The death was foretold by the German social critic Theodor Adorno. In his 1951 book, Minima Moralia, he wrote of his sense that the industrial “spirit of practicality” was expanding from the realm of business into that of everyday social relations. An efficiency-minded approach to communication was beginning to warp the way people spoke to each other: If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one’s own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straightforward. Every sheath interposed between men in their transactions is felt as a disturbance to the
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