Another essay I've contributed to Vinay Gupta's, The Future We Deserve; coming together live on Appropedia. In Ellul's Propaganda he declares that individualist and mass societies are in effect the same thing, that the existence of unintegrated individuals is what makes mass society possible. Between a living culture and mass society we find the difference between soil and concrete. Soil consists of integrated particles of varying sizes and types existing in "communities" varying by depth and location, all part of a larger living system. To make concrete you must strip particles of their organic connections and create an aggregate of "individualized" and therefore interchangeable particles forced into a blend controlled by an outside deciding body. To this aggregate, the commodification of what had been soil, commodified water and lime are added to produce the commodity concrete. The result is unmoving, resisting and brittle; the makings of a tomb.