The Lonely Crowd

The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins all technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to television, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "the lonely crowd." The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions -- and each time in a more concrete manner.

--Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967