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\u201cLook at this sweatshirt,\u201d Thomas Frank says in a video interview from his study in Bethesda, Md. He pulls at his maroon hoodie, which he\u2019d just picked up from a thrift store the other day. The badge on his chest reads, \u201cInnovation Fitness.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThese words are everywhere now,\u201d he says with his ever-present smile and laugh. \u201cIt\u2019s total saturation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frank has spent three decades arguing that Americans misread and misunderstand their own economy, perhaps most famously in his 2004 modern classic, What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas?, which followed his evolution from college Republican to something else and probed why so many people from his native Kansas City area voted against what he understood as their class interests. His latest, The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America\u2019s Biggest Racket, takes aim at a staple of business journalism: the idea of \u201cinnovation\u201d as something fundamental to American business.<\/p>\n
Frank is gracious toward Fortune, which publishes America\u2019s Most Innovative Companies, runs the Fortune 500 Innovation Forum and Workplace Innovation Summit, and hosts a \u201cLeaders in Innovation\u201d series. \u201cYou guys have been very critical of all the stuff you ordinarily cover,\u201d he says. He recalls that The Baffler, the journal he cofounded in 1988, kept a stack of old Fortune issues in its office. \u201cWe had this huge box of back issues,\u201d he says, recalling the great painted Art Deco artwork that Fortune was known for in the 1930s and \u201940s. \u201cWe used to just sit there in the office and pore over it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of Frank\u2019s book is about the cult of innovation and creativity that dates back to the postwar years. Much of the modern concept traces back to, of all things, the mind of an adman straight out of Madison Avenue: Alex Osborn, the \u201cO\u201d in BBDO. Among other things, Osborn popularized the term \u201cbrainstorm,\u201d which once meant a mental seizure of sorts but which Osborn turned into a militaristic business term, as in storming an idea with your brains.<\/p>\n
Frank spent a week in Buffalo, looking through an archive of Osborn\u2019s papers. He says Osborn and his colleagues collected everything that used the word \u201ccreativity\u201d in the 1950s and \u201960s to document the progress of their pet idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe word I use in the book is \u2018ideology,\u2019\u201d Frank says, adding that he hopes that doesn\u2019t sound too \u201cpolitical and really heavy-handed.\u201d He describes the ideology: \u201cThis is how history works; this is how a country prospers \u2026 We\u2019ve been saying that since the 1950s.\u201d The problem is that it just \u201chasn\u2019t really worked out,\u201d Frank says in chipper but mournful fashion, pointing out that Osborn, \u201cno fan of the New Deal,\u201d pushed the ideology toward considering blue-collar workers as uncreative. \u201cIt has hurt us. It\u2019s hurt us really bad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now Frank says AI has made his argument harder for white-collar workers to ignore. This is the point where the creativity gospel turns on the people who preach it the most. It\u2019s \u201csort of an unspoken strain in all of the talk about AI,\u201d he says. Just as \u201cinnovation\u201d came for the working class and the Rust Belt as automation and outsourcing devastated communities like his hometown, Kansas City, AI now threatens the same displacement for the supposed creative class. \u201cI have a lot of fears about it, too,\u201d Frank says. \u201cI\u2019m right in the crosshairs \u2026 Nobody gives a damn about the creative class and their innovation districts anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frank\u2019s own use of AI is mixed. He says it has \u201crevolutionized\u201d archival work, recalling that when he wrote The Conquest of Cool in the 1990s, he sat in a library paging through old issues of Life, Fortune\u2019s former Time Inc. stablemate. Now the whole run is searchable; he can even count how often a word appears. But he notes that he recently asked an LLM about a song lyric stuck in his head, and it confidently and wrongly told him it was from The Great Gatsby. When he pushed back, it said, \u201cYou are absolutely right,\u201d before offering another wrong answer.<\/p>\n
Frank\u2019s deeper complaint is that AI won\u2019t be revolutionary enough: It will replicate the fatal flaw of journalism in treating authority\u2019s misleading answers as truth. He calls the way LLMs work as dangerous: \u201cDo the experts say it? Well, then that\u2019s the truth.\u201d The problem, he adds, is that \u201cexpertise evolves constantly.\u201d People want \u201cthe correct answer with a capital C,\u201d he says, \u201cand I feel like that\u2019s one of the dangers of AI.\u201d It \u201creproduces orthodoxy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn some ways,\u201d Frank says, \u201cit\u2019s easier to get your hands on the truth than ever before.\u201d But in other ways, \u201cwe\u2019re in this world of clouds and mystification and orthodoxy that you can\u2019t question or touch \u2026 It\u2019s going both directions at the same time.\u201d He says he hopes that \u201cdigging\u201d for the truth doesn\u2019t disappear in the mixture.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it\u2019s no surprise Frank\u2019s criticism has an antiestablishment flavor. He has often cited punk rock as an inspiration for his work in The Baffler. An early journalistic coup was when Frank exposed the New York Times\u2019 Style section had printed slang from Seattle\u2019s grunge scene that Sub Pop employee Megan Jasper had made up. (The invented slang included \u201cwack slacks\u201d for old, torn jeans, and \u201cswingin\u2019 on the flippity-flop\u201d for hanging out.)<\/p>\n
Punk, he argues, is a perfect example of true innovation, unlike the supposed innovation of the Osbornian fashion. \u201cPeople talk about Paris in the \u201920s or these moments of medieval Florence. The only one that\u2019s happened in my lifetime was the punk rock explosion.\u201d Describing it as \u201ctotally unauthorized,\u201d he says it\u2019s \u201cnot the sort of creative thing that anybody would have celebrated at the time.\u201d A lot of punk rockers were \u201cunemployed people, working-class people; they did something really amazing. We haven\u2019t seen an explosion of creativity like that in a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a very Gen X kind of attitude, I had to point out, which Frank mostly dismisses. \u201cIn America, we like to talk about generations, but we hate to talk about social class,\u201d which is something he considers \u201creally obviously the motor behind everything.\u201d At the same time, he says younger people struggle to picture the economy he grew up in. His father was an engineer for General Motors, and all of their neighbors also worked on the GM assembly line. \u201cWe all lived in the same kind of houses,\u201d he says. \u201cThe idea that blue-collar and white-collar would basically have the same standard of living \u2026 at the time, that was a clich\u00e9. Everyone said that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frank recalls The Baffler\u2019s first anthology, Commodify Your Dissent, published in 1997, which carried the subtitle \u201cThe Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age.\u201d That was a bit early, he says, laughing. \u201cYou don\u2019t get a prize for being right about these things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Does he advise Fortune readers and AI users to listen to more punk rock? \u201cExactly. Think for yourself. Do the research and read this book.\u201d<\/p>\n
#decades #asked #Whats #matter #Kansas #hes #70year #con #creativity #innovation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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