The most widely read section of Dialectic of Enlightenment is the chapter on the culture industry, and it is worth reading with the uncomfortable possibility in mind that it might be describing something real.
Adorno and Horkheimer coined the term deliberately. They rejected the phrase "mass culture" because it implied that popular culture arose spontaneously from the masses, from the genuine preferences and creative energies of ordinary people. It did not, they argued. It arose from an industry: a set of corporations with economic interests in producing standardized, predictable, easily-consumed cultural products and delivering them to a population that had been conditioned to receive them.
Here is the economic logic they identified. The film studio, the record label, the radio network (these are their examples; you can update them to the streaming platform, the social media algorithm, the podcast network) operates under conditions of industrial capitalism. It needs to produce reliable returns on investment. Genuine novelty is economically risky: audiences might not like it. Standardization reduces risk. So the industry develops formulas: the romantic comedy plot arc, the three-act screenplay structure, the pop song structure (verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus), the thriller template. These formulas are not arbitrary; they are refined by extensive market testing to produce reliable audience responses. They are efficient.
The result is what Adorno calls pseudo-individuality: cultural products that appear diverse and offer the appearance of individual choice while actually delivering variations on the same standardized template. The top forty pop songs sound different from each other in surface ways (this one is upbeat, that one is melancholy; this artist is marketed as edgy, that one as wholesome) while following identical deep structural patterns. The appearance of choice in the cultural marketplace is real; the underlying diversity is not.
Now here is where Adorno makes his sharpest, most easily misread move. He argues that the culture industry does not just give people what they want. It produces the wants it then satisfies. The pleasure you feel watching a formulaic film is not a natural response that the industry merely caters to. It is a conditioned response: the result of a lifetime of exposure to the industry's products training your responses to activate in the presence of the industry's patterns. You have been taught what to enjoy, and then you enjoy it, and this feels like freedom.
The function of all this, Adorno argues, is reconciliation: the culture industry produces an after-work culture that reconciles the worker to the conditions of work. The assembly line produces alienation; the entertainment industry produces the synthetic pleasure that makes the alienation tolerable and prevents it from becoming dangerous discontent. Leisure under the culture industry is not rest from work. It is the extension of work's logic into leisure time: the same passivity, the same reception of standardized inputs, the same absence of active creative engagement. "Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work."
A word on what Adorno was not saying, because he is often caricatured. He was not saying high culture is automatically good and popular culture automatically bad. He was an extraordinarily serious reader of Schoenberg and Beckett, but he had no interest in defending the snobbish preference for the opera over the radio. His point is about the structural conditions of production and reception, not about the inherent qualities of highbrow vs. lowbrow content. A piece of classical music performed as a prestige commodity for wealthy patrons is just as subject to the culture industry's logic as a pop song. And genuine artistic innovation can happen in popular forms. What he is describing is a systemic pressure, not an absolute rule.