Enlightenment as Mass Deception

I read Theodore Adorno and Max Horheimer's 1944 The culture industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. He starts out talking about cities and their high tech building, old outlying gloomy slums, but maintain small hygienic apartments all these things meant to keep people subservient to forms modern day capitalism. I can agree with this because from what i have seen especially in D.c with gentrification reaching it's highest points in years pushing some people out and bringing in a higher class of people shoving them into cramped quarters in the middle of metropolitan cities. Forcing those residents to maintain the status quot feeding the consumer based industry.

 Industries are no longer hiding their monopoly on businesses prior to that they had been masquerading as art forms. "Private broadcasters are being denied freedoms and deemed amateur" Reading that is disheartening on so many levels but it is the product of the beast which we have created. Any semblance of individualism, spontaneity, and creativity is immediately engulfed and absorbed by power houses of talent scouts, agencies, and corporations that make their money by exploiting the unique, quirky, awkward, rebellious, or otherwise different from the populous in any intriguing way. Even corporations in a sense are dependent on industry broadcasters depend on electrical companies, motion picture and films are dependent on the banks which fund them or loan them the necessary dividends to produce another cyclic form of so-called art.

  People have lost their face and their voice as consumers. Consumers are now statistics. Statistics are now numbers and colors on a chart based on income, demographic, location and disposable income. People have become colored chart on the walls of advertising and marketing agencies. These numbers speak nothing of the product or its quality or even it's impact, the question is who is buying and how much are they paying for it? All the while the consumers, the people are made to think they are in control by giving them a choice. The thought process being "I have a choice so I must be in control". When in actuality the choice presented will inevitably feed the consumer machine further spinning it round and round which is exactly what the producers want.

  The cyclic motion of the machine can be seen in all aspects of American culture. Movies are repetitive to a science. Most viewers know how the film will end fifteen minutes after it has began, who will die, who the hero and the heroin or love interest may be. Consumers are spoon fed the same story over and over again they are bombarded with the latest effects, sexual innuendos the newest hottest songs and riddled with today's hottest celebrities leaving no room for the viewer to use their imagination to think outside the box to think beyond what is given. What's worse is they do not want you to have an imagination in order to be successful in the entertainment industry one can only survive by fitting in, as Adorno wrote "freedom is for the stupid to starve"..."not to conform is to be rendered powerless". Basically saying you do it this way and succeed or you do it your way and starve your creativity and individuality is of no relevance in this industry.

   What i found to be the most ironic about this essay was at no point did the author deem the consumer indignant or ignorant. The people know it's a machine, the consumer sees straight through advertising agencies promises of enjoyment. The masses understand they are being groomed to work, to maintain the cyclic evolving of the beast that is the industry, yet no real solution was given. It can't be due to lack of intelligence I personally think it's more of a feeding of our own addiction to the very thing we as consumers can see straight through. Again advertising triumphs and we the people, the masses and the consumers feel compelled to buy, buy, buy feed the need even though we know in our hearts we have no need for it all.