"A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere ... [They] were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no personal objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new type of late twentieth-century life, they thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed."
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High-Rise (novel)
High-Rise is a 1975 novel by J.G. Ballard about a London tower block whose affluent residents, after all the apartments are rented, gradually descend into barbarism, vandalizing the building and remaining in it all day and forming groups to violently attack other floors and defend their own. In 2015 it was adapted into a film directed by Ben Wheatley, starring Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller and Jeremy Irons
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