5 ms·

Reminds me of Adornos "Dialektik der Aufklärung" and its take on what he calls the "Kulturindustrie". Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings

Reminds me of Adornos "Dialektik der Aufklärung" and its take on what he calls the "Kulturindustrie". Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though. An additional danger is how this pulls all of us down. Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste. Cultural offerings do have some educational responsibility after all.

eloisius 4mo ago
This is the essence of the Situationists’ Spectacle.
stymaar 4mo ago
> Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though. Ray Bradbury did anticipate all of that in Farenheit 451, including the addictive nature of it. I read Farenheit 451 in 2010, and I was shocked to see that he had anticipated Twitter, but his predictions didn't stop there and he also anticipated that the next step would be what is now Tik Tok.
- thyselius 4mo ago
  In The book, what happens after?
  - srcnkcl 4mo ago
    Torment nexus.
  - stymaar 4mo ago
    Books are forbidden, book readers are prosecuted and their collection is burned down by “firefighters”.
plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
You have a whole strand of German and French cultural pessimism that foresaw the convergence of mass media to the current point to some degree. > Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste. I would go so far to say, that even if people tasted the real thing, they would prefer the artificial product. For example, we have Sauce Hollondaise in my country, and most people were probably raised on the convenience product. The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh. So, I've noticed that even if people taste the 'real' sauce, they prefer the convenience product.
- westmeal 4mo ago
  I don't know the real sauce is incredible compared to the fake stuff. It really is a massive hassle though :/
  - plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
    I know! But a lot of people prefer the fake stuff, because they were raised on it or harbor nostalgic feelings for it. For them, it's the real deal.
  - eszed 4mo ago
    Try this: https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-hollandaise-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-hollandaise-r... I used to make it on the stovetop - even learned how to rescue it when it broke - but I don't anymore. You can decide whether using a hand blender counts as "real" or not, but the ingredients are the same, and I can't tell the difference, only the technique is arguably "cheating".
  - gacgacgac 4mo ago
    I make eggs benedict probably once a month or two. It's really fairly simple with an immersion blender. Comes together in like a minute. Timing the poached eggs and the sandwich elements is a little tricky, but not materially more difficult than, eg, cinnamon rolls from scratch.
fssys 4mo ago
every time someone coins a new term for these phenomena i think of how Adorno already explained it all. "enshittification" SHUT UP
- clydethefrog 4mo ago
  There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances. Remember Peterson et all all warning about "Cultural marxism" and "postmodernism"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... I try not be against new terms like "enshittification" or "dopamine fracking" for this reason, the tech people at the levers that might be convinced to change course seem to be more open to substack and blogpost concepts (see SSC / rationalist popularity for all this new terminology that just describes old continental philosophical concepts) instead of having to read old European thinkers that use too much Marxist terminology. Edit: case in point, literally users here are now linking to SSC essays explaining critical theory lol
  - thrance 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - tpm 4mo ago
    > There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances. I feel it's still ongoing, the reactionary elements are campaigning against anything circa modern (not modernist as in art but modern as organisation of society, so also anything that can be traced back to Enlightenment) and later, postmodern etc. They are actively destroying natural sciences too, which is a part of this effort. Feels like going back to feudalism.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - topaz0 4mo ago
    Since I can't upvote @thrance's reply, I'll second it here: certainly complaints about postmodernism date to the 90s or earlier and fear of Marxism is as old as Marx (less sure about when "cultural Marxism" specifically became a scare-term of art)
cassepipe 4mo ago
As someone who has struggled with understanding Adorno for a long time, I found this recent review of a book about Frankfurt School a pleasant read : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-dialectical-imagination https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-dialectical...
- cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
  You can read and enjoy Adorno in bits without swallowing a whole overarching theoretical foundation. As he also often wrote that way. Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal and essay form writings. Also I absolutely love Negative Dialectics as a piece of theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about epistemology than it is about culture. (He was, however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever and always absolute truth. Ahem.)
- cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
  From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: "Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”." I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to continue to let breathe...). For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff, seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room. Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history crap. I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the Hegel stuff generally is barely present. If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the contradictions and see what's in there" not "here's a recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..." And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of looking at contradictions in reality and history but without expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable. Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to Auschwitz.
YinglingHeavy 4mo ago
The taste of the masses will always be vulgar, by very definition of the word. Vulgar as in commonplace.

eloisius 4mo ago

This is the essence of the Situationists’ Spectacle.

stymaar 4mo ago

> Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though. Ray Bradbury did anticipate all of that in Farenheit 451, including the addictive nature of it. I read Farenheit 451 in 2010, and I was shocked to see that he had anticipated Twitter, but his predictions didn't stop there and he also anticipated that the next step would be what is now Tik Tok.

thyselius 4mo ago
In The book, what happens after?
- srcnkcl 4mo ago
  Torment nexus.
- stymaar 4mo ago
  Books are forbidden, book readers are prosecuted and their collection is burned down by “firefighters”.

plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago

You have a whole strand of German and French cultural pessimism that foresaw the convergence of mass media to the current point to some degree. > Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste. I would go so far to say, that even if people tasted the real thing, they would prefer the artificial product. For example, we have Sauce Hollondaise in my country, and most people were probably raised on the convenience product. The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh. So, I've noticed that even if people taste the 'real' sauce, they prefer the convenience product.

westmeal 4mo ago
I don't know the real sauce is incredible compared to the fake stuff. It really is a massive hassle though :/
- plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
  I know! But a lot of people prefer the fake stuff, because they were raised on it or harbor nostalgic feelings for it. For them, it's the real deal.
- eszed 4mo ago
  Try this: https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-hollandaise-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-hollandaise-r... I used to make it on the stovetop - even learned how to rescue it when it broke - but I don't anymore. You can decide whether using a hand blender counts as "real" or not, but the ingredients are the same, and I can't tell the difference, only the technique is arguably "cheating".
- gacgacgac 4mo ago
  I make eggs benedict probably once a month or two. It's really fairly simple with an immersion blender. Comes together in like a minute. Timing the poached eggs and the sandwich elements is a little tricky, but not materially more difficult than, eg, cinnamon rolls from scratch.

fssys 4mo ago

every time someone coins a new term for these phenomena i think of how Adorno already explained it all. "enshittification" SHUT UP

clydethefrog 4mo ago
There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances. Remember Peterson et all all warning about "Cultural marxism" and "postmodernism"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... I try not be against new terms like "enshittification" or "dopamine fracking" for this reason, the tech people at the levers that might be convinced to change course seem to be more open to substack and blogpost concepts (see SSC / rationalist popularity for all this new terminology that just describes old continental philosophical concepts) instead of having to read old European thinkers that use too much Marxist terminology. Edit: case in point, literally users here are now linking to SSC essays explaining critical theory lol
- thrance 4mo ago
  [dead]
- tpm 4mo ago
  > There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances. I feel it's still ongoing, the reactionary elements are campaigning against anything circa modern (not modernist as in art but modern as organisation of society, so also anything that can be traced back to Enlightenment) and later, postmodern etc. They are actively destroying natural sciences too, which is a part of this effort. Feels like going back to feudalism.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- topaz0 4mo ago
  Since I can't upvote @thrance's reply, I'll second it here: certainly complaints about postmodernism date to the 90s or earlier and fear of Marxism is as old as Marx (less sure about when "cultural Marxism" specifically became a scare-term of art)

cassepipe 4mo ago

As someone who has struggled with understanding Adorno for a long time, I found this recent review of a book about Frankfurt School a pleasant read : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-dialectical-imagination https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-dialectical...

cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
You can read and enjoy Adorno in bits without swallowing a whole overarching theoretical foundation. As he also often wrote that way. Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal and essay form writings. Also I absolutely love Negative Dialectics as a piece of theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about epistemology than it is about culture. (He was, however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever and always absolute truth. Ahem.)
cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: "Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”." I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to continue to let breathe...). For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff, seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room. Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history crap. I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the Hegel stuff generally is barely present. If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the contradictions and see what's in there" not "here's a recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..." And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of looking at contradictions in reality and history but without expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable. Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to Auschwitz.

YinglingHeavy 4mo ago

The taste of the masses will always be vulgar, by very definition of the word. Vulgar as in commonplace.