I believe this is what Marx termed "commodity fetishism" in the first chapter of Capital.
> Adorno was born a German Jew at the end of the nineteenth century; he saw Hitler come to power via popular vote; and, in 1941, he was forced to flee Germany for the United States. Once there, however, he observed conditions of isolation and aloofness that made him worry: post-war American culture looked, to his eye, too much like pre-war Germany. The post-war “baby boom” had resulted in the growth of the American suburbs, sprawling sections of land developed for first-place functionality (private residence) and located within commuting distance to second-place nuclei (cities, office buildings, places of work). Adorno watched Americans shuttle back and forth in their cars between work and home, and he critiqued what he saw as ever-deepening habits consistent with conditions of social alienation. “He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest,” Adorno argues in his 1951 work Minima Moralia. In other words, Adorno says, isolation begets feelings of superiority, but not solely because the isolated individual lacks opportunities for comparison; rather, isolation begets superiority because the isolated individual has no audience but himself, no one to receive (and, perhaps, critique) his image of himself, to test whether or not it is even accurate.
> Adorno was born a German Jew at the end of the nineteenth century; he saw Hitler come to power via popular vote; and, in 1941, he was forced to flee Germany for the United States. Once there, however, he observed conditions of isolation and aloofness that made him worry: post-war American culture looked, to his eye, too much like pre-war Germany. The post-war “baby boom” had resulted in the growth of the American suburbs, sprawling sections of land developed for first-place functionality (private residence) and located within commuting distance to second-place nuclei (cities, office buildings, places of work). Adorno watched Americans shuttle back and forth in their cars between work and home, and he critiqued what he saw as ever-deepening habits consistent with conditions of social alienation. “He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest,” Adorno argues in his 1951 work Minima Moralia. In other words, Adorno says, isolation begets feelings of superiority, but not solely because the isolated individual lacks opportunities for comparison; rather, isolation begets superiority because the isolated individual has no audience but himself, no one to receive (and, perhaps, critique) his image of himself, to test whether or not it is even accurate.
--Sheila Liming, "Hanging Out" (2023)