve collapse of photovoltaics (Energy Abundance), and the shift of manufacturing from mass-intensive to information-intensive with additive techniques (Atoms Abundance). Each is a domain Fuller predicted would ephemeralize, even though he did not foresee the specific technologies.
Ephemeralization is not dematerialization
A common misreading treats ephemeralization as pure dematerialization — fewer atoms, period. Fuller's actual claim is more specific: the service delivered per unit of input keeps rising, not that total inputs fall. Historically, total resource consumption has often risen even as intensity has fallen (the Jevons paradox). Honest use of the term names the intensity trend without overclaiming absolute decoupling.
Critiques and open questions
Ecological critics argue that ephemeralization has repeatedly failed to prevent absolute resource overshoot, and that treating it as a law invites complacency. Political critics note that decoupling is easier in rich geographies that have offshored their material footprints. The wiki preserves ephemeralization as a useful heuristic while refusing to treat it as a free pass against the distributional and ecological ledgers.