"For decades sociologists have found America as productive a field of study as the most exotic locales of Africa and Micronesia, so extreme are the social conditions that persist within its borders. Indeed, the United States’ primary cultural expression and greatest export is loneliness, having turned the impersonality principle into a vast industry, a dream-lifestyle of seafled-off spaces, from the office cubicle to the automobile to the detached suburban home. Concurrently, the dislocation of the individual in physical space has been augmented with the technology of the screen, ever-increasingly plunging him or her into their own private nomos, as devices become more portable and capable of ever greater levels of distraction, away from a commons whose infrastructure decays almost unnoticed"--the Phil Zone