I’m reading Thomas Frank’s new book–The Creative Con–and it has reinforced how creativity and innovations have acted as a cover story for the oligarchy that’s radically transformed the US, resulting in the inequality and corporate power concentration crisis we face today.
Frank argues that creativity and innovation have been weaponized as cultural and economic dogma, and have come to dominate our political and economic narrative while serving up inequality and promoting elite interests.
The Democrats were early adherents and have embraced innovation and creativity to help cover their betrayal of working and middle-class Americans, and why they are now the party of the professional/managerial/class (PMC). And of course Obama was the president who was most passionate about creativity and innovation, especially as he “foamed the runway” for Wall Street with American homeowners in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. Innovation was Obama’s “magic word, the concept that brought together traditional liberalism and the admirable modernity of Silicon Valley.”
Innovation and creativity have been repeated endlessly as explaining US business and financial exceptionalism. They’re deployed by business leaders, tech gurus, military strategists, educators, and urban planners to describe American hegemony. While other countries supposedly suffer from rigidity and authoritarianism, the US is portrayed as endlessly creative and innovative. Instead, Frank offers a provocative indictment of the way creativity and innovation have been used as a kind of ideological cover for policies that benefit the billionaires and their PMC apparatchiks.
He says, “We have promoted innovation and creativity in our rhetoric while, in practice, nurturing exactly the opposite. In the process our leaders have reoriented the American economy around white-collar knowledge work, cut taxes for the wealthy, deregulated banks, offshored manufacturing, reoriented cities, and destroyed what is truly creative about this country.”
These beguiling phrases were deployed as American factories were sent to distant lands, Wall Street was bailed out, Purdue Pharma hooked millions of Americans on oxycontin, and hedge-funds conquered our economy. Then there’s our innovative deregulation agenda aimed at “cutting red tape” for businesses — which in practice means dismantling workers’ rights and environmental protections.
One of the most disquieting parts of the book is how the weapons corporations are the most shameless in touting creativity and innovation. Defense contractors love to talk about how innovative they are designing expensive weapons that turn brown people in distant lands into red-mist.
Like I noted, innovation can and does apply to the vast amount of scams and criminal behavior we’ve witnessed in recent years. Think the “financial innovation” that produced the Wall Street Crash, or the “pain relief” innovation that led to the explosion of sales of oxycontin. And Pharma-bro Martin Shkreli sure was creative when he obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price to insurance companies from $13.50 to $750.00 per pill, sparking a scandal in the United States and around the world, cementing his reputation as ‘the most hated man in America.
Nowhere has creativity and innovation been evoked more than AI, where proclamations of historic innovations joins the magical thinking that flourishes in a bubble’s final stages. Ai sure has been innovative with data centers, the looming threat of massive job losses and the surveillance of American citizens as well as the innovation in AI-driven surveillance pricing.
I’m sure you can think of a lot more creative innovations that are making your life miserable, but unfortunately we’re just collateral damage. The relentless invocation of creativity and innovation have done their work to create the all-American oligarchy that controls our country.
Few will be surprised when I say–fuck creativity and innovation. I prefer competence, caring and community.
