Mies van der Rohe: Sure, less is more, but stop sleeping on my couch.

People are obsessed with those extreme collectors known as hoarders, but the BBC has an interesting storyabout their polar opposites, anti-hoarders who chuck almost all of their physical belongings and keep only a laptop, an external hard drive, an e-book reader and an iPod in their spartan apartments. Their possessions are largely virtual and digital. Some even go a step further and give up their living space and shuttle from one friend’s couch to another to keep themselves as unfettered as possible. The whole thing sounds ridiculous to me, and I’m not someone who has (or wants) many possessions.

One on the subjects profiled is 22-year-old software engineer Kelly Sutton, who is an Angeleno transplant living in that hard-to-like Brooklyn neighborhood known as Williamsburg. An excerpt:

“Meet Kelly Sutton, a spiky-haired 22-year-old software engineer with thick-rimmed glasses and an empty apartment in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood–a hotbed for New York’s young, early adopters of new technology.

Mr Sutton is the founder of CultofLess.com, a website which has helped him sell or give away his possessions–apart from his laptop, an iPad, an Amazon Kindle, two external hard drives, a ‘few’ articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment.

This 21st-Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions.

‘I think cutting down on physical commodities in general might be a trend of my generation–cutting down on physical commodities that can be replaced by digital counterparts will be a fact,’ said Mr Sutton.”