On The Digital One-Dimensional Man
Marcuse, Bernays, and the Machinery of Manufactured Desire
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. - Goethe
The Spectacle of Choice
You scroll because you’re bored, you’re bored because you’re addicted, and you’re addicted because someone figured out how to monetize your dopamine before you figured out how to defend your soul. We live in an age of unprecedented freedom. We can choose from a thousand content feeds, a million product SKUs, an infinite scroll of lifestyles and identities. Our thumbs summon rides, groceries, intimacy, outrage. Every day we choose what to watch, wear, support, invest in, eat, and believe.
And yet, something vital is missing.
We do not choose what to want.
We do not choose what is visible.
We do not choose what is thinkable.
Herbert Marcuse saw it coming. Writing in 1964, One-Dimensional Man was a cry of alarm against a society that had managed to suppress dissent not through violence, but through comfort. The advanced industrial world, he argued, no longer required overt repression because its systems of production and consumption had successfully colonized desire itself. In his words, “The range of choice open to the individual is not the range of freedom but the range of goods and services.”
This essay is an attempt to trace that colonization through three interlocking thinkers:
Marcuse, who diagnosed the psychological flattening of man through consumer society,
Edward Bernays, who helped build the propaganda architecture that made such flattening possible, and
Noam Chomsky, who revealed how media systems constrain the flow of information in ways that enforce ideological consensus.
Behind them all looms Freud, whose excavation of the unconscious provided the very tools with which modern power, both corporate and political learned to manipulate the public. Freud opened the door; Bernays walked through it; Marcuse warned us; Chomsky dissected the aftermath. And today, in our algorithmic world of perpetual scroll and hyper-targeted messaging, their warnings echo louder than ever.
We are surrounded by choice, but flattened by it. As Isaiah Berlin might put it, we are “free” in the negative sense (to do as we please), but increasingly incapable of positive freedom: the ability to reflect, resist, and live as autonomous moral agents. Instead, we are comforted, nudged, and stimulated into acquiescence.
What Marcuse called “one-dimensional man” has become the default user profile.
In what follows, we will examine how this came to be how consumerism became control, how freedom became formatting, and how rebellion itself has been rerouted into system-friendly forms. To reclaim real thought and real liberty we must understand the architecture of our captivity.
Marcuse and the Manufacture of Contentment
Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is not a rejection of modern comfort, it is a rejection of comfort as control. What he saw in postwar Western democracies was the emergence of a new kind of repression: not authoritarian, not violent, but libidinally satisfying and materially abundant. The citizen was not silenced but saturated; not chained but entertained.
“A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization.”
This unfreedom worked not by prohibiting alternatives, but by making them unthinkable. In Marcuse’s framework, society no longer needed to crush the revolutionary impulse with guns or gulags, it simply absorbed it. The culture industry, mass media, even the language of liberation itself were co-opted, streamlined, sold back to the public in marketable, impotent forms. Think of the way today’s “resistance” comes pre-printed on a T-shirt. The critique is already baked into the product.
Marcuse called this dynamic repressive desublimation: the apparent liberation of desire (e.g., sexual expression, consumer choice, personal branding) that actually serves to reinforce the status quo. By allowing people to indulge, to “express” themselves within system-defined limits, the deeper, more disruptive desires for justice, truth, solidarity, even transcendence are neutered. Pleasure becomes pacification.
“The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”
This insight finds its modern analogue in digital consumer identity. The Spotify Wrapped summary becomes a personality. The Apple Watch becomes a wellness ethic. Aesthetics replace ethics. Your “vibe” replaces your character. Contentment is no longer existential, it’s algorithmic.
Marcuse’s technological rationality is particularly prescient here. He warned that the very structures and tools we build to “liberate” ourselves often carry embedded ideological assumptions: that efficiency, productivity, and stimulation are inherently good. In our era, this manifests as the optimization of attention through screens, feeds, recommendations, and notifications. But what is optimized is not human flourishing, but clicks, views, and behavioral compliance.
“Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion.”
Today, one-dimensionality is coded into the interfaces themselves. Options abound, but the substrate remains unchanged. Whether you scroll Instagram, TikTok, or X, the underlying mechanism is the same: attention capture, identity reinforcement, behavioral predictability.
Marcuse was not nostalgic. He did not romanticize the past. What he feared was the closing of the horizon, a future in which individuals no longer believed change was possible, or even necessary, because the system was “working.” A future in which criticism feels neurotic, alternative thought seems futile, and people are pacified by pleasures that do not liberate, but lull. That future has arrived.
Edward Bernays and the Engineering of Desire
Before Marcuse warned that desire had been domesticated, Edward Bernays showed how it could be constructed.
As the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays brought psychoanalytic theory out of the clinic and into the boardroom. In his hands, Freud’s insights into the unconscious, the irrational drives beneath civilized behavior became tools for managing the public. If Freud revealed the human psyche as fragmented, desiring, and conflict-ridden, Bernays asked a darker question: How can that knowledge be used to control the masses?
His answer was propaganda, rebranded as public relations.
In Propaganda (1928), Bernays stated it plainly:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
This was not a lament, it was a playbook. Bernays believed the public was too irrational and uninformed to be trusted with raw facts. The task of shaping opinion, therefore, fell to a “specialized class”: those who understood human psychology, media, and symbols. Democracy would be preserved, not by empowering the masses, but by guiding them invisibly.
He did it with startling success:
He made it fashionable for women to smoke by branding cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom.”
He sold bacon and eggs as the “All-American Breakfast.”
He promoted regime change in Guatemala under the guise of PR for the United Fruit Company.
In each case, he bypassed logic and appealed directly to the unconscious associating products or policies with freedom, identity, status, and security. Desire became programmable.
Where Marcuse saw the end state, citizens pacified by commodified desire, Bernays built the road to get there. He made it respectable to manipulate people at scale, not through coercion, but through symbols, language, and emotional resonance.
“Men are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions.”
This technique was not limited to corporations. It became the DNA of modern politics. Bernays’s approach fused Freud’s unconscious with mass media and market logic. The goal wasn’t to inform, it was to shape behavior, to engineer consent.
This is where Bernays meets Marcuse. Both understood that the modern subject was not merely repressed, but constructed. But where Bernays celebrated this manipulation as a civic necessity, Marcuse saw it as a catastrophe for freedom. The individual, rather than becoming autonomous, became a bundle of curated appetites defined not by self-mastery or virtue, but by reactivity, conformity, and consumption.
Today, Bernays’s descendants are not found in smoky PR firms, they work at Google, Meta, TikTok, and Netflix. They no longer sell soap or cigarettes. They sell behavior itself: engagement, retention, identity formation, micro-targeted compliance.
We are now several generations removed from Bernays, but we live in the world he imagined:
A world where unconscious drives are monitored, modeled, and monetized.
A world where emotion replaces argument.
A world where desire itself has become the most powerful instrument of control.
Marcuse described the condition. Bernays laid the groundwork. You, dear reader, are getting trampled.
Chomsky and the Filters of Consensus
If Bernays engineered desire, and Marcuse diagnosed its pacifying effects, Noam Chomsky mapped the media structure that sustains it. In Manufacturing Consent (1988), co-written with Edward Herman, Chomsky outlined the mechanics of modern propaganda, not in totalitarian regimes, but in liberal democracies, where freedom of the press ostensibly reigns.
The insight was sharp: control doesn’t require censorship if you can pre-filter the range of discourse. Instead of banning speech, you limit what’s considered serious, credible, or newsworthy. You manufacture consent not by silencing opposition, but by ensuring that opposition appears marginal, unserious, or economically nonviable.
Chomsky and Herman identified five filters that shape mass media content in capitalist democracies:
Ownership: Major media outlets are large, for-profit corporations. Their content must align with corporate interests.
Advertising: Media depends on ad revenue, creating an incentive to avoid content that alienates sponsors.
Sourcing: News outlets rely heavily on government and business “experts,” reinforcing elite narratives.
Flak: Negative responses to dissenting views serve as a deterrent to challenging orthodoxy.
Anti-communism (later, anti-terrorism / other ideological control): A unifying threat narrative that justifies systemic constraints.
The result: an illusion of debate within a narrow spectrum of permissible opinion, flanked on both sides by ridicule and silence.
Marcuse foresaw this ideological closure in more philosophical terms “one-dimensionality.” But Chomsky provided the operational blueprint: the system doesn’t need to tell you what to think. It just ensures you never hear anything truly subversive.
Apply this to today’s environment:
The ownership filter persists through media conglomerates like Comcast, Disney, and Amazon.
Advertising logic now drives algorithms: YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok reward emotionally reactive content that sells.
Sourcing and flak are baked into virality: controversial voices are either platformed to burn out or shadowbanned into irrelevance.
The new unifying ideologies are safety, equity, and civility, each of which can be invoked to justify limiting speech or promoting conformity.
This is not state censorship. It is infrastructural gatekeeping, invisible, automated, and often welcomed by users in the name of “curation” or “community standards.”
Chomsky’s model also reveals the fate of dissent in the digital age:
It is not crushed, it is drowned in noise, reduced to content, memed into absurdity, or fed into partisan ecosystems that neuter its structural threat.
True systemic critiques are filtered out not because they are wrong, but because they cannot generate revenue, don’t fit the narrative templates, or threaten platform stability.
Here, Chomsky’s filters function as the nervous system of Marcuse’s one-dimensional society. They constrain thought long before it can become action. They keep people “informed” without ever exposing them to ideas that might actually challenge power.
Together, Bernays, Marcuse, and Chomsky describe a society in which:
What we want is engineered.
What we see is filtered.
What we imagine is foreclosed.
That is not liberty. It is its simulation. And there is no viable off switch.
Digital Totality and the New Infrastructure of Pacification
In the analog world, propaganda required effort: posters, speeches, editorials, PR campaigns. In the digital world, the infrastructure of persuasion is ambient. It is woven into the interfaces, the recommendation engines, the social networks, the UX design. You do not need to be told what to think, you are shown what to see, what to desire, what to scroll.
This is not Orwell’s Big Brother, with jackboots and telescreens. It is Marcuse’s Soft Leviathan: seamless, pleasing, and frictionless.
“The range of freedom shrinks, but it appears to expand.”
Today’s individual moves through a landscape carefully calibrated to maintain dopaminergic equilibrium:
TikTok rewards instinctive mimicry.
Instagram promotes curated envy.
Spotify narrows your musical taste while claiming to personalize it.
Amazon builds an identity around your consumption.
YouTube radicalizes not through ideology, but via engagement-maximizing drift.
These platforms do not just offer services, they engineer subjectivity. Your preferences are no longer expressions of your self; they are inputs, shaped by system feedback, which then determine what is shown to you next. The result is a recursive self, trapped in an attention loop that feels autonomous but is wholly reactive.
This is the digital realization of one-dimensional man:
A being who feels free because he has choices.
A being who feels informed because he has content.
A being who feels unique because he has a profile.
In truth, this subject is:
Predictable, not free.
Stimulated, not informed.
Curated, not unique.
The digital layer adds something new to Bernays and Chomsky: real-time responsiveness.
Bernays could only segment audiences broadly. TikTok adjusts per swipe.
Chomsky mapped media filters. Now, the filter is personalized per user, at scale, through machine learning.
Marcuse saw the flattening of culture. We now have flattening through hyper-niche feedback loops, where the illusion of difference masks the sameness of form.
Even rebellion has been digested. Counterculture is monetized. Dissent is branded. “Anti-establishment” influencers serve sponsored ads for testosterone supplements and VPNs. Every impulse can be accommodated by the system, so long as it remains expressive, not structural.
You may rage, but you will not reimagine.
That’s the real innovation of the digital regime: not censorship, not surveillance, not ideological dogma, but endless accommodation. There is room for every identity, every kink, every grievance, every aesthetic, so long as none of it threatens the system’s logic:
attention capture to data extraction to behavior optimization to PROFIT.
Berlin’s Liberty Revisited: What Freedom Still Means
To fully understand the tragedy of the digital subject, we must return to Isaiah Berlin, who drew one of the clearest lines in modern political thought: the distinction between negative and positive liberty.
Negative liberty is freedom from interference, no one telling you what to do.
Positive liberty is freedom to, to act, to think, to self-determine according to reason or higher ideals.
Marcuse, Bernays, and Chomsky never use this vocabulary explicitly, but their projects orbit its implications.
In the digital context, negative liberty is maximized and weaponized. You can say almost anything, buy anything, post anything. You are “free” in the thinnest sense free to choose among pre-curated options. But this is not freedom as autonomy. It is freedom as formatting.
Berlin warned of the dangers of positive liberty, when regimes claim to know your “true” self and impose a vision of freedom from above. Marcuse agreed that such impositions are dangerous, but he believed something worse had emerged: a society where individuals no longer even seek self-mastery, because the tools of critical thought have been eroded by saturation.
“The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual is the hallmark of one-dimensional thought.” - Marcuse
The one-dimensional subject believes he is free, because no one is stopping him. But his goals, his tastes, his desires, even his political expressions, have been molded in advance by forces he neither understands nor questions.
What Berlin feared from overbearing states, Marcuse identified in consumer capitalism, and Chomsky in media systems. All converge in today’s algorithmic civilization. The citizen is not coerced, but neither is he sovereign. His “choices” are bounded by:
The platform’s affordances,
The system’s incentives,
And his own conditioned compulsions.
This is the paradox:
The more freedom we are offered, the more freedom becomes unintelligible.
To reclaim liberty, we must reject the idea that freedom means doing what we want. We must instead ask:
Who shaped what I want? Can I want otherwise?
Berlin’s insight must be updated: In the digital age, positive liberty is not the road to tyranny, it is the only path out of it.
Reclaiming Depth: Toward a New Dimensional Man
The crisis is not that we are surveilled, manipulated, or even pacified. The crisis is that we no longer recognize it as a crisis. The system doesn’t just constrain what we think, it constrains what we can think. Marcuse called this the closing of the universe of discourse. What lies outside of it becomes not dangerous, but invisible.
To reclaim freedom is to reclaim dimensionality, to resist the flatness imposed by platforms, brands, metrics, and algorithmic suggestion. It is to resist the urge to express and consume endlessly, and instead to cultivate silence, interiority, and negation.
This is not romantic primitivism or anti-tech asceticism. It is a demand for re-differentiation:
To re-draw the boundary between want and need.
To separate pleasure from pacification.
To recover the distinction between expression and articulation, data and truth, stimulus and meaning.
It requires the reactivation of inner sovereignty, what Berlin would call positive liberty, what Marcuse would call negation, and what ancient philosophers called virtue. A refusal to be shaped by the default settings of the age. A willingness to sit, think, not-click.
In this sense, the “new dimensional man” is not a utopian figure. He is a resister:
He reads slowly.
He cultivates boredom.
He creates without metrics.
He chooses deliberately.
He remains un-integrated.
He does not treat every urge as authentic, every trend as insight, every platform as neutral. He understands that to live freely is not to escape structure, but to choose one’s structure consciously.
This is not easy. Everything in the current regime pushes against it. The algorithms optimize for frictionless engagement. The platforms reward conformity disguised as expression. Even dissent is monetized, gamified, looped back into the system. To step outside this is not just unpopular, it is invisible to most.
But invisibility is not defeat. It is a kind of power.
In a world addicted to visibility, opacity is resistance.
In a world driven by prediction, unpredictability is sovereignty.
In a world built to capture desire, the capacity to withhold it is freedom.
Marcuse’s one-dimensional man is not a relic of the Cold War. He is the default subject of the digital world fragmented, curated, engaged, and pacified. Bernays built the architecture, Chomsky mapped its filters, and Berlin warned us what would be lost when liberty was reduced to choice.
To recover depth, we must not simply long for the past. We must imagine again. We must recover the capacity to negate, to resist false needs, to say “no” to what flatters us and “yes” to what challenges us. We must become, once again, dimensional. Not for nostalgia. Not for purity. But for freedom.