The culture industry
selected essays on mass culture
by Theodor W. Adorno · first published 1991
39% recommend61% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Essays on how mass culture such as film, radio and magazines is produced like standardized goods, with the culture industry chapter often singled out. Recommended for readers of Frankfurt School critique of capitalism.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardised all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused by his many detractors of everything from overreaction to deranged hy
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…order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. No mechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned to unfreedom. (from "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno) I think this passage is brilliantly relevant to these discussions. For me the internet provides…
on “The internet does to the world what radio did to the world” ↗…Spectres of Marx, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and particularly almost all of Zizek's work (in particular The Sublime Object of Ideology), which I must recommend. Of particular note is The Culture Industry by Adorno, commonly associated with the Frankfurt School.
on “Apple and Google embody two alternative models of capitalism” ↗Yeah, I've read the book many a years ago. Another good read in this vein is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" [1]: "they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that are used to manipulate…
on “Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia” ↗One of my favorite essay is Adorno's "Free Time" in The Culture Industry [0]. When someone talks of work and rest as opposite, I always think of this quote: >I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic, who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying…
on “How to rest well” ↗i recommend the book: The Culture Industry https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Industry-Selected-Routledge-C... basically what happened is capitalism and capitalism means that companies and individuals seek out creating goods that make the most instead…
on “Ask HN: Are the 2020s the decade of peak homogenisation?” ↗…Enlightenment' might be a good place to start when it comes to thinking about thinking. If you want something a bit more fragmented/playful/debatable, then 'Minima Moralia' would be interesting. 'The Culture Industry' is well worth reading too.
on “Books on Thinking About Thinking” ↗I would also add that 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment', is perhaps a more thorough precedent to 'The Society of the Spectacle'... if you're at all interested ... the chapter 'The Culture Industry' is good. https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Max-H...
on “The Society of the Spectacle” ↗I disagree entirely. This quote explains my view better than I could word it: > The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry:…
on “YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This” video from 2007” ↗…points were intimately related to society at the time, and even today's society. Marcuse called it 'one dimensionality' and highlighted the dangers of total administration, while Adorno lamented the 'culture industry'. They precisely answer to the simple utilitarian position, and precisely the repression that arises. Contra Orwell's idea of "war is peace, peace is war", Marcuse argued that now the contradiction is…
on “The German front in rare color photos, 1914-1918” ↗…understand what people say they feel when they connect with art. That's not what people mean when they talk about AI art though. AI art is Commercial Art. What Horkheimer and Adorno famously called "The Culture Industry".
on “The AI Art Apocalypse” ↗…movies like "Shark Tales" or "Madagascar" and I cant say exactly why. There are funny bit parts but the whole thing feels like it is in the service of what the philosopher Adorno referred to as the "Culture Industry". I find those movies more disturbing than somethign with more overt violence. In a very interesting way I think this goes back to Plato and his fear of 'poetry' by which he included dramatic arts. It…
on “My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft Auto” ↗…philosophical work answers not only to the philosophical commitments of the author, but also stylistic and linguistic ones. The style itself is part of the philosophy. So when Adorno and Debord write against the culture industry, it would be almost ironic if they were to use the style of the industry. They snubbed the industry in everything they did, and that included writing. >The Capital does not need to be deciphered. But…
on “The Society of the Spectacle” ↗…self-perpetuated system that makes future decisions based on its own past decisions. This is remarkably close to Adorno and Horkheimer's view of the cultural industry: The underlying thesis here is that the culture industry preselects cultural production. Within the constraints of that preselection, the customer is free to choose whatever he or she fancies. This in turn leads to a culture industry that can claim that every…
on “No Girls Allowed” ↗Adorno was talking about this back in the 1940s in "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/cultu...
on “Hit Charade” ↗…particular really has claim to ownership of culture, but the naming does sit somewhat off with me, though it's just a personal preference of course. Adorno wrote about the commodification of art in The Culture Industry. Can the same be said about our ideas? Gramsci wrote about cultural hegemony, can the same be observed in our replacement of the meaning of words in this way?
on “Show HN: Dharma – Programmable Peer-To-Peer Loans Using Ethereum Smart Contracts” ↗