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  • 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