"The Tiller Girls can no longer be reassembled into human beings after the fact. [...] The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation. Since the principle of the capitalist production process does not arise purely out of nature, it must destroy the natural organisms that it regards either as means or as resistance. Community and personality perish when what is demanded is calculability; it is only as a tiny piece of the mass that the individual can clamber up charts and can service machines without any friction."
Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament", The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 78.
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