A Society of Mass Individuals - Manufactured Inauthenticity - a ChatGPT Society

Select Quotes from above (Horkheimer & Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment)

"Enlightenment is humanity's exit from the immaturity for which itself is at fault. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intellect without guidance by others." - Immanuel Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment?"

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"Enlightenment understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. (...) Enlightenment's program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge."

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"The mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits... Technology is the essence of this knowledge."

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"What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." (self-destrunction of enlightenment)

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"in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization (...) the tireless self-destruction of enlightenment (...) public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into a celebration of the commodity."

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"The individual is entirely nullified in the face of economic powers... While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before." (w/ both material well being & spiritual emptiness)

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"The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once." (Mass media produces inauthentic art and inauthentic artists)

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"For the present the technology of the culture industry confines itself to standardization and mass production."

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"Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries." (so we clearly see that a capitalist commodification in a traditional Marxist way is responsible for this industrialization of culture. What happens is the transformation of the traditional mode of production of culture by artistic geniuses to a mode of production that produces mass consumable trash. aAd this all happens within an industrial functionality.)

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"Just as the occupants of city centers are uniformly summoned for purposes of work and leisure, as producers and consumers, so the living cells crystallize into homogenous well-organized complexes."

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"Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again."

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"According to this tendency, life is to be made indistinguishable from the sound film."

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"The fusion of culture and entertainment (...) Amusement is now experienced only in a facsimile, in the form of cinema photography or the radio recording."

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"At all its levels, from Hemingway to Emil Ludwig, from Mrs. Minver to the Lone ranger, from Toscanini to guy Lombardo, intellectual products drawn ready-made from art and science are infected with untruth."

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"Every film is a preview of the next, which promises yet again to unite the same heroic couple under the same exotic sun." (so that basically repeats Benjamin's point. Art originals have been replaced by sameness. Artworks are now copies, produced no longer for truth but from mass consumption and for distraction, diversion, entertainment.)

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"That the difference between the models of Chrysler and General Motors is fundamentally illusory is known by any child (...) It is no different with the offferings of Warner Brothers and metro Goldwyn Mayer."

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"The technical media, too, are being engulfed by an insatiable uniformity." (and importantly this also leads to the replacement of subjective expression in art with conformity to style)

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"The great artists were never those whose works embodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form, but those who adopted stayle as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth... Up to Schonberg and Picasso, great artists have been untrustful of style, which at decisive points have guided them less than the logic of the subject matter."

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"Because of his ubiquity, the film star with one is supposed to fall in love is, from the start, a copy of himself."

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"Today every close-up of a film actress is an advert for her name"

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"From the standardized improvisation in jazz to the 'original' film personality who must have a lock of hair straying over her eyes so that she can be recognized as such, pseudo-individuality reigns."

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"The step from telephone to radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former liberally permitted the participant to play the role of subject. The latter democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs (...)"

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"The principle of individuality was contradictory from the outset. (...) The individual on whom society was supported... was the product of society's economic and social apparatus."

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"Against the will of those controlling it, technology has changed human beings from children into persons. But all such progress of individuation has been at the expense of the individuality in whose name it took place." (The identity of Intelligence and Idiocy)

The Mass Individual