Why should there not be a handle?

It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff--he tends to act a though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them--and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him.  Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras.  This man would like to know :  Why should there not be a handle?  Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers.            

 It's true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet does not merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy.  There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality... 

There seems to be an ideology of freedom at the heart of consumerist material culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen. Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility. I believe the appeal of freedomism, as a marketing hook, is due to the fact it nonetheless captures something true. It points to a paradox in our experience of agency: to be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it.

--Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009)