It is a cool summer night in Kuwait, and I decide to cozy up at a bohemian coffee shop called Sluggish with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The endless manipulative cooing of Lord Henry and his idée fixe on eternal youth and beauty are instantly vacuumed into the matcha drinkers’ algorithmic phones—lighting up, buzzing, effortlessly luring their minds to hurriedly keep track of the latest beauty trend. I have just placed an order for a collagen-based skincare package that promises to give my 30-something skin a guaranteed glow. I put the book down, as I and three others pick up our phones, seeking a quick endorphin hit as we willingly fall prey to another marketing scam. We simultaneously sip on our antioxidant-boosting matcha drinks, and I briefly notice a #KeepEyesOnSudan tote bag on the table next to me, as the green drink stains the corners of my mouth. Many of the sippers, with their unnaturally oversized, over-filled lips, produce oddly restrictive facial expressions, despite their somewhat animated conversations—capitalism’s venomous fangs have produced a series of physically indistinguishable clones, I reflect. I pick up the book again, but the sinister portrait of Dorian Gray has quietly morphed into the despondent face of Theodor Adorno. The book has transformed into his and Max Horkheimer’s co-written Dialectic of Enlightenment. As I read their chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” I cannot help but share Adorno’s “bitterly melancholic” view of mass culture and society. We are Lord Henry’s project of deception: we are filtered consumers, performing an illusory, outward perfection while the real consequences of our choices—mental health, debt, environmental havoc—fester unseen in a digital attic we collectively pretend does not exist.
To better understand the social criticisms of Adorno, I continue to read my formerly Wildean book: Adorno’s philosophical and theoretical contributions — first developed with Horkheimer during their exile in the United States and seminally expanded upon his return to Germany’s Frankfurt School in 1949 — focused on a critique of Western Enlightenment and modern capitalist society, emphasizing how the social systems of instrumental reason and the culture industry dominated the masses. Both Adorno and Horkheimer insist that the culture industry produces an indisputable homogeneity, in which mass-produced media is commodified as it manipulates and subdues the masses. In their co-written book, they foreground how the culture industry “helps create a state of mind in which people’s desires for pleasure and happiness are activated but deferred in endless entertainment. It inculcates resignation, habituating consumers to the everyday drudgery of the modern world.”. This capitalistic and exploitative distraction serves to deceive the masses as it scaffolds a systematized status quo that robs people of their authentic individuality and critical thought. Culture, they explain, “amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes… Advertising becomes art and nothing else, just as Goebbels – with foresight – combines them: l’art pour l’art, advertising for its own sake, a pure representation of social power.”. Culture becomes an economic ideology that dominates the public mind, and the value of art is replaced with profitable exchange. The result is pseudo-individuality in which people believe their choices are unique when they are actually mechanically and identically mass-produced by avaricious capitalists.
The café scene around me confirms the prescience of Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1940s critique of culture industry: their dismal predictions have been realized and intensified through social media, turning users into mutual deceivers who perpetuate pseudo-individuality. As a participant of this social reality, I realize that our hyper-consumerism is not only catalyzed by platform capitalists, but actively cradled by us, the masses. We have become one another’s deceivers and distractors, willingly posting, promoting, and scrolling ourselves — and each other— into a numbing cycle of endless, homogenized desire. Adorno and Horkheimer explain how the culture industry is sustained: “Advertising is its elixir of life. But as its product never fails to reduce to a mere promise the enjoyment which it promises as a commodity, it eventually coincides with publicity, which it needs because it cannot be enjoyed.” I think of Kuwait’s local social media influencers swearing that a product has changed their lives — whether a consumable good, an injectable cosmetic procedure, or the latest version of an over-the-counter weight-loss magic trick (like the highly sought-after Mounjaro and Ozempic). I think of “age-reversing” skincare products and rituals: Sea moss! Beef tallow face cream! LED infrared masks! Lymphatic drainage massage! Have you hopped on a rebounder trampoline today?! Micro-needling! Your lips are too thin, why haven’t you gotten lip fillers yet?! They promise that the promoted products will somehow meet our immediate need to lose weight, have age-defying skin, or satisfy our insatiable desire for food, beauty, and entertainment. This incessant cycle illustrates Adorno and Horkheimer’s “instrumental reason”: we no longer ask “what kind of life do I want to live?” but rather, “what is the most efficient technique to make my face and body match the algorithm’s ideal?” This is especially applicable to pre-teens and adolescents. My now twelve-year old cousin has had a skincare routine since the age of nine, inspired by TikTok trends that urge young viewers to maintain glowing skin as they establish their own “aesthetic.” While this aspect of Kuwaiti culture coincides with Adorno’s pessimistic view of mass deception, the #KeepEyesOnSudan tote bag I glimpsed among the slug-shaped matcha cups was no accident; it was the first visible obstruction of his totalizing view of mass media’s undisputed system.
Through a cultural materialist lens, I argue that the platforms that promote mass-produced items and enforce social conformity have simultaneously become instruments of subversive guerrilla journalism and global solidarity, inspiring individuals to identify cultural discrepancies and raise political awareness that finally lends a voice to the oppressed. The civil war in Sudan illustrates how social media platforms have evolved into a revolutionary weapon: when the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces conflict began in 2023, traditional media outlets forsook the country — this led ordinary Sudanese citizens, activists, students, and doctors to broadcast the bombings, famine zones, and mass graves through TikTok, Instagram Live, and Whatsapp. The hashtag #KeepEyesOnSudan has reached billions of views, raised millions in direct aid, and forced international attention where traditional journalism and media failed. In this example, the culture industry turns from a tool of distraction to a digital source of truth that attempts to subvert political oppressors. This use of the platform permits a negotiated decoding of media, as introduced by Stuart Hall, and a consequential political resistance. The live documentations that serve to counter disinformation and raise global awareness reach the Middle East on a daily basis, inspiring us to stand in solidarity with victims of the SAF-RSF conflict. We pick up our phones with our matcha-stained hands, snap a photo of the #KeepEyesOnSudan tote bag, and post it on our stories with a link for humanitarian aid, and a mention of the coffee shop. There is hope, after all, for mass media to spread a meaningful message — one that inspires activism and solidarity. However, Adorno’s cynical view does linger and intensify at times, especially when we find ourselves to be “complacent consumers, depicting a ‘realistic’ world that is really no more than a combination of stereotypes, advertising, and propaganda.”. I therefore stand between the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, waving a flag of paradoxical truth, recognizing contemporary platforms as both an instrument of mass control and a necessary tool for individual and collective agency.
