“Look at this sweatshirt,” Thomas Frank says over a video interview from his study in Bethesda, Md. He pulls at his maroon hoodie, which he’d just picked up from a thrift store the other day. The badge on his chest reads “Innovation Fitness.”
“These words are everywhere now,” he says with his ever-present smile and laugh. “It’s total saturation.”
Frank has spent three decades arguing that Americans misread and misunderstand their own economy, perhaps most famously in his 2004 modern classic, What’s 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’s Biggest Racket, takes aim at a staple of business journalism: the idea of “innovation” as something fundamental to American business.
Frank is gracious toward Fortune, which publishes America’s Most Innovative Companies, runs the Fortune Innovation Forum and Workplace Innovation Summit, and hosts a “Leaders in Innovation” series. “You guys have been very critical of all the stuff you ordinarily cover,” he says. He recalls that The Baffler, the magazine he co-founded in 1988, kept a stack of old Fortunes in its office. “We had this huge box of back issues,” he says, recalling the great painted art-deco artwork that Fortune was known for in the 1930s and ’40s. “We used to just sit there in the office and pore over it.”
Much of Frank’s 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 ad-man straight out of Madison Avenue: Alex Osborn, the “O” in BBDO. Among other things, Osborn popularized the term “brainstorm,” which once meant a mental seizure of sorts but Osborn turned into a militaristic business term, as in storming an idea with your brains.
Frank spent a week in Buffalo, looking through an archive of Osborn’s papers. He says Osborn and his colleagues collected everything that used the word “creativity” in the 1950s and ’60s to document the progress of their pet idea.
“The word I use in the book is ‘ideology,'” Frank says, adding that he hopes that doesn’t sound too “political and really heavy-handed.” He describes the ideology: “This is how history works, this is how a country prospers … We’ve been saying that since the 1950s.” The problem is that it just “hasn’t really worked out,” Frank says in chipper but mournful fashion, pointing out that Osborn, “no fan of the New Deal,” pushed the ideology toward considering blue-collar workers as uncreative. “It has hurt us. It’s hurt us really bad.”
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’s “sort of an unspoken strain in all of the talk about AI,” he says. Just as “innovation” 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. “I have a lot of fears about it, too,” Frank says. “I’m right in the crosshairs … nobody gives a damn about the creative class and their innovation districts anymore.”
Frank’s own use of AI is mixed. He says it has “revolutionized” 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’s 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 “you are absolutely right,” before offering another wrong answer.
Frank’s deeper complaint is that AI won’t be revolutionary enough: it will replicate the fatal flaw of journalism in treating authority’s misleading answers as truth. He calls the way LLMs work as dangerous: “Do the experts say it? Well, then that’s the truth.” The problem, he adds, is that “expertise evolves constantly.” People want “the correct answer with a capital C,” he says, “and I feel like that’s one of the dangers of AI.” It “reproduces orthodoxy.”
“In some ways,” Frank says, “it’s easier to get your hands on the truth than ever before.” But in other ways, “we’re in this world of clouds and mystification and orthodoxy that you can’t question or touch … it’s going both directions at the same time.” He says he hopes that “digging” for the truth doesn’t disappear in the mixture.
Perhaps it’s no surprise Frank’s criticism has an anti-establishment 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‘ Styles section printed slang from Seattle’s grunge scene that Sub Pop employee Megan Jasper had made up. (The invented slang included “Wack slacks,” for old, torn jeans, and “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” for hanging out.)
Punk, he argues, is a perfect example of true innovation, unlike the supposed innovation of the Osbornian fashion. “People talk about Paris in the ’20s or these moments of medieval Florence. The only one that’s happened in my lifetime was the punk rock explosion.” Describing it as “totally unauthorized,” he says it’s “not the sort of creative thing that anybody would have celebrated at the time.” A lot of punk rockers were “unemployed people, working class people, they did something really amazing. We haven’t seen an explosion of creativity like that in a long time.”
This is a very Gen X kind of attitude, I had to point out, which Frank mostly dismisses. “In America, we like to talk about generations, but we hate to talk about social class,” which is something he considers “really obviously the motor behind everything.” 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. “We all lived in the same kind of houses,” he says. “The idea that blue-collar and white-collar would basically have the same standard of living … at the time, that was a cliche. Everyone said that.”
Frank recalls The Baffler’s first anthology, Commodify Your Dissent, published in 1997, which carried the subtitle “the business of culture in the New Gilded Age.” That was a bit early, he laughs. “You don’t get a prize for being right about these things.”
Does he advise Fortune readers and AI users to listen to more punk rock? “Exactly. Think for yourself. Do the research and read this book.”