Jean Arp and Karl Marx discuss the iPod

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

--sculptor Jean Arp

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

--Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts