Modern societies tell themselves a flattering story about speech. The story goes like this: if enough people talk, argue, exchange reasons, and correct one another, a public intelligence emerges. Democracy, on this view, is not merely voting. It is discourse.
Jürgen Habermas is the great theorist of this aspiration. He describes a public sphere in which citizens deliberate, test claims, and form opinions through rational-critical debate. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, by contrast, are the theorists of the sabotage. Their analysis of the culture industry suggests that mass media does not primarily nourish autonomous judgment. It standardizes experience, manufactures needs, and converts culture into a managed commodity.
If Habermas gives us an ideal of communicative reason, Adorno and Horkheimer show us a system of administered consciousness. In the twenty-first century, these two positions collide in a single object: the content feed. The feed promises the public sphere and delivers the culture industry in personalized form. It offers deliberation as a user interface, while monetizing attention as the underlying logic. (You are invited to speak, but the room is owned.)
This essay argues that the feed represents a structural transformation of public discourse: truth becomes a format, discourse becomes content, and participation becomes a measurable behavior.
Habermas and the Dream of Rational-Critical Debate
Habermas’s concept of the public sphere is not naive. It is historical and normative at once. Historically, it describes a space that emerged with modern print culture, salons, and civic associations - contexts in which private individuals could discuss public matters outside direct state control. Normatively, it articulates a standard: legitimate political outcomes should be anchored in processes of public reasoning, where participants can give and demand reasons under relatively non-coercive conditions.
The key is not that people always behave rationally. The key is that institutions can be arranged so that argument, evidence, and critique matter. In Habermas’s language, communicative action aims at mutual understanding rather than strategic advantage. The ideal is a discursive environment where better arguments have a chance to win, where claims are contestable, and where speakers are accountable to reasons rather than to raw power.
Under this model, public discourse is not entertainment. It is civic infrastructure.
The concern is that the infrastructure can be damaged. Habermas himself worries about commercialization and media manipulation, which can turn citizens into consumers and public discussion into spectacle. The feed intensifies precisely this danger because it collapses the distinction between a civic space and an attention market. It makes the forum itself profitable.
Adorno and Horkheimer: Culture Industry as Opinion Factory
Adorno and Horkheimer diagnose a different baseline. For them, mass media in capitalist societies tends to produce conformity, not emancipation. The culture industry standardizes cultural goods and, in doing so, standardizes consciousness. People encounter ready-made meanings, predictable emotional arcs, familiar templates. This fosters passivity and weakens the capacity for critical thought.
Importantly, the culture industry does not need to ban dissent. It can absorb it. Opposition becomes a genre. Critique becomes a style. Even rebellion becomes a market segment.
This is the crucial insight for understanding contemporary discourse. The system does not silence you. It formats you.
The feed extends the culture industry by making it interactive and targeted. Instead of one broadcast schedule, each person receives a customized stream. But customization does not guarantee autonomy. It can simply mean that standardization becomes individualized, like mass production with tailored packaging.
The result is not a lack of information but an overproduction of stimuli, where judgment is constantly interrupted by novelty. The culture industry once delivered the same spectacle to everyone. The feed delivers different spectacles to each person while preserving the same economic function: capture attention, sell it, repeat.
From Discourse to Content: The Feed’s Structural Conversion
The most revealing feature of a feed is that it does not treat speech as speech. It treats speech as content.
A citizen’s claim, a journalist’s investigation, a scholar’s argument, a friend’s grief, a comedian’s riff - all enter the same container, displayed in the same visual logic, competing under the same metrics. This equalization is often mistaken for democratization. It is not. It is a change of regime: discourse is stripped of its institutional distinctions and reorganized as engagement units.
Three transformations follow.
First, visibility replaces validity as the immediate regulator. In a feed, the main question is not “Is this well supported?” but “Will this travel?” The travel criteria are emotional intensity, identity resonance, novelty, and conflict. Argument becomes a kind of performance optimized for spread.
Second, participation becomes behavior. In Habermas, participation means giving reasons, responding to counterarguments, and revising positions under pressure of evidence. In the feed, participation is clicking, sharing, reacting, commenting - actions that produce data. The system can treat these as equivalent signals of involvement even when they have opposite cognitive meanings. Outrage and agreement both register as engagement.
Third, discourse becomes personalized and therefore fragmented. Habermas’s public sphere presupposes a shared space of reference, where claims can be commonly addressed. The feed privatizes the public. People inhabit adjacent realities generated by different streams, with different salient events, different villains, different urgencies. One consequence is that disagreement increasingly takes the form of mutual incomprehension: not “we interpret the same facts differently,” but “we do not share the same objects.”
In this context, the public sphere does not vanish. It is simulated. You can see it on your screen, but its conditions of possibility have changed. It resembles deliberation while running on attention economics.
This is why “more speech” does not necessarily yield more understanding. It may yield more noise, more segmentation, more affective polarization - and thus more profitable engagement.
The Punch: Truth as Format, Not as Claim
At this point Habermas and Adorno converge in an uncomfortable way.
Habermas’s ideal requires a medium in which reasons can matter. Adorno’s critique suggests the medium is already part of domination. The feed resolves their dispute not by choosing one side, but by making the problem visible: when the forum itself is owned and optimized for attention extraction, rationality becomes a niche style rather than a governing norm.
Truth, in such a system, does not disappear. It becomes a format.
It becomes the look of a fact-check. The vibe of authority. The rhetorical posture of neutrality. It becomes a thread, a chart, a debunk, a hot take, a longread. The claim’s fate depends less on its grounding than on its packaging and velocity.
This is not merely a moral complaint about “people these days.” It is a structural condition of a medium that treats discourse as content and content as inventory.
The civic tragedy is subtle: citizens are invited into constant participation, yet that participation is harnessed to a mechanism that rewards strategic speech over communicative action. You can speak, and you should speak, but your speech enters a system that measures it primarily by its capacity to hold attention.
The result resembles a public sphere the way a theme park resembles a city. You can walk the streets, but the streets are designed for spending.
Rebuilding the Conditions of Discourse
A Habermasian response would focus on rebuilding institutions and norms that protect the conditions of rational-critical debate: journalism insulated from click imperatives, forums that privilege sustained argument, transparency about amplification mechanisms, and civic education that treats attention as a political resource.
An Adornian response would add a darker warning: even reforms can be absorbed as style. The system can sell you “quality discourse” as a premium experience while leaving the underlying attention economy intact.
The synthesis, if one is possible, begins with a sober recognition: the crisis of public discourse is not mainly a crisis of opinion. It is a crisis of infrastructure. The feed does not merely host debate. It formats it, monetizes it, and fragments it.
If democracy depends on a public capable of reasoning together, then the question is not only what we think, but where thinking happens - and who profits when it does not.
See also:
Zizi Papacharissi / The virtual sphere: The internet as a public sphere
