Playground Blues

Highlights

In the nineteenth century, a new organization of production known as the factory system gradually replaced artisan labor. It reached its classical form when Henry Ford installed the first assembly line in his factory in 1913. The assembly line relied on two principles. The first was standardization of parts, already employed in the production of military uniforms in the nineteenth century. The second, newer principle was the separation of the production process into a set of simple, repetitive, and sequential activities that could be executed by workers who did not have to master the entire process and could be easily replaced. Not surprisingly, modern media follows the logic of the factory...

— p. 29

[Virilio] mourns the destruction of distance, geographic grandeur, the vastness of natural space, the vastness that guaranteed time delay between events and our reactions, giving us time for critical reflection necessary to arrive at a correct decision.