Escaping the Culture Industry
You may listen to the podcast version of this essay here.
Privacy is about more than just downloading the latest encrypted messaging app. It’s more than just trying to hide your data from governments and corporations. The pursuit of privacy is nothing less than protecting the private self. None of these privacy techniques even matter if you don’t have a self. So let’s start from the beginning.
I’ve noticed a common attribute among privacy seekers: possessiveness. Regardless of their political views, privacy seekers desire to prevent unauthorized access to their personal stuff. “You cannot have my biometrics,” the anarchist says to the government authority. “You cannot record my purchase history and use it for psychologically-exploitative advertising,” the socialist says. I’ve found that most privacy seekers, even if they aren’t political, have a strong distaste of having to hand over personal information to someone else.
Why are we so possessive of our personal details and our attention and other things that affect us? Because we all recognize that there is a core being within us: our private mind, our personality, our self. And it obviously makes sense to cultivate that self and protect that self, and we do that in part by not giving out information about ourselves that can be used against us in various way. And by not opening ourselves up to a level of contamination that our cultures’ propaganda masters can foist upon us. Protecting and developing the self is the ultimate domain of privacy.
One very specific contamination of the private self is via thoughtless consumerism. Consumerism, the desire to have more possessions and to consume and to have this consumption define us, envelopes many of us, bombarding us with images and language which alters our thoughts and feelings. A prevailing strategy in marketing these days is not to sell a product but a feeling, a lifestyle, an idea. You see watches sold for extravagant prices with their owners diving in the arctic ocean or machete-ing through the Amazon. The Ball Watch Company is great at this kind of marketing. In fact it gets comical if you check out their website. Oh shoot, did I just promote one of these companies? But in short, they’re not selling watches. They’re selling an idealistic replacement for masculine adventuring. And it’s quite successful. Most of us recognize that in basic functionality and even in style a $5,000 watch is not that much different from a $50 watch—or even a $5 watch. What companies advertise is a feeling. Carbonated beverages show videos of you with your friends on a fantastic summer day; never mind that by drinking it you’re well on your way toward an overweight, diabetic life where you can enjoy none of these things. Given the sugar content, there is no acceptable amount of soda for a human to consume. We all know the techniques, we all fall for them to some degree whether we admit it or not, and they do influence us to one degree or another.
The father of PR (public relations) Edward Bernays in the opening pages of his 1928 book Propaganda expressed the potential for modern advertising:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
Interestingly, Bernays was the nephew of the psychologist Sigmund Freud. Consumerism is at heart a psychological operation. Huxley in Brave New World captures this brilliantly, which is why the book is a better dystopia than Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the question is—which I will investigate now—just now much does our consumerist culture influence us?
A touchstone study for contamination of the self is the “The Culture Industry.” In 1947 two German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published a collection of essays translated into English as The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer and their book played a huge role in developing the Frankfurt School, which was a Marxist-inspired intellectual movement that sought to use neo-Marxist analysis coupled with other frankly unfalsifiable theories such as psychoanalysis to develop highly critical theories of current society. These analyses emphasized the power structures they argued were influencing people to a profound degree. Their ideas were very radical and somewhat thought-provoking. They thought our societies and particularly “capitalism” were so all-encompassing that they created within the average person a “false consciousness,” an altered view of our relationship to other human beings, to our environments, and even to our true desires. This is a concept that a later Frankfurt Schooler Herbert Marcuse would flesh out in his famous book One-Dimensional Man, in which he argues that “most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs”. This is an extreme and overwrought analysis of societal influence, but it’s not without its uses.
And this is where we get to the most popular essay in The Dialectic of Enlightenment called “The Culture Industry.” The main idea is that popular culture—or mass culture—has hijacked our minds so completely that we do not act as individuals and may even be incapable of doing so. I’ll start by quoting the last image that Adorno and Horkheimer leave us with in the essay. This is long but important, so bear with me:
The way in which the young girl accepts and performs the obligatory date, the tone of voice used on the telephone and in the most intimate situations, the choice of words in conversation, indeed, the whole inner life compartmentalized according to the categories of vulgarized depth psychology, bears witness to the attempt to turn oneself into an apparatus meeting the requirements of success, an apparatus which, even in its unconscious impulses, conforms to the model presented by the culture industry. The most intimate reactions of human beings have become so entirely reified, even to themselves, that the idea of anything peculiar to them survives only in extreme abstraction: personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.
This is the “false consciousness” that Marxist intellectuals—I use the word intellectual as a job description and not as a compliment—often speak of, and I think we can all recognize some of the truth of the idea. If you’re being self-reflective you might ask yourself where you get certain ideas from? Your ethics? Probably not from your holy book but rather the cultural adaptation of the ethics in this holy book. Your idea of an ideal relationship? Perhaps those come from the countless films you have watched. For Adorno and Horkheimer in this consumer Culture Industry a “pseudoindividuality reigns.” People walk around thinking themselves highly individualistic when they’re really just choosing one option out of a pre-determined set of options. In opposition to the variety of options that we’re told advanced industrial society offers us, “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness.” It’s quite true that there is an illusion of difference in the options we’re presented with in our lives. We spend hours if not weeks nitpicking over which coffee maker or vehicle is better suited for our style when we could be thinking about whether either of these products is even very necessary for us at all: much less something we should spend time differentiating between brands. Films recycle the same eight plot lines with the same formula of when humor should occur, when to ease tension, etc. Voters in places like the USA argue over which direction a strong central government should go in instead of whether a strong central government—or government and voting at all—is desirable. Convenience stores if you analyze their ingredients are basically selling different combinations of salt, food coloring, and high fructose corn syrup: the colorful labels being the only real differentiators.
It gets much worse. I recall the moment when I realized that there were maybe a dozen different personalities that I was seeing from people in the world. It seemed to me that many people chose a personality—perhaps one that they saw in popular culture or from people around them—and went along with it. The most conformist people of course were the anti-conformist people, who particularly despised anyone who didn’t think or dress like them. I also remember the time when I realized that most people were parroting things they had heard from external sources. When asking people there opinion on X topic, I would here the exact words they had heard from their favorite pundit. People confine their thoughts to the increasingly corporate-approved and sterilized concepts that are inserted via mass culture into our brains. The ability to think revolutionary thoughts becomes increasingly impossible for such minds.
My favorite line in the excellent film Fight Club comes from protagonist Tyler Durden: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.” Along similar lines the early retirement or FIRE movement sees 9-5 jobs, called “wage slavery” as the prime delusion to escape from. The author of Early Retirement Extreme puts the dilemma this way:
This endless working and paying is called ‘making a living,’ yet people are so busy ‘making a living’ that they have no time for living. A wage slave is a person who is not only economically bound by mortgages, loans, and other obligations, but also mentally bound by an inability to perceive that there are other options available, like the prisoners of Plato’s Cave. …
There’s nothing like working a 9-5 to erase your creativity and get you into a rut, ensuring the perfect soil for mass culture to bloom in your mind. You end up spending your Saturday recovering from the trauma and your Sunday preparing for the upcoming unpleasantness. Corporately-sanitized Netflix shows become your only relaxation: yet they hollow and ultimately unsatisfying in a way you cannot put your finger on. You walk around in a daze as life passes you by. Your wages for a day of work are used to buy an expensive coffeemaker when you could have given up your coffee habit or made it more cheaply without one and spared yourself having to work for those exact wage earnings. Work becomes a way to buy things to survive to work another day. If you’re clever and willing to move to somewhere cheaper you can survive on very little money per day and not have to work as much. Yet the option of living frugally and thus giving up a 9-5 altogether occurs to very few people. And before you know it you’re caught up in the debt cycle with nary an escape: believing that the beaches on that credit card advertisement that you just signed up for are about freedom and not enslavement.
I’m not going to analyze further these ideas because it gets wild and cynical and the Frankfurt School Marxists go way to far. Dangerously too far. I think we all recognize enough truth in The Culture Industry to seek a solution. So let’s talk solutions, especially since we’re at that time of the year where we can start thinking about resetting our minds for a new trip around the sun.
What can you do to fight against the Culture Industry? The first is to become aware of it and deeply aware at that. I’ve found books like Unscripted by MJ DeMarco and Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fiskar to be useful in this regard. Animated shorts like IN-SHADOW on YouTube are fabulous as well. The Century of the Self is a helpful documentary. Fight Club is a great film about breaking from the status quo and embracing discomfort and growth. Kierkegaard should be read as quickly as you can get your hands on his work. Books like The Comfort Crisis and In Defense of Food are essential reading. Read, watch, but then take action. Don’t be content with the catharsis of things that are themselves products of the Culture Industry: use them to propel yourself to action.
How many of us are not either tech or food addicts? Our consumerist societies bombard our pleasure receptors in a mesmerizing way that you should be aware of and resist. Pleasure has infected our world to a dangerous level. Food fasts and dopamine detoxes should be on your radar, as should detoxes from phones, computers, TVs, and tech. Can you go for an entire day without tech? Go walk around town or in a park. Plan to meet up with people. Call someone on the phone if you need to instead of staring at a screen for entertainment. Remember that the most pleasing things to your tastes or desires are rarely the most actually pleasurable things for you. Eating ice cream is one temporary pleasure, but having a fit body completely in your control after a day of discipline is a higher order of pleasure altogether. Learn to enjoy the higher pleasures. And the cheap taste of sugar lacks any nuance and is an inferior sensation compared to other tastes. Recognize that advertising tricks you into thinking that a candy bar is an acceptable amount of refined sugar to consume when no amount of refined sugar is acceptable to consume.
What else? Avoid popular culture as best you can. Especially these days big companies—who are not necessarily products of the free market and who do not deserve our respect—propagandize almost religiously. Their commercials are insultingly political. Walk away when advertisements play. Use Ublock Origin on your computer to get rid of ads once and for all. When I occasionally turn off adblockers or spend time with normies I’m shocked by how many ads they put up with. It’s a different world, it really is. Browsers like Librewolf—which is becoming my main browser—have Ublock Origin embedded by default. Keep your inbox clean and stop giving out your real email address and physical address so you’re not bombarded with distracting rubbish. Read old books, watch old films, resist popular things in themselves and make them prove otherwise.
One of the insidious things about consumerism—and if we want to summon this idea of the Culture Industry, which I realize I am wrongly adapting for my own purposes—is that it is more than just a propagator of cheap thrills and distractions. The films and adverts and presentations that we see are changing our appetite for vital aspects of human experience such as risk. These pre-digested products have had all their rough edges sawed off so that any real adventure, any real rebelliousness is washed away. I imagine in the high corporate offices of film companies today that they deploy dozens of script writers that have all parts of a script audience tested to make sure only the things that are least risky get approved along with the $200 million budget. Every now and then when I do have the displeasure of seeing mass films like the recent Star Wars or Jurassic Park trilogy or Marvel films of the last few years I frankly want to vomit. The same with video games: since 2015 the video game scene has been a rash of remakes, purposeless meanderings, and multiplayer regurgitation. It’s all committee-approved, politically correct and I think designed to turn off the brain cells. You can be sure that nothing that gets approved is worth entering your brain. It’s never been more important to fill your mind—should it need to be filled—with art from before industrial society, and especially from before around 2015.
On that topic, one of the truest individuals that you’ll come across is Howard Rourk in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943). Rand is excellent at describing idealized individuals who are totally self-directed and unaffected by their surroundings. How does Howard Rourke accomplish this? The first thing is a supreme focus. Focus of course requires you to have a mission. You should spend time defining what your life goal is and who you want to be. This will be an on-going process because a lot of the path you’re currently on is likely a product of your conditioning. Keep whittling away until you get an idea. Don’t confine your thinking when coming up with the path: don’t use pre-scripted phrases like “what job do I want to have.” You need to think beyond that. Maybe a job is not the goal. Maybe the verb “have” is not the correct verb.
It takes a lot of practice to develop this kind of focus. You have to go for stretches of time dedicated to a single thing. Spend multiple hours reading, or writing, or coding, or doing your work. Allow no distraction to enter. Shut off your phone, your Telegram chat, and Twitter. Turn off the music. Become frustrated, angry, and bored by the stillness. Don’t get up and walk around. Don’t go to the restroom. Become uncomfortable and learn to live in discomfort. Do not reward yourself for trivial achievements. You are 100% focused on the activity you are pursuing. If you’re having trouble, stop using a digital device and go back to pen and paper: or whatever method you want to choose. You might be surprised how little productivity so-called productivity tools have given you. Do not make compromises in your pursuit of regaining focus until you are once again in control.
Just developing this mindset will allow you become effective instead of simply productive. Don’t mistake effort with effectiveness. If you learn to focus and accomplish goals you’ll be well on your way to accomplish things you’ve never accomplished before: you’ll find that things that used to take months now take you all of a week of this focused effort. And when you do indulge in entertainment or relief, you’ll find that it was never more enjoyable. Perhaps you’ve gone throughout a day totally focused on your mission. The feeling is much more enjoyable than any entertainment could ever hope to be.
As an individual you have to stop being a consumer as much as you can. You don’t need to buy the latest gizmo, the latest fashion, or fill your house with trivial collectibles that are supposed to manifest your fandom. Don’t be a fan of something. Let days or even weeks go by with no activity in your bank account. Cherish things that do not have a cost attached to them. Find entertainment in exercise and exploration and outdoors and with other people.
Practice minimalism. If you’ve never done so, sell all of your possessions and live while traveling for several months. A couple years ago when I was doing this I emptied four large boxes of prized books that I had marked and written notes in. At the moment it pained me, but getting rid of those books was immensely purifying.
You could also try to be homeless and even beg on the street for a time. Read Chris Damatio’s (a former guest by the way) book Rough Living: Tips and Tales of a Vegabond about his time choosing to be a homeless person.
Be a creator. I like Plutarch’s famous line: “the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled”. Become a producer. A producer is the opposite of a consumer. Go outside and build something or craft something. Write something or draw something. Learn to dance. Go perform a comedy skit. Creativity is a beautiful part of human experience, but these days were been so conditioned to consume that few people even have creative thoughts. Expose yourself to good art if anything and use it as inspiration to create your own thing. From the Culture Industry: “Anyone who is so absorbed by the world of the film, by gesture, image, and word, that he or she is unable to supply that which would have made it a world in the first place, does not need to be entirely transfixed by the special operations of the machinery at the moment of the performance.” Creation, not consumption, is what we’re here for.
In conclusion, you don’t want to be like Samuel Beckett’s famous protagonists: “At least I was free; free to do what, to do nothing.” The people who say they have “nothing to hide” are in many ways correct. If you are a boring, lifeless husk of a mass-produced personality with no opinions of your own and state-approved morality,” then I completely agree: you don’t have anything to hide. And you don’t need privacy.
Yours,
Gabriel Custodiet
https://escapethetechnocracy.com/ (New books and privacy tutorials in stock)