from middlesex

Historical fact: People stopped being human in 1913. That was the year henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.
p95