(Click Pop Culture) Netflix as Mass Deception

The first couple of chapters of many popular culture theory books are devoted to the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School refers to a group of Marxists who gathered at the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University, which celebrated its 100th anniversary this year.

The Social Investigation Institute, which focused on the capitalist economy and labor movement history in the early days of its establishment, stood out in earnest in 1930 when Max Horkheimer took over as director. He criticized Germany’s progressive parties at the time for being overly ‘economist’. While capitalism was perpetuating and Germany was falling into totalitarianism due to Hitler’s propaganda and agitation, the Frankfurt School paid attention to culture, not the economy, which ‘orthodox’ Marxism regarded as gold and jade, for social transformation.

In particular, as the ‘cultural industry’ has been set as a target of criticism, Horkheimer and co-author Theodor Adorno argued in that “cultural products are part of a huge economic mechanism that holds everyone in their rest time as well as their work time”. , “The cultural industry tries to reproduce human beings as if making standard products without defects.” Now, the meaning has changed, but the reason why they coined the word ‘cultural industry’ for the first time is that a culture that can never be industrialized is manufactured as if it were a manufactured product, and both workplaces and daily life become targets of profit-seeking and exploitation by those who have it, and society as a whole It was to deplore the phenomenon of uncritical paralysis.

The reason why popular culture theory books start discussions from the Frankfurt School is that they not only systematized popular culture theory for the first time in fact, but also regarded it as a key symptom of a social crisis, and found a solution in the field of popular culture. At the same time, the Frankfurt School, which denigrated popular culture for being overly elitist and Eurocentric, instilled resistance from subsequent researchers who loved popular culture and encouraged challenging research. In the midst of elaborating the enjoyment enjoyed by ordinary people in popular culture and revealing alternative desires and hopes that can be obtained by bypassing industrial logic, popular culture is not mass culture, but our culture despite various contradictions and problems. (popular culture).

However, it is not easy to assert how much popular culture has deviated from the ‘cultural industry’ when looking at reality outside of popular culture theory books. Recently, President Yoon Seok-yeol cited Netflix’s attraction of 3.3 trillion won in investment over four years as one of the major diplomatic achievements he made after visiting the United States. The President’s Office commented, “The content industry will have a significant effect on domestic industries and product exports while raising the national image.” In this kind of awareness, the boundary between culture and industrial products is blurred.

The authors of saw the identity of the ‘cultural industry’ with automobile manufacturers such as Chrysler and General Motors. Both have a management system tailored to the accumulation of profits, and thanks to standardization and mass production, a large amount of products have been poured out according to the scheme. Will it be different from Netflix? FAANG refers to Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, which lead the US IT industry, and exposes that the cultural industry and IT industry operate on the same logic. Except for the fact that the dominant industrial sector has changed from manufacturing to IT, the ‘cultural industry’ that the Frankfurt School described 100 years ago may still be in progress.

It is unclear whether there is a clear cause-and-effect relationship between popular culture, which is dominated by industrial logic and produces similar pleasures, and totalitarianism in society. But at least a correlation can be pointed out.

Recently, Korean popular culture stories have been excessively focused on Netflix. It seems impossible to talk about popular culture without mentioning Netflix, which is aimed at paid subscribers. Even I have filled this space with Netflix several times. Positive and criticism should be distinguished, but pop culture discourse that is biased towards Netflix does not seem very healthy.

The Frankfurt School regarded the ‘cultural industry’ as ‘enlightenment as public deception’, but the weight of the words still remains. That’s why our pop culture, guided by the cool and flashy Netflix, doesn’t look so optimistic.