......

"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.  This was the sort of resident that was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait or his neighbors to make a mistake...... their opponents were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular 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 kind of late twentieth-century life.  they thrived on rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed."   




"She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling -- the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain."






  -- J. G. Ballard, Excerpts From: High-rise