how the algorithm keeps you under control

In their 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment, the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer voiced their concerns about how the popular media of the time—film, radio, and magazines—primarily functioned to pacify the general population.

To them, the “culture industry” was a tool to both occupy our senses and influence our attitudes toward the world. Through the mass production of entertainment, the media-makers are able to dominate people’s leisure “from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning.” The flat, repetitive nature of the content, meanwhile, enforces social structures by pushing the same conformist narratives, and the movie-goer never questions anything since he “sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left.”

Adorno and Horkheimer would probably be losing their shit today.

The mass media of their era certainly created a layer of depersonalization from objective reality, allowing for the viewer to lose some of their critical lens. When we watch a movie, we can forget that we’re being fed the perspective of a camera, and when we read the New York Times, we can forget about the layers of editorial consent affecting how the story is presented. These oversights render us complacent, and subject to the norms of the culture industry.

However, as I describe in my previous substack post, the personalized recommendation systems of social media add another layer of depersonalization. You now perceive a message as if it’s coming from your “algorithmized self,” making you less likely to question it. The resulting “algorithmic gaze” removes us further from truth, enhanced both by our solipsistic relationship with social media and the “flow state” we enter through interacting with our phones.

Simply put, you’re a more passive consumer when you’re scrolling on TikTok than when you’re watching a movie. This makes it easier to cram in more and more “mass culture” through an endless stream of “content” rather than actual messaging. Why do you think we’ve resigned ourselves to this incessant parade of enshittified advertisements, AI slop, and Subway Surfers-style “sludge” content? As Adorno would probably point out, we’re identifying with a manufactured need—one so entertaining that we overlook the deterioration of what we’re consuming.

Notably, all of this content is user-generated. There’s no bogeyman imposing cultural messaging from the top down. Rather, conformity is ingrained into the very structure of social media. The act of participating on TikTok, for example, schematizes certain assumptions like valuing follower counts or view counts. This ties one’s self-worth to what goes viral on the algorithm, incentivizing the creation of ever more content.

If you as the viewer enjoy a meme, you mentally legitimize the algorithm that brought it to you. If you engage by liking or commenting, you even help it crowdsource information about the type of audience that should receive that meme in the future. To exist on social media at all is to opt into a technofeudalistic fiefdom where we individually and collectively feed platforms the information they need to keep us docile.

To opt out, though, is to be excluded. The average Gen Z American spends 1.5 hours a day on TikTok, and there are dozens of new app-wide trends each week—each a cultural reference one must understand to be a part of modern society. As more and more of us continue to buy in, then, it’ll be harder and harder to avoid the algorithmic gaze and the way it shapes our communication.

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If you liked this analysis, please consider pre-ordering my upcoming book Algospeak, which further explores how social media algorithms affect our communication.