Please note the following:
- Technology is making gestures precise
and brutal, and with them men [sic].
- It expels from movements
all hesitation,
deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were
ahistorical demands of objects.
- Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and
discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed,
others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those
entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding
the interior of the house which receives them. What
does it mean for the subject that there are no more casement windows
to open,
- but only sliding
frames to
shove, no gentle latches
but
turnable handles, no forecourt, no doorstep before the street, no wall
around the garden? And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power
of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children
and cyclists?
- Not least to blame
for the
withering
of experience is the fact that things, under the law of pure functionality,
assume a form that limits contact with them to mere operation, and tolerates
no surplus, either in freedom of conduct or in autonomy
of things, which would survive as the core of experience, because
it is not consumed by the moment of action.
Adorno,
T. 1951
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life
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