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Ditching your possessions is hip right now. The “tiny house” is popular enough that it has its own conference — the next one, in Portland, Ore., promises to be “the biggest Tiny House Conference yet.”

An environmental science professor recently gained Internet fame (and some ridicule) for his decision to sell most of his belongings and live in a Dumpster. And Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, founders of the blog The Minimalists, recently sang the praises of their stuff-light life in an interview at The Atlantic. Mr. Millburn said, “As a minimalist, everything I own serves a purpose or brings me joy.”

But at Jacobin, Ian Svenonius questions the wisdom of less. He’s especially disturbed by the conversion of things we keep in our homes into data kept for us in the cloud:

“We’re encouraged to lose our possessions. Music? Store it on the iCloud. Books? Store it on the iCloud. Movies, magazines, newspapers, TV — all are safely stored in the ether and not underfoot or stuffed in a closet. It’s a modernist monastery where the religion is Apple itself.”

This religion, he argues, has inverted the traditional meaning of stuff, making abundance undesirable:

“The hit A&E TV show ‘Hoarders’ identifies people with things as socially malignant, grotesque, primitive, dirty, bizarre. In a word: poor. Apple has turned the world upside down in making possessions a symbol of poverty and having nothing a signifier of wealth and power.”

Mr. Svenonius sees the anti-possession ethos as a form of mind control perpetrated by the tech industry, which sees stuff not produced in its factories or by its programmers as a threat to its hegemony: “The record collection or magazine or newspaper might reveal some clue to a social movement or trend or fashion or sensibility that defies their moronic stranglehold on consciousness. A burp of resistance. A clue to a way out.”

The idea of a vast anti-tchotchke conspiracy may strike some people as extreme. But others have begun to raise questions about minimalism’s class biases. At her blog Simply Fully, Taryn McCall notes that while she enjoys reading about minimalism online, “many of the most popular blogs that I read are written from the perspective of people who left high-powered, well-paid and benefited corporate careers for a simpler life and now have plenty of savings to show for it.” And, she writes:

“I am very aware that many people do without and receive stigma rather than praise. To them it is not called ‘minimalism.’ They live on very little, but it is not called anything because it is mostly unacknowledged, and when it does come up they are looked down upon as ‘lazy’ or ‘irresponsible’ (a feeling conveyed in even many minimalists’ posts). So I want to say what most minimalists are not saying: the benefits of minimalism depend in large part on where you start.”

While minimalist living may help some people achieve financial freedom, she argues, it’s not necessarily enough to lift people out of poverty.

In a Jezebel post titled “Minimalism Is the New Luxury Hotness,” Tracy Moore writes: “Getting rid of things requires the having of things. If minimalism is a kind of voluntary thing-poverty, then real poverty is involuntary minimalism.” She adds, “It will always be easier to say having things doesn’t matter when you have too many things.”

As Ms. Moore notes, Mr. Millburn and Mr. Nicodemus have addressed these criticisms in the past. And in a recent post at The Minimalists, they write that at a recent speaking engagement, an audience member asked them essentially, “Is minimalism just for single, rich, white guys?” Their answer:

“If anything, people with fewer resources, especially those with less money, can benefit most from minimalism because a minimalist lifestyle helps people determine what truly adds value to their lives — what things actually serve a purpose and bring joy.”

And, they add: “Simplification begets intentionality. Rich or poor, married or single, black or white, simplifying one’s life can only benefit one’s circumstances.”

Mr. Millburn and Mr. Nicodemus believe the principles of minimalism are adaptable to different lives — Mr. Millburn told The Atlantic’s Rebecca J. Rosen, “Even though everyone embraces minimalism differently, each path leads to the same place: a life with more freedom.” And since part of their philosophy is that corporations create superfluous desire for stuff, they might be disturbed by Mr. Svenonius’s equation of the stripped-down life with corporate control. But if minimalism is indeed becoming a sort of status symbol, its proponents may have to reckon with what that means.