No society has ever existed that did not contain practices comparable to what the Roman nobility called otium. No such society exists, except in the West of the industrial democracies, which, taking themselves for post-industrial societies, are submitted to the ‘leisure’ industries, industries that are in fact the very negation of leisure…These industries are constituted through the hegemony of… negotium. Such is their decadence.
Bernard Stiegler
The Decadence of Industrial Democracies
Gustave Caillebotte
On the Pont de l'Europe
(1876-1877)
