Nicholas Negroponte of the distinguished Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claimed back in the mid-1990s that we should start to think more in terms of "bits instead of atoms". Today this paradigm is frequently referred to as “dematerialization.” The term is defined in “SMART 2020” and “SMART 2020 Germany Addendum: The ICT Sector as the Driving Force on the Way to Sustained Climate Protection” as the substitution of CO2e-intensive with less CO2e-intensive applications, a process that can be accelerated by the use of ICT technologies. For example, products that become obsolete, such as books, can be produced exclusively in digital form.