Adorno helps us to critically understand top-down leadership, nationalism, the friend/ enemy-scheme, and militant patriarchy as principles of right-wing authoritarianism and as ideological moments that distract attention from the complexity of society’s problems and from their aspects of capitalism and class. Next, we will have a look at how Adorno helps us to answer the question of whether we live in an information/digital society or digital capitalism.
4.5 Digital Society or Capitalism?
The main question of the information society debate is: in what kind of society do we live? Is it an information and digital society? Or a capitalist society? Or something different?
Theodor W. Adorno (1968/2003) argued that the “fundamental question of the present structure of society” is “about the alternatives: late capitalism or industrial society” (111). He asked if society was a capitalist society or an industrial society. Today, Adorno’s question can be reposed in a slightly altered form: do we live in capitalism or an information/digital society?
The information society debate’s dominant narrative is that a radically new society has emerged. For example, Daniel Bell (1974) spoke of the emergence of a post-industrial information society that “is based on services” in “health, education, research, and government” and where what “counts is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information” (15). This is a subjectivist view with a focus on radical change: for Bell, information/knowledge work constitutes “a vast historical change” (37).
Adorno gave an answer to the question of whether society was at the time he lived capitalist or industrial:
In terms of critical, dialectical theory, I would like to propose as an initial, necessarily abstract answer that contemporary society undoubtedly is an industrial society according to the state of its forces of production. Industrial labor has everywhere become the model of society as such, regardless of the frontiers separating differing political systems. It has developed into a totality because methods modelled on those of industry are necessarily extended by the laws of economics to other realms of material production, administration, the sphere of distribution, and those that call themselves culture. In contrast, however, society is capitalist in its relations of production. People are still what they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the nineteenth century […] Production takes place today, as then, for the sake of profit (Adorno 1968/2003, 117).
Chapter Four | Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism
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Digital Society or Capitalism?