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Theodor Adorno was a 20th century philosopher, social critic, and leftist theorist. He is most well known for his being a member of the Frankfurt School, who were prominent social critics in America and Europe. He's often seen as a sort of curmudgeonly elitist who hates popular culture, and well, pretty much everything else. He wrote essays, for example, attacking things like Jazz, for ruining music. A lot people think this is just a sort of old intellectual hating on the new fads, as often happens, but his major point was that Jazz had fundamentally changed what music was, and how people interacted with music, in a way that other fads had not. For example, people would have favorite Jazz tracks that they didn't even like to listen to, because they were really only "good for dancing".

He was wary of all populism, having seen it himself in Germany lead to Hitler and the Nazis. When he fled to America he saw a totally different kind of culture, which he was also highly critical of, where capitalism would create the culture itself. He thought that negative criticism was equally as important as positive advances in pushing humanity forward (in the Hegelian sense). One of his most popular works was Negative Dialectics. It isn't terribly uncommon for bad articles to pose questions like "What would Adorno think of X?", and the answer seems to almost universally be "he would hate it." Many of the institutions that Adorno criticized have only gotten stronger since he died. And he would probably not be too fond of twitter.

Theodor Adorno was a 20th century philosopher, social critic, and leftist theorist. He is most well known for his being a member of the Frankfurt School, who were prominent social critics in America and Europe. He's often seen as a sort of curmudgeonly elitist who hates popular culture, and well, pretty much everything else. He wrote essays, for example, attacking things like Jazz, for ruining music. A lot people think this is just a sort of old intellectual hating on the new fads, as often happens, but his major point was that Jazz had fundamentally changed what music was, and how people interacted with music, in a way that other fads had not. For example, people would have favorite Jazz tracks that they didn't even like to listen to, because they were really only "good for dancing".

He was wary of all populism, having seen it himself in Germany lead to Hitler and the Nazis. When he fled to America he saw a totally different kind of culture, which he was also highly critical of, where capitalism would create the culture itself. He thought that negative criticism was equally as important as positive advances in pushing humanity forward (in the Hegelian sense). One of his most popular works was Negative Dialectics. It isn't terribly uncommon for bad articles to pose questions like "What would Adorno think of X?", and the answer seems to almost universally be "he would hate it." Many of the institutions that Adorno criticized have only gotten stronger since he died. And he would probably not be too fond of twitter.