High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Culture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who argued in the final chapter of their Dialectic of Enlightenment, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception', that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods through film, radio and magazines to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. This was reference to an earlier demarcation in needs by Herbert Marcuse.