If people no longer own themselves, they cannot be said to be influenced
Evidence
No causal nexus at all can properly be worked out between isolated āimpressionsā of the hit song and its psychological effects on the listener. If indeed individuals today no longer belong to themselves, then that also means that they can no longer be āinfluencedā. The opposing points of production and consumption are at any given time closely co-ordinated, but not dependent on each other in isolation. ā Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 95
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the learned examples about impersonal trust and how agents subject to centralized control lose the meaning of their own choices, plus the broader Adorno-adjacent critique of media effects research. ā connects to: Personal property is constitutive of the self, so alienating it harms the person ā Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 307