Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is
alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are
necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be
satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production
centres and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to
demand organization and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that
standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were
accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and
retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention
is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society
is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological
rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society
alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing
together until their levelling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it
furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the
achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever
involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.
This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function
in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been
suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the
telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed
the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic:
it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast
programmes which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been
devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the
apocryphal field of the ‘amateur’, and also have to accept organization from above.
But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled
and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programmes of
every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry
long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The
attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the
culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art
follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the
dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material
for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical
experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven
symphony is crudely ‘adapted’ for a film soundtrack in the same way as a Tolstoy
novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the
spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air. We are closer to the facts
if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus
which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of
selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all
executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs
from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves. 
In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective
purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful