In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously declared that culture had become an industry. Art, once a realm of critical reflection and spiritual nourishment, was now manufactured like soap or automobiles—standardized, predictable, and ultimately pacifying. Their critique of the “culture industry” was not just aesthetic but economic: under capitalism, cultural production obeyed the logic of the commodity.
That logic hasn’t disappeared—it’s mutated. Where the mid-century culture industry sold movies, music, and magazines, today’s platforms trade in services and, increasingly, data. Spotify doesn’t just sell you music—it personalizes your sonic environment. Netflix doesn’t sell films—it sells seamless streaming, frictionless choice, algorithmic intimacy. And TikTok? It doesn’t sell content at all—it collects your behavioral residues and turns them into predictive models.
From culture as commodity to culture as service to culture as data—we are witnessing a structural transformation of aesthetic economies. Adorno’s original framework still haunts this evolution, but it needs updating.
Culture as Commodity: The Classic Model
Adorno and Horkheimer’s “culture industry” was built on the Fordist model of production: cultural goods were mass-produced and mass-distributed, designed for maximum consumption and minimal disruption. The goal wasn’t art, but compliance. The illusion of choice masked a deeper uniformity—different genres, same formula.
In this world, the economic transaction was relatively clear: money for a cultural product. You bought a ticket, a record, a magazine. The consumer was passive, the product fixed.
But as digital infrastructures replaced physical formats, something shifted.
Culture as Service: The Platform Turn
With the rise of streaming, cultural products became services. You no longer owned the song or film—you accessed it. This shift wasn’t just about convenience; it redefined the temporal logic of cultural consumption. Instead of discrete purchases, users entered into ongoing relationships with platforms.
Spotify and Netflix don’t just deliver content—they manage your experience. Curation, recommendation, and personalization become the value-add. The old culture industry sold standardization; the new one sells differentiation at scale. But this personalization isn’t a liberation of taste. It’s the production of feelings of freedom within tightly controlled frameworks.
Adorno would likely see through the veneer. Personalization is just the latest mask of conformity: your “Discover Weekly” is drawn from a statistical average; your binge session is a behavioral feedback loop optimized for retention.
This service logic paved the way for a more abstract economy—one where culture itself becomes secondary to the extraction of data.
Culture as Data: The Invisible Commodity
Enter the age of culture-as-data. Here, the cultural product is no longer the end goal—it’s the interface for data capture. TikTok doesn’t need to sell you a song or a show. It needs you to scroll, pause, like, replay—each gesture feeding a machine that doesn’t care about art, only prediction.
This is where Adorno’s analysis becomes eerily prescient. He argued that the culture industry was not about cultural enrichment but about behavioral conditioning. Today, the conditioning is continuous and participatory. You create content, but more importantly, you train the algorithm. Culture is no longer a product but a training ground for models that anticipate—and monetize—desire.
The consumer is both subject and resource.
Why It Matters: The Disappearance of Aesthetic Autonomy
The shift from culture industry to culture service to culture data marks the deepening of capitalism’s grip on imagination. What began as mass-produced distraction has become an intimate, datafied choreography of attention.
Adorno mourned the loss of aesthetic autonomy—art’s capacity to resist, to estrange, to provoke thought. In the data age, that autonomy is not just eroded; it's rendered invisible. Culture is everywhere, but its purpose has changed. No longer a space for collective meaning-making, it is now the substrate for behavioral prediction, micro-targeting, and algorithmic governance.
What remains of critique in a world where every deviation is already mapped, modeled, and monetized?
