![]() ![]() ![]() And so, for recent critics, it is the writer’s purpose to reveal the authoritarianism that masquerades as ordinary experience.īut unlike Adorno, who fashioned himself the observer, authorized to critique mass culture because he had avoided its influence, many critics of twenty-first-century consumerism find their authority in a different guise: as self-admitting participants in capitalism. Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+ Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s: to the critics in Adorno’s wake, the decisions endemic to contemporary American life demonstrate what Adorno called “mass deception,” a state meant to obscure real alternatives to cultural norms. His pivotal 1947 essay on the “culture industry” in particular, and its central insight into how the many faces of consumer choice conceal a regime of control, forms the basis for much recent criticism. ![]() To write on consumerism today is to write in the shadow of Theodore Adorno. ![]()
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