Although we can still point to many robust industries that produce what we call “our culture” (e. g., the film industry, the television industry, the tech industry), we have gone way beyond “the culture industry” of Adorno and Horkhemier’s Marxist critique of the capitalist system.

Here are some ways of thinking about how we’re transforming the processes of production that shape our interactions and identities:
1. We are a culture of YOUs.
When Adorno and Horkheimer talk about culture, they’re really just talking about “mass culture,” as it was emerging through mass media like radio, magazines, and film. They saw this kind of one-to-many communication as a threat, as a means of manipulating people into buying into one message; remember, these two German theorists had just witnessed the Nazis’ brilliant use of propaganda to carry out mass murder.
New media opens the lines of communication, addressing each of us individually and collectively as YOU, not simultaneously and en masse, but on-demand, through our own agency in selecting the content we interact with — when, where, and how. For example, YouTube and Netflix alone have changed the role of film in cultural production in ways that Adorno and Horkheimer could not have seen coming when they feared that film would monopolize the imagi(in)ing of social reality in its unified production.
2. We are users and prosumers (forgive me, I hate this word but it works).
Like it or not, we produce when we consume (on Facebook, when we like and even when we don’t like something). This fundamentally changes the top-down producer-consumer paradigm that Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory relies on. Users and prosumers appropriate products for their own purposes, beyond their intended or advertized uses, and participate actively in identity formation through search-enabled consumer practices. We can instantly compare prices and reviews of products and receive recommendations based on the data we produce when we make choices. Sure, the algorithms limit our agency, but the flow of influence and information is no longer one way.
3. We are a network.
From the perspective of the network, “individually, we are nothing,” as a space monkey would put it, but we are the sum of dynamic relationships. We are no longer fixed, labeled, and packaged in ready-made categories like any other product of the culture industry; we are linked in more ways than we can see at any one time, and we can shape our identities and organize by our interests.
That’s one side of the “black mirror”…