What Adorno argues in The Cultural Industry is essentially that large corporate interests who profit in the industry of "cultural consumption" (advertisers, politicians, entertainment entities) seem to be using the new technological advancements to lull the masses into a state of passivity where they allow themselves to be manipulated.
He starts this argument with an argument that mass entertainment and ubiquity are the products of "mass-produced art." He says that in the future (that would be us) we would have a hard time understanding that in the past, different people had different heritages with their own art and culture that was connected deeply to their identity. But, his argument continues, such cultures will not be able to compete with the full force of the new economy.
The new economy is deeply capitalistic, says Adorno. In order to preserve the existence of a "consumer market," he says that the culture will need to be a good platform for advertising, so he predicts (acutely) that entertainment industries will move toward homogeneity, sameness, replicability, and ubiquity. Ubiquity means that it's so common that everyone knows about it, because you cannot escape it. He says "Culture today is infecting everything with sameness."
He mourns the sad loss of art in the general public, but he remains confident that art will exist, but only as an object of elite intelligence and academic pretense. In other words, the formation of art will be moved as a luxury into the higher classes of a society, while the less fortunate will be given cheap, easily commodified art. He bemoans the reduction of art into a thing of commerce, like when advertisers use classical music to sell products.
