>> Adorno, Horkheimer & Culture Industry

short excerpt from wikipedia:
"Culture Industry" is a term coined by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), who argued that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. Herbert Marcuse was the first to demarcate true needs from false needs."

keywords:
Frankfurt School, Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialsim, Hegel
one single marketplace, centralized power; culture shapes society by standardization and commodity, mass production shapes consumers' needs, not the other way round; de-emancipating people, making objects, not subjects, tyranny of the producers