Is that All We Are To Them, Consumers?

In this episode of American Socrates, we dive deep into the world of consumer culture through the lens of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s concept of the culture industry. Why do so many movies, songs, and stories feel predictable and recycled? How does capitalism shape not just what art gets made, but how we think, feel, and imagine? Using examples from Hollywood blockbusters to AI-generated music, we explore how art becomes commodified and what we lose when creativity is reduced to a product designed to sell. Tune in for a thoughtful critique of modern consumerism—and a heartfelt call to support authentic, daring, and meaningful art as a form of cultural resistance.

Keywords: culture industry, consumerism, Adorno, Horkheimer, capitalism and art, commodification of culture, Hollywood movies, AI music, cultural resistance, American Socrates podcast

Transcript

Have you ever had that deja vu feeling while watching a movie? You know, one you've never seen? Like you could predict the lines or you know who's done it. Or you just know how the hero is going to resolve her problems. You've seen this movie. I mean, not literally, but you've seen a version of it. It had the same plot, the same lines, the same relatable protagonist with a quirky sidekick and unresolved trauma whose journey towards self-actualization just happens to also save the world. You get that familiar music cue in the third act. The last-second twist you saw coming an hour earlier. The joke that undercuts the emotion so that the audience doesn't get too uncomfortable. And of course, the open ending to leave room for the sequel.

It's Marvel movie number 43 or streaming hit number 97. It's more content. It's easy to digest. It's never too risky. It's never too different. It's not just movies, either. Turn on the radio and scroll through TikTok. Open Spotify, and every song is starting to sound like an echo of the last one. Even the rebellious indie stuff is starting to feel branded, market-tested, polished for your easy consumption. And at some point, you might even ask yourself, Is it me? Am I just getting old, cynical, jaded, or is everything derivative and just crappy nowadays? That's what we're going to talk about today.

According to two German philosophers writing in the wreckage of World War II, we don't just live in a world of consumer products. We live in a culture industry where art is shaped not to express truth or beauty, but to sell, where even our stories, our values, our emotions have been flattened into products. And when that happens, something sacred gets lost, not just in the world, but in our souls. We stop making our own culture and now we merely consume it.

Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert.

Today, we're asking what happened to art and to us when everything became a commodity. Let's rewind the Wayback Machine for a minute here and take us back to 1944. We have two German philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. They're living in exile in the United States. They're watching the rise of Hollywood, of radio, of advertising, and the explosion of the mass-produced media. They've just witnessed the horrors of the Third Reich, the fascist authoritarianism, and the war in Europe. And now they're staring into this bright, blinking lights of American consumerism. And to them, it just doesn't feel right.

People think they're free, but their lives are being shaped by this invisible, seductive and totality rising force. They call these forces the culture industry. Now, when you hear the term industry, you probably think of things like steel mills, factories, production lines that sort of image. And that's exactly the point that Adorno and Horkheimer are trying to make here. They say that in modern capitalist societies, culture is no longer crafted freely by a series of artisans. It's manufactured. It's mass-produced, just like cars or cans of chicken soup or anything else. 

And what happens to culture when it's mass-produced? Well, it becomes predictable, right? It becomes safe, sanitized, repetitive. It's designed not to challenge people, but to be comfortable so that they will purchase it. It's not designed to make you think, which can be daunting, but to keep you consuming ideas and their view. The role of the culture industry isn't just entertainment; it's social control. When movies, music, and media are all stamped out of the same mold, they start to shape the way we think and feel. They give us a version of reality that has been constructed that we begin to accept because frankly, we spend more time with these movies and television and other forms of media than we do in reality itself. 

And so they train us not to ask too many questions or to accept certain answers. They limit what we imagine is possible. And that's not an accident. Horkheimer and Adorno are going to argue. That's by design. Here's a quick example. Clearance rates: That is the number of reported crimes where the criminal is actually apprehended by the police and then faces trial. Clearance rates are vastly different in the media depictions of them versus real life. In fiction. The police get their criminal roughly 90% of the time in real life. If we're just counting violent crime. And that's the kind of crime where police actually do their best, they get the criminal about 37% of the time in Hollywood films. 

Even back in the 1940s. The endings were neat. The characters were all archetypes. The conflicts were all familiar, everything wrapped up just in time for the credits to roll. The world was orderly and justice was always restored. If this sounds familiar, this kind of storytelling, this. It trains people to see the world in closed loops. It discourages things like deep thoughts and discomforts and contradiction. It sells really, really well. Predictability feels reassuring, and familiarity is comforting, especially when life feels hard or uncertain, especially as it did in the 1940s when Americans were battling fascism.

And so slowly, without realizing that, we learn to prefer comfort over complexity, both in our entertainment and then eventually in our everyday thinking. That's the danger that Adorno and Horkheimer were trying to warn us about. Not that people are stupid. But the people are actually smart, and those smart people are being subtly trained by an economic system that needs them to stay predictable, manageable, and, above all, profitable.

The culture industry makes everyone the same, because it's simply more profitable to produce for a mass audience. For consumers who need exactly the same thing, exactly the same way, exactly the same time. That's the culture industry's product. It's you. It produces you. And the more we let it shape our stories, our art, our imagination, the harder it becomes to think outside of its horizon.

Let's fast forward from the 1940s to today. Adorno and Horkheimer were worried about formulaic movies and radio jingles. But what would they say if they saw a Marvel movie? Or if they flipped through Spotify's top 50 playlist or watched Endless AI Slop scroll by on TikTok? I imagine they'd say their nightmare has completely come true. Maybe even then, some. Not only has art been commodified, it's been automated. It's been accelerated, and it's been weaponized for profit.

We didn't get here by accident. Art didn't just become shallow. It was engineered to do this. It was optimized. It was refined the way we refined junk food. Every song you hear, every trailer you watch, every viral clip. It's all been sifted, tested, tweaked, and tracked. It's built not just to entertain you, but to hook you, to keep you watching, to keep you clicking, streaming, sharing and most importantly, opening your wallet and spending your money. Hollywood doesn't just tell stories anymore. It runs focus groups. Alternate endings are screened like product demos. Dialogue gets rewritten if the test audience twitches the wrong way.

The music industry. It's not just about finding talent and building them up. It's about tempo. Songs are crafted to capture your attention in the first five seconds, or they're going to die in the algorithms' graveyard. TikTok doesn't just predict what kind of music you like. It nudges artists to create music that fits a loop, that hits a certain kind of beat that's popular, at least for a second. That's short. It's addictive. It's endlessly rhythmic. Simple art is no longer just consumed. It's been formatted for you. 

And it's not creativity that's driving these changes. It's just marketing. It's the metrics of art. It's conversion rates, really. It's it's virality. We're looking for things that go viral, and that's really all we care about. We don't care what it says. We don't care about the content. If it strikes the right chord with people, great. It is a complete abstract commodity.

 And now, enter AI stage left. Enter YouTube channels that post fake Drake songs made by machines trained on the real thing, image generators that can spit out paintings that look like they were made by thousands of different artists, but they weren't. There's no story behind any of it. There's no real struggle here. There's no soul. There's noise with a face, but the face is a human one behind the scenes.

It's the real artists who little bit by little bit, have been ripped off and recombined so that someone else can own this sort of art project. But people do consume it. Why? Because it scratches the itch. It looks close enough to the real thing. It feels familiar enough. Good enough. When was the last time a song really made you cry? The movie stayed with you for days or weeks or years, gnawing at your thoughts.

When was the last time something broke the mold? We've traded surprise for comfort and depth for dopamine. We've traded in meaning for a rubric of what is acceptable and what is good. Because the truth is, our culture is now shaped by algorithms that care about one thing: engagement and making money. Not truth, not insight, not beauty, but just raw attention that can translate into dollars, which means even the artists have started to adapt not to their vision or to their muse, but to the market. They create only what they think the algorithm is going to like.

They sand off the rough edges. They play it safe. The idea here is to make art as generally palatable as possible, because when it does so, it makes the most amount of money. And it's not just the art that changes, it's us. The algorithms don't just predict our desires. They shape them. They train human beings. What art should sound like, what good art looks like. They sculpt us. They rewire us. The consumer. Recently, The Atlantic ran a piece on how we're splitting into two different cultures.

And around that same time, The Economist described the U.S. as having two economies, one red and one blue. This isn't random. It actually fits the culture industry's idea of perfection. If how you consume art, news, music and entertainment is being sorted into red and blue buckets, that's not just marketing, that's the manufacture of it. That's the culture industry at work, and it's algorithms that have been steering us into these cultural silos since at least the early 2000s.

This whole thing might sound paranoid. Don't you get to choose what you like? Isn't this just the market finding? You know the best products to for what the people want. Isn't this just how modern life is? But think of it this way. If you feed someone fast food every day, vegetables start to taste weird. Eventually, French fries feel like normal food and salad feels like some sort of weird alien food. And that's what happens in your culture. We're being trained to prefer this shallow, predictable, and emotionally easy content.

Complexity becomes exhausting. Ambiguity feels like a threat. Silence feels awkward. That's what adornment meant when he said that mass culture doesn't just reflect who we are. It prepares us. It gets us used to having less. It makes us easier to sell to the easier to manage. It makes a passive life feel normal instead of one that's supposed to be active and engaged. It's a flat world that feels acceptable. It trains us to forget how to imagine something different, something else.

And it's happening every time you turn on Netflix and every time you scroll through Instagram, every time you click play next. When you really start to see it, you realize everything in this society is being slowly flattened into a commodity, not just entertainment. Education. That's just a pipeline to the job market, right?Health care? Well, that's just a revenue stream generated out of illness and injury. What is friendship? Oh, that's just networking in order to build a successful business romance. Well, that's a matter of selling yourself online. Like your own brand.

Marketing yourself. Even your identity then becomes a kind of brand your vibe, your content, your personal growth journey. If everything about you is defined in terms of what you own, then you buy your identity one label at a time. That's what Adorno and Horkheimer were warning about. Once capitalism gets inside a culture, there's no sacred ground left. Even meaning itself becomes something to package and sell. Capitalism will sell it all. 

You want to be anti-capitalist? Hey, great. I have a Ché Guevara shirt that I'm willing to sell you for 1899 to show how anti-capitalist you are. Look at how we talk about life now. We are always chasing success. We invest in ourselves. We build our personal brand. Everything sounds transactional, but it's not free. It's not individual. It's certainly not unique. And it's not at all meaningful. Because when everything has become a product, you become merely a consumer.

You are no more than a walking wallet, and you are worth nothing to anyone more than the number you have in your bank account. So what we lose in art is exactly what makes us human. We lose our pain. We lose our ambiguity. We lose our silences, our stillness. We lose our weirdness. We lose our individuality. All things that can't easily be monetized. And this loss is spiritual. We don't expect art challenge us. We stop expecting culture to mean anything, and we start treating life like a performance for an invisible set of shareholders. Everything is just a route to a payday. We are told to monetize our hobbies, to capitalize our personal property, to rent out our own homes on Airbnb.

And this is where it circles back to power. When people are trained to consume instead of create, to conform instead of question, they're easy to manage. A culture industry is a mechanism of control, then producing thoughtless shells of people who, if they don't consume, don't know how to be at all.It doesn't tell you what to think. It teaches you not to bother thinking, to go out there and shop for ideas the way you would shop for potato chips. 

And that's the scariest part, at least for me. Not that we're being manipulated. We've always been manipulated, but that we're slowly forgetting what real culture even looks like. We just think this is what it must be. This is all there is. Now, maybe you're thinking. Okay. Sure. The system shapes what gets made. But if people like Marvel movies or top 40 AI-generated pop songs or reality television, what's the problem? Isn't that just giving the people what they want?

It's a fair question, and in a way it's the hardest one to answer because it sounds really democratic. But here's the thing. Desire doesn't come from nowhere. Like market enthusiasts passionately assume that it does. What we want is deeply shaped by what we're exposed to, what we're taught to expect for ourselves, and what feels normal to us. What we grew up with shapes us more than we fathom.

When the menu has only five items, eventually those five start to feel like all there is. And when the system rewards only happy ending stories, when studios only fund sequels and platforms only boost what's engaging, then people lose the chance to even encounter anything different. Taste gets narrowed in this top sharp little pyramid. Ideas turn into echo chambers. Curiosity begins to shrink and depth starts to feel foreign.

Maybe dangerous even. Fries. French fries hit the spot. But woe to you who is hungry for anything else? Adorno and Horkheimer weren't sane people or sheep or dupes. They were saying that under capitalism, our preferences get conditioned, and then we're told that those conditions are actually natural. That's just what we happen to want. That's how the system actually hides itself. It makes you think your consumer choices are actually yours and that you're free to make them.

But you never really were. Freedom isn't just choosing between Coke and Pepsi. Freedom means having real choices. And there's another layer to this. When someone says, well, people like it, what they often really mean is it sells a lot.
But sales don't tell us anything about things meaning or its depth or its joy. They tell us what gets the most attention. What feels safest. What's the most aggressively marketed? What's the most aggravating?

What happens to be the top of the algorithm at the moment? That does not tell us what's true or what's best for us, or what is good, or what is right, or what is important. You could write the most beautiful and moving movie in the world, but if it doesn't hit the market at the right time, in the right way, or it doesn't test well with the right demographic, it's never really going to make it.

Meanwhile, someone could write some mediocre piece of [INAUDIBLE] with enough brand recognition to get a $200 million budget and a global rollout heavily marketed. So when we say people like it, what we're often really saying is simply, this is what the system is going to allow people to see.

And when that system only rewards what is shallow, what is familiar, what is safe? It doesn't just shape the market, it shapes us, our perceptions. If algorithms tell us that lies should be promoted ten times faster and ten times broader than the truth, then you're going to live in a world where lives are valued more than the truth. So what happens when culture becomes just another product on the shelf?

It's not just that we get tired of the same recycled stories, or that everything starts to feel predictable and stale. The damage runs much deeper. We lose something vital, something very human about us. We lose connection to ourselves, to each other, to the deeper questions that give our lives meaning. When culture is flattened into mere content, art stops being a conversation. It stops being an act of discovery, and it simply starts being just another way to get a dopamine hit.

At its best. Art isn't just decoration or entertainment, it's a mirror and a window. It's a mirror that reflects who we are. Not just our curated selves, but our rawness, our contradictions, our grief, our longing, our joys, and a window that opens onto something bigger. It opens us to new perspectives, to unfamiliar lives, to alternative futures. It can shock us into a weakness. It can help us name things we've only ever felt before. Think of the first time you heard a song that said exactly what you were feeling inside, but you never had those words or the time you saw a painting, or maybe a movie that just left you stunned and silent. Not because it was pretty, but because it felt so true.

And when art is made purely to be sold, that mirror gets distorted. It gets smoothed down until all the jagged edges are shaved off, until it reflects back only what we already knew anyway. We didn't learn anything. We didn't grow. We weren't challenged in any meaningful way. This is what we already expect. And that window, while the window gets shuttered, it gets nailed down because new ways of seeing things don't test well, they don't lead to greater profit margins for producers because they become more unpredictable. People become more unique, more individual.

And that's not good for the market. Complexity does not trend well and the truth isn't ever brand safe. And this isn't just a loss for artists, it's a loss for the entire culture. Culture isn't just entertainment; it's how we come to understand the world. It shapes how we think, how we value things, what we end up caring about, what we believe is even possible. If we're all given this as a formula, we start to think that this formula is all there is. If everything we watch then is conflict-avoidant, comfort-forward, morally simplistic, then we expect that same thing to come to us out of life.

We begin to crave easy answers. We look for clean arcs and happy endings, and when we don't find them, we become angry. We become agitated. And maybe most quietly devastating of all is that we forget that art, and by extension, life, should challenge us, that it can shake us to our core. And not everything that's good for the soul goes down easy. This is why today, supporting art that isn't trying to be a product is an act of resistance.

It's a way of holding space for something real and a system that prizes polish over depth. It's about lifting up voices that aren't chasing the algorithm, that aren't trying to simply please everyone, to be famous, to make money that aren't afraid to be rough, to be strange, to be weird, to be slow. It's about choosing creativity that breathes, even if it never goes viral. That might mean listening to a friend's unfinished record, or going to a community theater production where the lights flicker and the actors forget lines, but something real is happening there anyway.

It means buying zines and paintings and weird ceramics from local artists, not because they're polished or beautiful or would sell well in a mass market, but because they're alive. They are different. That means choosing books that confuse you, that confront you, or music that lingers instead of hooks or films that don't wrap up everything neatly in the end. Because our culture isn't something you're supposed to consume. It's something you're supposed to live through. It demands something of you two, and it gives you something back in a mass produce world.

To live that way is radical. By choosing art that unsettles us, or by even more daringly, creating our own terrible art, we speak in a voice that we're not used to hearing our own. And we begin to push back on the culture industry. We push back against the logic that says if it doesn't scale up, it doesn't really matter. And we remember that beauty isn't always efficient. Truth isn't always pretty. The freedom isn't always comfortable. And maybe, just maybe, we start to remember what freedom looks like. So here's the bottom line. We don't have to accept a world where every story, every song, every piece of art is just another product on a shelf designed to be safe, to be familiar, to be forgettable.

The culture industry wants us comforted and predictable. It wants us to settle for what's easy to sell rather than what's hard to feel. But you listening here today have the power to simply break that cycle. You can support art that feels alive, even if it's rough around the edges. You can seek out creators that aren't playing to the market's rules. You can make space for your own creativity, whether that's writing or painting, or making music, or telling your own story, or simply going out there and playing a game.

And remember, resisting the culture industry isn't just about art. It's about reclaiming your imagination, our complexity, and ultimately our freedom. When culture is vibrant and alive, will only then so are we.

Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode.
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