Slopping the Hogs: Anti-Intellectualism, The Culture Industry, and Nietzsche

*Zizek voice* I already am eating from the trash can all the time

Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce.

- Adorno and Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

The Dialectic of Enlightenment was written around 80 years ago, between 1944 and 1947. Computers were a barely a dream, let alone the internet, LLMs, and AI. In spite of this Adorno and Horkheimer saw things clearly in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” We talk about technology ruining art, but observing the same dynamic in the 1940s implies that technology isn’t the only problem. The invisible hand of our decline is a vulgar capitalist marketplace that treats art as trash, a troublesome chore on the way to making lots of money.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment centers on the Janus face of societal progress. The high modernism of the early 20th century had promised so much: new technology, new ideas, new ways of organizing society, but had instead delivered previously unimaginable levels of death and destruction. Shortly after WWII and the Holocaust, Adorno and Horkheimer set themselves to answering the question, “If modernity is so great, why has it given us such staggering brutality?” The answer, using distinctly Hegelian logic, is that Enlightenment always already includes is opposite, barbarism. The concept and its negation are intimately related.

Adorno and Horkheimer also believed how people spent their leisure time was every bit as important as the traditional Marxist focus on the workplace. Society should be viewed in its totality, and it is the job of those of us on the left to illustrate how seemingly opposed elements function together as part of a larger whole. This intuitively makes sense, without the entertainment industry, social media, shopping centers, and deep roster of consumer goods the miserable workplace conditions most of us endure would be far less acceptable.

The marketplace not only sells us products to meet our needs, it also cultivates needs which only it is capable of fulfilling. It shapes the desires of a struggling and exhausted base of consumers so that they have tastes and wants that only the market can satisfy. This is done in obvious, explicit ways such as advertising, and subtly via the tastemakers, reviewers, and influencers. Capitalism both produces an unhappy and exhausted workforce and sells us entertainment and consumer goods as a salve.

The term “slop” has skyrocketed in popularity. It is fitting that the noun used for the slurry of leftover food and trash farmers feed to pigs is now describing internet content. AI slop illustrates a profound contempt for art above all else: its production, consumption, and any meaning to be gleaned from it. What does it say that one of the first credible use cases for AI is the ever increasing removal of human beings from the process of artistic and literary production?

We are rapidly approaching an era when internet content is made by AI, shared on social media by bots, and boosted by even more bots to game the algorithm. The current form of content creation is that of a cyborg-snake eating its own tail. Somebody somewhere is making money off of this mecha-Ouroboros, but it is getting rarer to find an actual human being who gained anything in the process. We are left with a system of cultural production made by machines to distract people and show them ads which treats very concept of artistry with open contempt. One can be forgiven asking what any of this is even for but the answer is always and forever money.

This isn’t to say that worthwhile art will never be produced with the use of AI prompts, because of course it will. However, this is absolutely not its intended purpose from the business community. The obvious should be stated, media executives are excited about AI because they think it means they can pay less people to produce the same amount of content and are hoping to pad the bottom line with the difference. In their ideal world, investors would make returns without even the nuisance of producing something, and AI is seen as a way to get one step close to this goal.

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Twilight of the Content Creators

What we need now more than ever is to take art and culture seriously, to create and experience art which is great and explicitly tries to be so. Art which is scientifically crafted to be as profitable as possible is not the same as that which is great. Entire schools of thought such as poptimism, which serve primarily to sanctify that which the marketplace has already elevated, are the purest expression of capitalist ideology. It is fitting that many critics have abandoned even their duty to have views about art reducing their role to little more than saying that which is being sold to you is good. Perhaps it is time to be done with illusions, to dispense with any notion of critics as something greater than hype men for the culture industry.

Recent events have been extremely upsetting, creating an ambient background drone of disgust and anxiety. In moments like this when I feel hopeless I often try to escape with some of the classics on my bookshelf. Thoughts Out of Season is a deep cut for Nietzsche, but in my opinion one of his best. “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life” is fairly well known, mostly because Heidegger referenced it in Being and Time. It states a lot Nietszche’s ideas without being just a series of disjointed aphorisms, as was often the case later on. I had wanted to write about it for a while. Ironically, when I started this Substack a few months ago I was worried I’d run out of ideas. After starting I had the opposite problem. Too many half-baked ideas, all spiraling out into a hundred different directions.

When I picked up the text, I couldn’t get over how much Nietzsche cared about culture and how important he thought having a truly great culture in Germany was. I had barely made it through the first paragraph, an essay criticizing David Strauss, and it was overwhelming. Nietzsche was bashing anyone who thought the military victory of Germany over France meant a corresponding victory for German culture. The argument over Nietzsche’s political legacy has been done to death, but it is crystal clear from his writing that he hated vulgar nationalist kitsch, the falsely important held up by national pride. Draw from that whatever conclusions you like.

One recurring theme of Thoughts Out of Season is separating what genuinely matters from that which doesn’t. We are finite beings as humans. There are 24 hours in a day, most of which is spent working, sleeping and doing chores, leaving only a few hours of free time for anything else. There is limited amount any person can know and history for its own sake is a dead end. More than that, too much history is suffocating, saddling us with preserving the past and than actually living. History is important and Nietzsche certainly thought so, but only in so far as it served life and living.

Nietzsche treats his present era in Germany no differently than history, plenty of it is not worth knowing. This is the source of the title Thoughts Out of Season, we must struggle against the era in which we are living and there is a virtue in being out of fashion. From the third essay “Schopenhauer as Educator”

Of course, it would be a hundred times better if this investigation should reveal that nothing so proud and full of hope as our own age has ever before existed. And there are indeed at this moment naive people in this and that corner of the earth, in Germany for instance, who are prepared to believe such a thing, and even go so far as to assert in all seriousness that the world was put to rights a couple of years ago and that those who persist in harboring dark misgivings about the nature of existence are refuted by the "facts." The chief fact is that the founding of the new German Reich is a decisive and annihilating blow to all "pessimistic" philosophizing— that is supposed to be firm and certain. —Whoever is seeking to answer the question of what the philosopher as educator can mean in our time has to contest this view, which is very widespread and is propagated in our universities; he must declare: it is a downright scandal that such nauseating, idolatrous flattery can be rendered to our time by supposedly thinking and honorable men—a proof that one no longer has the slightest notion how different the seriousness of philosophy is from the seriousness of a newspaper.

It is ironic to be reading such criticism, now more than a century old, but could just as easily apply to the Unites States of today, which was Nietzsche’s entire point.

There are many things which are simply not worth knowing, even very famous and profitable things. The falsely important has always been elevated, Nietzsche had David Strauss, and since a great many things will inevitably escape our attention we are forced to pick and chose. In a media landscape which is a Thunderdome fight for your ears, eyeballs, and mental energy we would all do well to choose wisely. It is admittedly difficult to know what matters and what doesn’t, but I don’t think it’s controversial to say most people feel they have wasted many hours scrolling social media.

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If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?

Fantasy isn’t some separate realm, it is a basic constituent of our reality and plays an active role in structuring it. What we want, believe is possible, and dream of achieving is the foundation of the actions we take in the real world. Paradoxically, these fantasies can be more powerful than anything which actually exists. While not tangible, investigating what we fantasize about is an important endeavor.

Anti-intellectualism has so thoroughly poisoned the culture in the US that most Americans find it easier to fantasize about becoming a billionaire like Trump or Elon Musk than an overeducated, bookish intellectual. This is in spite of the former being ten thousand times less likely. It costs you little more than a library card to become an intellectual. You don’t even need a college education, or any education past basic literacy to achieve it. Yet, for so many the idea of becoming an intellectual is worthy only of scorn and derision. Any level of stupidity is celebrated so long as it conforms to our vacuous capitalist definition of success, which really just means having money…always lots of money. Far less common is asking what being successful even means, why you want it, and what you would even want from it if you had it.

While many can be forgiven for not wanting to trudge through dense and difficult philosophical texts, the greatest scorn should be reserved for scholars who use this same logic. There are few things more contemptible than students and professors who spend all their energy making sure you know they don’t take any of it seriously. This especially true of complaints about writing style, of getting irate 19th century philosophy doesn’t read like an issue of USA Today. As if this were what was really important about it or anything more than the flimsiest excuse for not learning anything.

These quasi-academics imitate all the laziest criticisms they assume less educated readers would make. They then have the nerve to wonder the public doesn’t care about their field of study when they themselves don’t take it seriously and spend most of their energy saying so. Since we are talking about fantasy, I think the fantasy here is one common to many nerds. They want to be cool and popular, and to that end they never stop extolling the virtues of common sense in the service of self-loathing.

We are cursed by common sense as Americans and our culture has become blind to how it is the handmaiden of the status quo. It is frankly bizarre that anyone would assume in a society so thoroughly dominated by the marketplace and its accompanying ideology that somehow common sense would remain unscathed. To put it another way, if you only use the concepts of the status quo you will only ever reproduce it regardless of what your intentions are. What is appealing to this presumed ordinary understanding other than a call to leave the logic of the current system untouched?

The failure of the millennial left casts a large shadow over my writing. It isn’t often enough I see these criticisms made. Barely anyone involved in the resurgent left of the late 2010s wanted to be an intellectual. It was assumed memes, podcasts, facile slogans, and a fleeting rush of popularity were enough. Obviously they were not, and it is downright embarrassing to see people still casting the blame at leftists who were overly concerned with reading groups. There is bitter irony in using the logic of the now deceased millennial left to criticize it, and no less irony in those making the criticism being doomed to repeat the same mistakes.