Against Creativity

Against Creativity Plot Summary

Introduction

Creativity has long been celebrated as a positive force that drives innovation, progress, and personal fulfillment. From corporate boardrooms to educational institutions, the call to "be creative" echoes as an unquestioned virtue. However, this celebrated concept has undergone a profound transformation under contemporary capitalism. What was once a potentially revolutionary force for social change has been co-opted and redefined to serve economic growth and maintain existing power structures. The critical analysis presented here challenges the prevailing narrative of creativity as an unequivocal good, examining how creativity has been weaponized against the very people who embody it. Through a systematic examination of work environments, marginalized identities, political rhetoric, technological developments, and urban spaces, a compelling case emerges that creativity—as currently defined and implemented—primarily serves to extend capitalism's reach while suppressing truly transformative thinking. By tracing how creative potential is systematically channeled into profit-generating activities rather than social progress, we can begin to reclaim a more radical and authentic vision of creativity that might lead to genuine alternatives to the current system.

Chapter 1: The Co-option of Creativity in Modern Capitalism

The notion of creativity has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent decades. What was once considered a divine power or collective social endeavor has been systematically redefined as an individual characteristic with market value. This shift accelerated in the late 1990s when governments, particularly in the UK under Tony Blair's New Labour, began championing the "creative industries" as economic drivers. By embracing popular culture and knowledge-based work, they crafted a powerful narrative: creativity was no longer the province of eccentric artists but a marketable trait that could fuel economic growth. This redefinition has been immensely profitable. The creative industries have become flagship sectors worth billions to national economies, surviving even the 2008 financial crisis unscathed. The model has been replicated globally, with the language of creativity penetrating every aspect of social and economic policy. Today, everyone is encouraged to "be creative" in all areas of life—work, education, relationships, and leisure—with the promise that doing so will lead to personal and collective prosperity. Central to this transformation has been the work of Richard Florida, whose influential concept of the "creative class" positioned certain workers as essential to economic development. According to this framework, cities and companies should reshape themselves to attract these creative individuals who would then generate innovation and growth. The narrative was seductive: creativity was democratic, accessible to all, and the key to social mobility and economic success. However, this capitalist version of creativity operates primarily as an appropriative mechanism. It identifies potential sources of resistance or alternative thinking, stabilizes them through naming and categorization, and then monetizes them. Countercultural movements—from punk to skateboarding—are regularly absorbed into mainstream commercial culture, their revolutionary potential neutralized. The infamous 2017 Pepsi advertisement featuring protesters exemplifies this process: genuine political resistance was sanitized and repackaged to sell soft drinks. This appropriative creativity doesn't actually create—it captures and redirects. Rather than fostering genuinely new possibilities or social formations, it channels creative energy toward reproducing existing economic structures. The result is a paradoxical situation where the rhetoric of unleashing creativity actually serves to limit what can be imagined, foreclosing possibilities for systemic change. True creativity—one that might envision and build alternatives to capitalism—is systematically marginalized in favor of innovations that extend market logic into previously non-commercial domains.

Chapter 2: Work: Relentless Creativity and Labor Exploitation

The modern workplace has been thoroughly transformed by the rhetoric of creativity. Open-plan offices with colorful breakout areas and foosball tables have become standard in industries far beyond traditional "creative" fields. These environments supposedly foster collaboration and innovation, but they mask a fundamental shift in labor relations. The "creative" workplace promotes collective work while rewarding individual endeavors, effectively increasing competition among workers while providing the illusion of community. This individualization manifests in multiple ways. Success stories like Apple or Facebook are attributed to singular geniuses like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg rather than the collective labor of thousands. Co-working spaces sell the appearance of collaboration while hiding increasing isolation and precarity. Most significantly, the boundaries between work, home, and leisure have collapsed entirely. When creativity is valorized as a constant state, there is no legitimate time to stop working. Answering emails on the commute home, brainstorming over dinner, and working through weekends become expected rather than exceptional. The result is unprecedented precariousness. "Creative" work arrangements—freelancing, zero-hour contracts, project-based employment—have replaced stable jobs with benefits. In universities, for example, while senior staff retain tenure, early-career academics face a cycle of short-term contracts, geographical displacement, and overwork. These conditions disproportionately affect those already marginalized by race, class, gender, or disability, who lack the safety nets that might make such "flexibility" viable rather than devastating. This precarity extends beyond formal employment into domestic life. The home—once a sanctuary from work—becomes an extended workspace. The much-celebrated "working from home" is often a process of domicide, where domestic spaces and relationships are subordinated to productivity. Household chores become tasks to maintain "work mode," and gendered domestic labor remains invisible even as it props up supposedly creative production. The viral BBC interview where children interrupted their father's home office broadcast unexpectedly revealed this hidden infrastructure of creative work. Public institutions have not escaped this transformation. The National Health Service in the UK, traditionally organized around communal labor and public service, faces increasing pressure to adopt "creative" business practices. Nurses and doctors are told to "innovate" and be "flexible" while facing budget cuts and privatization. The communal ethos of healthcare—where work produces social value rather than profit—is under threat from market-oriented "creativity" that treats patients as customers and care as a commodity. True creative work would look radically different. It would embrace genuinely communal labor models like the cooperatives in Argentina where workers occupied bankrupt factories, fired managers, and reorganized production democratically. It would recognize that people want to work not just for money but for purpose and social connection. Authentic creativity lies in building economic structures that distribute resources equitably and value all forms of labor, not just those that generate profit.

Chapter 3: People: Marginalized Identities and Genuine Creativity

True creativity often emerges at the intersection of different realms of experience, when seemingly incompatible ideas collide and transform each other. This "bisociative" creativity, as Arthur Koestler termed it, depends on the destabilization of established patterns and frameworks. Yet under capitalism's version of creativity, the most valuable intersections are those that lead to marketable innovations, while truly disruptive collisions—especially those arising from marginalized perspectives—are either ignored or appropriated without credit. The story of Lizzie Magie, who created The Landlord's Game (later stolen and rebranded as Monopoly) to critique property speculation, exemplifies this process. Despite inventing what would become one of history's most successful board games, Magie received just $500 for her creation while Charles Darrow, who appropriated her design, became a millionaire. Her marginalization as a woman in early 20th century America made her vulnerable to exploitation, despite her genuine creative innovation. This pattern continues today. The narrative of the creative "original"—exemplified by business gurus like Adam Grant—celebrates individual disruptors while systematically ignoring context and privilege. The celebrated "originals" are overwhelmingly white, male, educated, and Western, with access to resources and networks that insulate them from risk. Their creativity is celebrated precisely because it operates within capitalism's parameters, proposing innovations that extend rather than challenge market logic. Meanwhile, some of the most genuinely creative perspectives come from those marginalized by capitalism's narrow definition of productivity: disabled or "diffabled" people. Those who experience the world differently—whether through blindness, deafness, synaesthesia, or other neurological variations—develop unique ways of navigating environments designed without them in mind. The blind architect Chris Downey describes how losing his sight transformed his sensory experience of cities, making him attuned to aspects of urban design invisible to sighted people. Deaf communities have created rich cultural practices and visual languages that hearing people cannot access. These diffabled experiences represent radical creativity because they generate entirely new subjectivities and ways of being that capitalism cannot easily appropriate. However, the biological model of disability—which treats difference as deficiency requiring correction—serves to normalize bodies for economic productivity. Medical interventions often aim to make disabled people conform to capitalist standards of efficiency rather than valuing their unique perspectives. Normalization processes extend beyond formal medical contexts. When diffabled experiences are represented in media or advertising, they are typically sanitized for consumption. Smirnoff's campaign featuring deaf dancers used the tagline "We're open"—packaging tolerance as a marketable virtue while stripping disability of its challenging implications. Similar "diversity" initiatives in corporations promote inclusion while leaving fundamental power structures intact. Genuine creativity requires engagement with these marginalized perspectives, not as inspiration for profit but as alternative ways of being that might destabilize capitalism's rigid frameworks. This means practicing radical empathy—attempting to understand experiences beyond dominant norms—and valuing diffabled knowledge on its own terms rather than for its potential market applications. In Chris Downey's words, "There are two types of people in the world: those with disabilities, and those who haven't found theirs yet." True creativity begins by finding and exploring these differences.

Chapter 4: Politics: How Austerity Weaponizes Creative Rhetoric

The transformation of politics into spectacle has accelerated dramatically in the twenty-first century, merging with the entertainment industry's production values and reality TV formats. Political debates increasingly resemble talent competitions with their theatrical staging, personality-focused content, and audience voting mechanisms. This mediatization of politics serves to obscure substantive issues beneath a veneer of performance, reducing complex policy questions to matters of style and presentation. Donald Trump epitomizes this convergence, seamlessly transferring his reality TV persona from The Apprentice to presidential politics. His disregard for political norms, preference for sound bites over substance, and command of media attention exemplify how political creativity has been redefined as spectacle rather than substantive change. Post-debate "spin rooms" and social media commentary further distance politics from material reality, creating layers of mediation that make genuine engagement increasingly difficult. This spectacularized politics conceals what Lacanian theory would call the Real—the fundamental antagonisms and inequalities that structure society. As political engagement becomes another form of curated self-presentation on social media, the material consequences of policy decisions fade from view. Politics becomes performative rather than transformative, a matter of individual identity rather than collective action. Nowhere is this divorce between political spectacle and material reality more evident than in austerity policies implemented after the 2008 financial crisis. Despite being caused by financial speculation and "creative" banking products like subprime mortgages, the crisis resulted in massive public bailouts for banks while imposing budget cuts on social services. This response was framed as economic necessity—"balancing the books"—rather than an ideological project to reshape society. Austerity has been particularly devastating for public cultural institutions. Libraries, museums, and community centers—once repositories of collective knowledge and social connection—face funding cuts that force them to adopt entrepreneurial models or close entirely. The "Big Society" rhetoric that accompanied these cuts in the UK encouraged volunteers to fill gaps left by reduced public services, recasting community mutual aid as unpaid labor propping up a failing system. The human cost has been severe. In the UK, the Work Capability Assessment regime—outsourced to private company Atos—has been linked to hundreds of suicides among disabled people denied benefits after being declared "fit for work" despite serious health conditions. Housing benefit cuts, including the notorious "bedroom tax," have intensified homelessness and housing insecurity. Similar patterns appear across Europe and the United States, with austerity disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable. Throughout this process, "creativity" has been weaponized as a justification for cuts. Public services are told to "do more with less" through innovative approaches. Workers facing stagnant wages must find "creative" solutions to maintain their standard of living. Communities losing vital services should develop "creative" grassroots alternatives. This rhetoric places responsibility on individuals and communities to solve structural problems created by policy decisions, all while celebrating the supposed freedom and ingenuity this enforced self-reliance requires. Resistance to this weaponized creativity takes many forms. In Greece, communities have created "urban solidarity spaces" and alternative currencies in response to EU-imposed austerity. Groups like UK Uncut have staged creative protests targeting tax-avoiding corporations and government austerity policies. These movements demonstrate that genuine political creativity lies not in adapting to unjust systems but in imagining and building alternatives to them—a creativity that is necessarily collective rather than individual, transformative rather than adaptive.

Chapter 5: Technology: Algorithmic Control and Creative Limitations

Silicon Valley's corporate culture, with its emphasis on disruption, autonomy, and networked production, has become the dominant model for technological creativity. Companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google champion a horizontal, flexible approach to innovation that supposedly liberates workers from bureaucratic constraints. This "hacker mentality" values speed, agility, and constant experimentation, epitomized by Facebook's former motto: "Move fast and break things." This corporate structure mirrors neoliberal economic theory, particularly Friedrich Hayek's celebration of decentralized, competitive systems. Just as Hayek argued that markets discover optimal solutions through competition, Silicon Valley promotes technological innovation through networks of competing yet interconnected firms and individuals. The result has been unprecedented economic success, with tech giants becoming the world's most valuable companies. However, this supposedly liberating creativity has produced technologies that increasingly control and limit human autonomy. Algorithms—rule-based computational processes—now mediate countless aspects of daily life, from search results to social media feeds, dating apps to financial decisions. Machine learning algorithms, which adapt based on data inputs, can now generate art, optimize advertising, and even teach themselves to walk in virtual environments without explicit programming. These technologies have potentially revolutionary applications. Algorithms can predict cardiac arrests, detect cancer, and solve complex problems beyond human capacity. But their actual deployment serves primarily to extend capitalist accumulation rather than address social needs. Google's search algorithms, for example, determine what information we access while simultaneously monetizing our attention through targeted advertising. The company's AdWords platform transforms language itself into a commodity, with words auctioned to the highest bidder. Social media algorithms similarly narrow rather than expand possibilities. By curating content based on previous engagement, they create filter bubbles that reinforce existing preferences and beliefs. These personalized information streams fragment collective knowledge into individualized feeds, each optimized to maximize engagement and, consequently, advertising revenue. Even protest and activism become algorithmically suggested based on previous political expressions, reducing collective action to another form of personalized consumption. The sharing economy extends this commercialization into material life. Platforms like Airbnb, Uber, and eBay allow individuals to monetize previously "underutilized assets"—spare rooms, cars, personal possessions—creating new markets in previously non-commercial spaces. While proponents celebrate this as democratizing access and reducing waste, it primarily serves to financialize everyday life, transforming social relationships into economic transactions. Marcel Mauss's anthropological study of gift-giving demonstrated how non-monetized exchange builds social bonds and community. The sharing economy reverses this process, replacing mutual aid with market transactions. Rather than lending items to neighbors or offering rides to friends, we now rent these services through platforms that extract profit from previously informal relationships. The result is further atomization and individualism, as even acts of sharing become opportunities for self-interest rather than community building. Resisting algorithmic capitalism requires maintaining spaces for agonistic social interaction—what political theorist Chantal Mouffe describes as constructive confrontation between different perspectives. Algorithms smooth away friction and disagreement, creating comfortable bubbles of confirmation rather than challenging encounters with difference. Genuine creativity emerges from these uncomfortable collisions, not from frictionless digital environments optimized for consumption.

Chapter 6: The City: Urban Development and Creative Gentrification

Urban spaces have become primary battlegrounds for capitalism's co-option of creativity. City governments worldwide have embraced "creative city" strategies to attract investment and stimulate economic growth. These policies, from London's Borough of Culture competition to Miami's Wynwood arts district, mobilize art and culture as engines of development while systematically displacing existing communities and ways of life. The creative city model follows a predictable pattern. Areas experiencing economic decline—often post-industrial neighborhoods with affordable rents and diverse populations—are targeted for "revitalization" through cultural investment. Developers and city officials deliberately downplay existing community assets, portraying neighborhoods as empty canvases awaiting transformation. In Wynwood, for example, developer Tony Goldman explicitly disregarded the area's Puerto Rican history while promoting it as a blank slate for his curated street art project. These strategies invariably lead to gentrification. Initial cultural investments—galleries, public art, creative quarters—make neighborhoods attractive to wealthy newcomers, driving up property values and displacing long-term residents. The aesthetics of creativity—converted industrial spaces, boutique retail, and hip cafés—become visual signifiers of this process, with street art particularly valued for providing an "edgy" atmosphere that appeals to creative class professionals while remaining safely commodified. As gentrification advances, even more insidious tactics emerge. "Artwashing" describes the use of art to legitimize displacement and development. Housing associations and developers commission artists to work in areas slated for redevelopment, building cultural capital that increases property values while making resistance appear backward or anti-culture. In London's Balfron Tower, a brutalist public housing block, residents were gradually "decanted" while artists were offered temporary residencies, ultimately facilitating the conversion of social housing into luxury apartments. This process extends beyond formal development initiatives into everyday commercial spaces. Businesses appropriate working-class aesthetics and experiences for branding purposes, as with the Job Centre bar in Deptford, London—a cocktail venue in a former unemployment office—or a Brooklyn café that advertised its "bullet hole-ridden walls" as an attraction. These ventures trivialize community struggles while profiting from their aesthetic value. Resistance to creative gentrification takes multiple forms. Direct action groups like the Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement in Los Angeles have aggressively protested galleries and developments they see as catalysts for displacement, demanding investment in community needs rather than amenities for newcomers. Their confrontational tactics have successfully forced some galleries to close, demonstrating that community resistance can effectively challenge gentrification narratives. Other resistance strategies work within institutional frameworks while maintaining radical goals. The Long Live Southbank campaign successfully preserved a historic skateboarding space in London through a combination of planning objections, creative protest, and community mobilization. Their victory demonstrated that subcultural spaces can coexist with commercial development without being absorbed or displaced. These struggles highlight how genuine urban creativity differs from its capitalist version. Rather than imposing standardized development models regardless of context, it emerges from specific communities and their needs. Rather than treating culture as a commodity to attract investment, it values culture as a living practice embedded in social relationships. And rather than segregating creative activity into designated districts, it recognizes creativity in everyday adaptation and resistance, particularly among those navigating systemic constraints and oppression.

Summary

Creativity has been systematically redefined to serve capital accumulation rather than human flourishing or social transformation. From precarious "creative" jobs to gentrified "creative" neighborhoods, from algorithmic content curation to austerity's demand to "do more with less," the rhetoric of creativity has been weaponized against the very people who embody it. This co-option operates through individualization, commercialization, and appropriation—converting potentially disruptive energies into profitable ventures while foreclosing alternatives to capitalism itself. Genuine creativity requires something radically different: a willingness to destabilize rather than reinforce existing systems, to value marginalized experiences rather than extract from them, and to build collective alternatives rather than individual advantages. It flourishes in worker cooperatives that reject hierarchical management, in diffabled perspectives that challenge normative assumptions, in solidarity networks that resist austerity, in technologies designed for democratic control rather than profit, and in urban spaces shaped by community needs rather than market logic. By recognizing and amplifying these alternative creativities, we might begin to imagine—and create—worlds beyond capitalism's limited horizon.

About Author

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Oli Mould

Oli Mould is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work focuses on issues of urban activism, social theory and creative resistance. He is the author of Urban Subversion and the Creative City and blogs at tacity.co.uk.aka Oliver Mould

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