To remove physical form or material properties from something, or to make something less dependent on physical objects.
From de- (remove) + physical + -ize (to make or cause to become). As a verb form of the noun 'dephysicalization,' it entered modern usage in late 20th-century philosophy and technology discourse.
When you stream a song instead of buying a CD, you're literally dephysicalizing music. When a company moves from paper records to cloud storage, they're dephysicalizing their files. It's the verb that captures our modern transformation from a world of stuff to a world of data.
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