Mass consumer choice over offered products is a token of powerlessness, not power
Evidence
Even if the masses have, as customers, an influence on the cinema, it remains as abstract as the box-office returns which have replaced discriminating applause: the mere choice between Yes and No to what is offered, an integral part of the disproportion between concentrated power and dispersed impotence. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 226
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the complaint about consumer sovereignty in culture-industry theory — where the public can only say Yes or No to what the apparatus offers, famously echoed later in debates over streaming-era recommendation algorithms. — connects to: Consumer-capitalist integration threatens rather than benefits individual freedom. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 7; Culture consumed as consumer goods manipulates people rather than liberating them.; Predetermined needs reduce the consumer to the eternal object of the industry — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110 (+5 more)
- SEED: Angle: consumer ‘choice’ as an algorithmically gamed Yes/No binary — applying Adorno’s box-office point to modern recommendation feeds.
Broader Connections
- Consumer-capitalist integration threatens rather than benefits individual freedom.
#corroborates(0.90) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7 - Mass consumers are calculated objects, not the subjects, of culture production
#corroborates(0.88) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 138 - Culture consumed as consumer goods manipulates people rather than liberating them.
#corroborates(0.85) - Predetermined needs reduce the consumer to the eternal object of the industry
#corroborates(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110 - Blocked power over productive activity produces consumerism as compensation.
#expands(0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 689 - Effective power requires asymmetrical preferences over avoidable alternatives
#complicates(0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 620 - Power differs from coercion in that coercion reduces choices to zero.
#qualifies(0.70) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 596