The culture industry

Lately, I've been reading Horkheimer & Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.  The first chapter is fairly dense and needs some unpacking, but the chapter called "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" provides a clear critique commercial (mass-produced) culture.  I won't go into a full discussion just yet, but I wanted to jot down a couple of ideas which I'd like to develop here on this blog.

1) Mass-produced anything is crap.

We craft beer brewers know this.  That's the reason we make our own beer in small batches: it's better than the mass-produced stuff.  "Better" is a subjective claim, you might say.  True.  While it is possible to make bad beer in small batches, I'd say that small producers who consistently produce beer by hand will not continue making bad beer for long.  Making small batches of beer is just too labor intensive to do it badly.  If you brew bad beer, you either fix the problem or take up a less demanding hobby.

2) Small is beautiful.

Brew beer and write books as if people mattered.  The justification of commercial culture is the production of profit.  Products (in the capitalist model) are manufactured for the purpose of making money.  Craft brewers make beer in small batches because they want to make good beer.  Making money is more like a necessary evil than the raison d'etre.

3) Think local.

Since I'm a writer and a reader, I've added books to the subject list I'll be writing about.  I'm a localist also, which means that I try to support the efforts of my neighbors.  Ideally, I'd like to know the name of the person who grows the food I eat, who brews the beer I drink, and who writes the books I read.  This last one is a bit more difficult since book writing is not in the same material category as beer brewing.

As it turns out, my brewing adventures are connecting me with local writers.  More about this later.

4) Collaboration, not competition.

Work together.  Don't do anything that will make it more difficult for someone else to do what they need to do to be fulfilled.  That will need some unpacking, but as I said at the beginning, I'm just getting these ideas down so that we can start chewing on them.  Yes, we.  Let's start a conversation here.

By the way, I've posted a kind of beginning to my book Cottage Industry.  Over the next year or so (or as long as it takes) I'll be adding chapters to this book about small scale brewing.  But it won't be just about small scale brewing.  It will be about small scale, do-it-yourself culture (as opposed to the culture industry).