Is the loneliness of the high-rise the loneliness of the city?

We might think here of Paolo Virno’s distinction between the “multitude” and
“people.” The latter positions individuals in relationship to larger shared identities in which individuals recognize themselves and with which they see shared experience, while multitude (which Virno characterizes as the dominant tendency of the present) describes subjects incapable of recognizing themselves in social groupings or of imagining shared experiences. The individuals of the multitude are bound together as multitude by the recognition in one another of the shared experiences of alienation.

- Contemporary Ornament: The Return of the Symbolic Repressed by Robert Levit