In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer gave us a scathing diagnosis of modern media under capitalism: the “culture industry.” For them, popular culture had become an instrument of domination—mass-produced, predictable, and numbing. Cinema, radio, and magazines weren’t just forms of entertainment; they were tools for reproducing social conformity. People consumed not to express themselves but to be pacified.
Fast forward to 2025. The cultural landscape has transformed, but the anxiety at the heart of the “culture industry” remains. Only now, it’s not just movie studios or record labels—it's algorithms that shape our desires, curating endless feeds that seem personal but feel oddly universal. What’s changed, and what hasn’t?
Theory Snapshot: From Mass Culture to Algorithmic Culture
Adorno and Horkheimer saw mass media as a top-down operation: centralized control, one-size-fits-all products, and passive audiences. Culture was standardized like Fordist production—predictable genres, interchangeable stars, easy resolutions. The result? A docile public trained to desire what it already knows.
But in today’s digital ecosystems, culture feels less monolithic. TikTok claims to democratize creativity. Spotify recommends playlists “just for you.” Netflix’s algorithm knows your guilty pleasures better than you do. This shift from mass to personalized media seems to break with the old model—until you scratch the surface.
Enter algorithmic culture, a term developed by scholars like Ted Striphas and Taina Bucher. It describes how algorithms shape cultural experiences not just by tracking behavior, but by predicting and producing it. Here, personalization doesn’t liberate—it governs. You scroll not just because you're interested, but because the system anticipates your interest before you do.
Case in Point: TikTok’s “For You” Page
TikTok’s famed “For You” page is the most distilled version of this logic. It presents itself as an egalitarian space where anyone can go viral. But its success relies on hyper-optimization: machine learning that tweaks your feed in real time, based on metrics like watch time, pause rate, and replays. The result is eerily addictive.
What makes this different from the culture industry’s “assembly line”? Superficially, it's the illusion of choice and individuality. You feel like the protagonist in your own media narrative. But behind the screen, you're part of a massive behavioral experiment, one that monetizes your attention in increasingly granular ways.
The culture industry flattened aesthetic differences; algorithmic culture mimics them. It doesn’t suppress uniqueness—it simulates it. Where Adorno saw homogeneity, we now get micro-niches. But the economic logic is the same: keep users engaged, extract value, repeat.
Freedom, Fictions, and Feedback Loops
The core question hasn’t changed: Is cultural consumption making us more free—or more predictable?
Adorno might balk at the idea that TikTokers or Spotify users are “empowered.” He’d likely see personalization as the latest strategy for managing dissent—by absorbing it. You want weird? Here’s curated weirdness. You want radical? Here’s a digestible, ad-friendly version. All safely contained within a feedback loop optimized for profit.
But where Adorno saw bleak conformity, today’s theorists remind us of something more subtle: participation itself can be a mode of control. The feed flatters you. It listens. It adapts. But it never relinquishes power.
And maybe that’s the enduring insight of the culture industry today: that culture can feel personal while remaining impersonal. That the machine no longer needs to tell you what to want—it can simply become your wanting.
