Thomas Frank Takes Aim at the 'Innovation' Gospel in New Book

Thomas Frank, the author best known for his 2004 book «What's the Matter with Kansas?,» is back with a new target: the corporate gospel of «innovation» and «creativity.» His latest book, «The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America's Biggest Racket,» argues that the language businesses use to describe progress has functioned less as a description of how the economy works than as an ideology that has shaped who gets rewarded and who gets left behind.

Frank traces much of the modern concept to Alex Osborn, the advertising executive and co-founder of the agency BBDO, who popularized the term «brainstorm» and spent decades promoting creativity as a business tool. Frank spent a week in Buffalo examining Osborn's papers, where he found that Osborn and his colleagues collected nearly everything published using the word «creativity» in the 1950s and 1960s to track the spread of their idea. Frank calls the result an ideology — a story about how history works and how a country prospers that has been repeated since the postwar years. Osborn, he notes, was no fan of the New Deal and pushed the notion that blue-collar workers were not creative.

That framing, Frank argues, has had real consequences. As automation and outsourcing devastated industrial communities, including his hometown of Kansas City, the innovation gospel offered a justification for treating displaced workers as relics of an older economy. «It has hurt us. It's hurt us really bad,» Frank says. The book's critique lands at an awkward moment for the business press, including Fortune, which publishes America's Most Innovative Companies and runs innovation-focused events. Frank acknowledges the irony with good humor, noting that the magazine he co-founded, The Baffler, kept a box of old Fortune issues in its office and that he and his colleagues pored over the publication's art-deco covers from the 1930s and 1940s.

The argument has gained new urgency, Frank says, because artificial intelligence is now threatening the same kind of displacement for white-collar and creative workers that automation once brought to the working class. He describes an unspoken strain in the current talk about AI: the people who preached creativity as the key to prosperity may find themselves on the receiving end of the same logic. «I'm right in the crosshairs,» he says, adding that «nobody gives a damn about the creative class and their innovation districts anymore.»

Frank's own experience with AI is mixed. He says the technology has «revolutionized» archival research, pointing out that complete runs of old magazines that once required days in a library are now fully searchable, and that a researcher can count how often a word appears. But he also describes asking a large language model about a song lyric stuck in his head and being confidently told it came from «The Great Gatsby» — a wrong answer that the model defended before reversing course and offering another wrong answer.

His deeper concern is that AI will not be revolutionary enough. Frank argues that language models replicate a familiar flaw in journalism: treating the statements of authority as truth. «Do the experts say it? Well, then that's the truth,» he says, describing the logic. The problem, he adds, is that «expertise evolves constantly,» while people want «the correct answer with a capital C.» The result, in his view, is a technology that «reproduces orthodoxy.»

Frank says the search for truth is simultaneously getting easier and harder. «In some ways, it's easier to get your hands on the truth than ever before,» he says. But in other ways, «we're in this world of clouds and mystification and orthodoxy that you can't question or touch.» He hopes that patient «digging» for facts does not disappear in the mix.

For Frank, the clearest example of genuine innovation in his lifetime is not a corporate initiative but punk rock. He calls the movement «totally unauthorized» and notes that many of its participants were unemployed and working class. «We haven't seen an explosion of creativity like that in a long time,» he says — a contrast, in his telling, with the sanitized version of creativity that businesses have spent seven decades celebrating.

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Caroline Mercer

World News Correspondent

Caroline Mercer covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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