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Comment by l33tbro | Hacker News Reader

"Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few gigantic corporations—Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon—presiding over unprecedented monopolies."

As opposed to when? When William Randolph Hearst ruled the press? Dickensian England? Even Big Media of my 90s youth.

Culture is always monolithic because it is shared behaviour. Go back to the salons of Europe or Ancient Greece and you would have this exact same argument. Misanthropy posing as a noble cry for utopianism, in my mind.

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There were always alternatives and sub cultures. In previous centuries these existed mainly in other countries. Today the impression is that a) the sub cultures have disappeared, b) the other countries cultures have merged into one. You question "As opposed to when" is a good one - we compare everything with now - and we can say that now things appear to be larger in scale. Yes, for those within the culture, culture is monolithic to them - to look at Culture from outside you can see it's bigger and more encompassing. I think that's what the quote was about.

In the article, the idea most interesting to me was about how traditional "high" culture (books, plays, opera) are still considered elitist when it's the mass culture of celebrities which comprise the elites. It was a passing idea and I'd like to hear more about that.

Maybe you're right about Apple, Nike, other gigantic corporations that sell products and set trends for the market. Google And Facebook are different beasts. They shape culture in a way and with means that really were not possible before. The first does it by managing his role as the funneled entrance to the more vast base of freely accessible knowledge humanity has ever created; the second one achieves it by leveraging the once invisible web of relationships that tie us all together.

Well, for what it's worth the New Yorker writing on Adorno isn't necessarily a scholarly interpretation of his work.

If you're looking for more scholarly engagements with Adorno and the Frankfurt school, try radical philosophy - http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/?s=adorno (disclaimer: I work for radical philosophy)

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