Comment by raumgeist
5 hours ago
Reminds me of Adornos "Dialektik der Aufklärung" and its take on what he calls the "Kulturindustrie". Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though.
An additional danger is how this pulls all of us down. Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste. Cultural offerings do have some educational responsibility after all.
You have a whole strand of German and French cultural pessimism that foresaw the convergence of mass media to the current point to some degree.
> Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste.
I would go so far to say, that even if people tasted the real thing, they would prefer the artificial product. For example, we have Sauce Hollondaise in my country, and most people were probably raised on the convenience product. The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh. So, I've noticed that even if people taste the 'real' sauce, they prefer the convenience product.
Same with truffle mayo or truffle-based products. [1]
People who grew up on the artificial flavor prefer it over the real one. I have quite a few in my circle of friends.
You go to an Italian restaurant and you get plain pasta, panned in butter or olive oil and then someone comes with a real truffle and grates it in front you of over your dish until you tell them to stop. You pay for that amount.
Unless you go to a restaurant with a great reputation or some Michelin star venue, that is the only way to be sure you're eating real truffles. The dish has no truffle-aroma itself and the truffle is grated while you watch.
Assuming ofc (and probably true for most people): your palate is not well acquainted to the taste of the real thing enough to tell it apart from the many fakes/substitutes.
[1] https://www.tasteatlas.com/truffle-industry-is-a-big-scam
If the real thing doesn't taste like gasoline, I'd probably prefer the real thing. I find fake truffle disgustingly gasoline- or solvent-like.
Maple syrup is a big one. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been to even fancy breakfast restaurants and had real maple syrup.
Cracker barrel used to, decades ago now. It's all garbage corn syrup now. I'd rather not have syrup at all than that cloying, thick, gross stuff.
At a restaurant it’s hard because people use way too much and it’s expensive stuff. A solution could be tiny packaged packets of it, the way they do with butter (in part for much the same reason)
Heh, I thought of maple syrup as well. And I'm ashamed to say I prefer the fake stuff! Although it's likely because it's what I had as a child, so there's a strong nostalgia factor.
A Canadian friend brought me back 2 bottles of local maple syrup as a gift. Ok, I'm a pretentious Frenchman when it comes to food and I do think most North Americans have no idea how real food tastes.
But that stuff, I didn't know how it really tasted before trying the OG thing.
Globalisation gave us the illusion of experiencing the world.
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the real stuff was arguably improved upon with the thicker replacement. I don't want wet pancakes.
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>French cultural pessimism
Specifically Jean Baudrillard describes copies of copies with decreasing relavence and quality. But more sinisterly, the loss of knowing what is real, important, safe, efficacious.
His work builds extensively on Plato, Lucretius, and Deleuze's concept of the Simulacrum.
This is like how 95% of SUVs are basically just minivans with a slightly different body. You have to research to find one with a truck engine that can say, haul a travel trailer. Another one that comes to mind is shutters on windows. People like the look but they’re just planks of wood in the vast majority of cases now.
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I was fully triggered by the hollandiase bit. This is something I look for constantly when I travel for real eggs Benny. It's never real, even at higher end hotels. They just use better quality fake stuff. And it's so good when it's real.
My wife makes real Eggs Benedict for me once a year on my birthday. I went to a resort hotel and spit out their Eggs Benedict it tasted so bad compared to what I get at home. They comped my meal. I guess this explains why I’m constantly confused why Eggs Benedict doesn’t taste right. I’ve found one, maybe two restaurants with passable Eggs Benedict in my city.
I don't know the real sauce is incredible compared to the fake stuff. It really is a massive hassle though :/
I know! But a lot of people prefer the fake stuff, because they were raised on it or harbor nostalgic feelings for it. For them, it's the real deal.
When it comes to these lines of thinking, and to romanticism which is closely related, I have a hard time not seeing some of it as disdain for the middle class and nostalgia for the stories classic aristocracy told about itself.
I’m American and grew up inundated with cultural disdain for the suburbs, tract housing, malls, all those things, and at some point I asked, well, what then? What’s better?
Sauce made slowly by hand is better. Carefully curated culture is better. Hand made, artisan, intentional.
Rare. Special. And if it’s rare and special few can have it, making it also expensive and aristocratic.
As soon as you try to give everyone that experience, you get chain stories. You get tract homes. You get mass culture. Because it’s a mass. It’s million, billions of people, and we are not as unique as we think we are. None of us are.
I’m not saying the whole critique is this. There’s another side to it that’s about exploitation and addiction and that one rings true to me. But I find that it’s hard to peel the two things apart.
It’s not exploitation to raise the standard of living of masses of people, and if you think it’s inherently tacky maybe you’re a neo-feudalist reactionary and don’t know it yet. There’s a reason that stuff took hold so easily among certain kinds of hipsters.
I see a lot of leftists where if you could get them to let go of one idea, namely equity and equality, you’d instantly have a “trad.” Most of their other opinions are already aligned.
I don’t see my post as making any judgement, let alone offering criticism. It’s simply my observation that many people prefer the artificial stuff to the original product.
But since you’ve brought this up, I’d argue that it’s not a question of elitism, but rather that 'the masses' simply isn’t given access to these products. What they get is an abstraction of the original, which merely imitates the flavour but abstracts anything else away. Take, for example, meat or vegetable stock, which is now a staple in every kitchen in the form of powder or stock cubes. If you take a look at the ingredients and nutritional values, they’re rather disappointing. The masses may get access to the taste, but not to the nutrients.
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> The original sauce is very cumbersome to make and almost no one makes it fresh.
No it's not.
It's not at all difficult if you have gained the basic survival skill of cooking. I mean, take a couple egg yolks in a double boiler, add the juice of a lemon, whisk until it's thick then add butter. 10 minutes and you can use a bowl over the pot of boiling water you're poaching your eggs in if you don't have a double boiler for your camp stove in the wilderness.
But that's still more of a hassle than putting the carton of that yellow plastic liquid in the microwave for a minute and a half. People will prefer their slops and the farmer brings it right to you; what could possibly be a better life?
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Nothing kills a discussion like when someone just saying "I disagree" with zero explanation. They're not really contributing just cluttering up the comments. At least give a reason why.
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> Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though.
Ray Bradbury did anticipate all of that in Farenheit 451, including the addictive nature of it.
I read Farenheit 451 in 2010, and I was shocked to see that he had anticipated Twitter, but his predictions didn't stop there and he also anticipated that the next step would be what is now Tik Tok.
In The book, what happens after?
Books are forbidden, book readers are prosecuted and their collection is burned down by “firefighters”.
Torment nexus.
As someone who has struggled with understanding Adorno for a long time, I found this recent review of a book about Frankfurt School a pleasant read : https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-dialectical...
You can read and enjoy Adorno in bits without swallowing a whole overarching theoretical foundation. As he also often wrote that way.
Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal and essay form writings.
Also I absolutely love Negative Dialectics as a piece of theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about epistemology than it is about culture.
(He was, however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever and always absolute truth. Ahem.)
From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: "Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”."
I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to continue to let breathe...).
For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff, seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room.
Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history crap.
I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the Hegel stuff generally is barely present.
If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the contradictions and see what's in there" not "here's a recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..."
And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of looking at contradictions in reality and history but without expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable. Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to Auschwitz.
every time someone coins a new term for these phenomena i think of how Adorno already explained it all. "enshittification" SHUT UP
There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances. Remember Peterson et all all warning about "Cultural marxism" and "postmodernism"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
I try not be against new terms like "enshittification" or "dopamine fracking" for this reason, the tech people at the levers that might be convinced to change course seem to be more open to substack and blogpost concepts (see SSC / rationalist popularity for all this new terminology that just describes old continental philosophical concepts) instead of having to read old European thinkers that use too much Marxist terminology.
Edit: case in point, literally users here are now linking to SSC essays explaining critical theory lol
> There was a major campaign the last decade from many pro-capital and libertarian thinkers to label Adorno and other philosophers as the root cause of many people grievances.
I feel it's still ongoing, the reactionary elements are campaigning against anything circa modern (not modernist as in art but modern as organisation of society, so also anything that can be traced back to Enlightenment) and later, postmodern etc. They are actively destroying natural sciences too, which is a part of this effort. Feels like going back to feudalism.
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This is the essence of the Situationists’ Spectacle.