In such a society the basic problem is no longer production but rather the creation of sufficient daily waste to sustain the inexhaustible capacity for consumption. Arendt’s subsequent observation that this supposedly painless consumption only augments the devouring capacity of Ufe, finds its corroboration in a world where shorter working hours, suburbanization, and the mass ownership of the automobile have together secured for the realm of consumption the ever accelerating rate of daily commutation within the megalopolis, a situation in which the hours saved from production are precisely “compensated” by the hours wasted in the consumptive journey to work. The victory of the animal laborans with which Arendt concludes her study of the dilemmas facing modern man turns not only on the reduction of art to the problematic “worldlessness” of free play, but also on the substitution of social gratification for the fabricating standards of function and use. For, as Arendt has argued: Nothing perhaps indicates clearer the ultimate failure of homo faber to assert himself than the rapidity with which the principle of utility, the very quintessence of his world view, was found wanting and was superseded by the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” While utility originally presupposed a world of use objects by which man was significantly surrounded, this world began to disintegrate with the “tool making” tendency of each object not to be an end in itself but rather a means of other objects and other ends. At this juncture where, as Arendt has put it, “the ‘in order to’ has become the content of the ‘for the sake of,’. utility established as meaning generates meaninglessness.” Art, on the other hand, as the essence of inutility—and this of course includes the non functional aspect of architecture—is rendered worldless in such a society, insofar as it is reduced to introspective abstraction or vulgarized in the idiosyncratic vagaries of kitsch.