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Physicalist's Fallacy

/ˈfɪ • zɪ • kə • lɪsts • ˈfæ • lə • si/ From 'physicalism' (the doctrine that the real world consists simply of the physical world).
Definition The erroneous belief that a culture's historical significance is proportional to its physical remains. It leads scholars to study the "potsherds" of antiquity while ignoring the "petribytes" of the digital age, rendering them blind to the conceptual artifacts of the last 40 years.

Atoms vs. Bits

The Physicalist's world is tethered to the tangible. A Roman coin is an artifact; a Bitcoin wallet is a curiosity. A clay tablet is a text; a .txt file is just data.

This worldview holds that because digital artifacts lack mass, they lack gravity. They are seen as ephemeral, replaceable, and fundamentally less "real" than objects you can hold. This bias is what allows institutions to spend millions excavating a single physical site while the entire archives of early digital culture (like GeoCities) are allowed to go extinct for lack of server fees.

The core of the fallacy is a lack of language. The Physicalist lacks the lexicon for the "liminal" artifacts of the digital-born world. They have no word for the "Umbrabyte" (the platform ghost) or the "Petribyte" (the format fossil), so they simply do not see them.

Stratigraphy (Related Concepts)
The Archaeologist's Blind Spot Petribyte Umbrabyte Archaeobytology