The tech economy is booming, and we’re sleepwalking into servitude. Algorithms capture and fracture our attention, AI is forced upon us, and capital becomes ever more concentrated. Some respond by worshipping technological progress as our salvation. Others retreat into fantasies of a simpler past. Both responses, argues philosopher Vangelis Giannakakis, have already surrendered, because both have abandoned reason’s power to be simultaneously critical and creative. To resist tech domination, we must, as Adorno said, be “absolutely modern,” wielding a restless reason that refuses to settle, that never stops questioning, and that relentlessly bends the world towards something better.

The modern world drains experience of meaning

We are living through a period in which subjective human experience feels increasingly imperiled. Social media fragments attention into restless cycles of distraction and outrage; streaming platforms and generative AI organize culture around what is predictable, marketable, and algorithmically successful. More and more domains of life are governed by metrics, analytics, and optimization.

Of course, optimization as such is not inherently malign. Medicine, engineering, and public infrastructure depend upon it. The danger arises when optimization ceases to function as a practical tool and instead becomes a governing ideal: when efficiency, scalability, and predictability become the primary standards by which culture, thought, and even human value are assessed. Experiences requiring contemplation, ambiguity, inwardness, or instinctive judgement begin to appear inefficient, opaque, or superfluous.

In such a world, the critical theory of Theodor Adorno acquires renewed force. Writing about mass media in the twentieth century, Adorno argued that industrial society increasingly transformed culture into a system of standardization and passive consumption. The technologies have changed; the underlying logic has only deepened.

Late capitalism does not abolish experience outright. Rather, as Adorno foresaw, it standardizes it, disciplines it, and drains it of meaning: “It is as if the … hardened plaster-cast of events takes the place of events themselves,” and people “are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on screen.”

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Reason must remain “restless”: once it claims complete objectivity or final truth, it ceases to be critical and instead hardens into ideology.

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Faced with this landscape, we tend to gravitate towards two extremes. Some embrace acceleration as destiny. Innovation becomes synonymous with progress, and progress with salvation. Others retreat into imagined authenticity, seeking refuge in a reconstructed past or a supposedly natural state of things. Both responses evade the harder labor of reflection. Each offers a convenient escape, and both ultimately regress.

Adorno proposes another orientation. He often cites Arthur Rimbaud’s injunction: il faut être absolument moderne. One ought to be absolutely modern. The phrasing matters. It does not say that one must absolutely be modern because modernity is inherently good. Rather, if one is to be modern at all, one must be so absolutely, without nostalgia but also without the illusion that progress is inevitable.

Here lies the paradox. Modernity, particularly late modernity—our modernity—has become an impersonal apparatus of instrumental reason: we view “anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility … with suspicion.” Yet Adorno, who prophesied our situation, does not counsel escape. Instead, he insists that we must inhabit the present fully, critically. This is the riddle. How can a thinker who dismantled the myth of progress so thoroughly still urge us to be absolutely modern?

Reclaiming reason from the illusion of objectivity