The Creative Economy Has Become The Movie They Live

Have you ever watched the movie They Live?You should.The 1988 film by John Carpenter is the story of Nada. Nada is played by the late great WWE icon Rowdy Roddy Piper. Nada is a homeless drifter who shows up in Los Angeles looking for work but ends up awakened for more than he bargains. He becomes "woke" on class consciousness at a time when not many people spoke about class warfare.In this science fiction which is more like a documentary if you watch it in 2025, Nada finds a pair of sunglasses that allows him to see reality.ObeyConsumeConformBuy More StuffWatch more TVGive up on your dreamsThe film has become a cult classic. Influenced a street artist named Shepard Fairey. Launched a streetwear brand around the whole concept of OBEY. Made the typeface Twentieth Century Bold really popular on sticker slaps.If we look at They Live and compare it to the creative class most of us right now are Nada. We're roaming around trying to find our place again in a sea of layoffs, a hard shift to freelance job structures, AI everywhere and being drowned out in a sea of noise telling us to obey all of these "rules" people have foisted on us the past few years. For creatives, 2025 needs to be the year many of us break free and put on the sunglasses to move beyond the handcuffs of best practices and the limits of corporate employment. Much of these limits came about as a result of the "systematization" of the social web, following "trends" and sticking with the "sure thing."Circa 2008, the social web started to swallow creativity. At one time there were much broader ideas on how creative strategists approached the world. Nowadays, too much creative strategy mimics this job posting I recently read on Upwork:"The ideal candidate will combine creativity and data-driven decision-making to develop impactful ad scripts, perform competitor analysis, and conduct in-depth brand research. You will work closely with our marketing and creative teams to optimize advertising campaigns and ensure they resonate with target audiences."Effective? Possibly.Boring? Faster than you can say “efficiency.”Now, I can hear you saying, "Geoff, this is just the way of the world and people want more certainty when it comes to marketing. They want more certainty when it comes to everything. They want DOGE! Oh, and they really connect with people who are authentic.”“Just be authentic.”Instead of Obey, now we get doublespeak like this. It is a tired quote uttered by the least creative business bureaucrats and shiny bright object influencers running around with ring lights. The social web, once a highlight of life, is now simply a shallow distraction. The place we go to doomscroll. A place void of inspiration. No different than what Nada endured before finding and putting on the sunglasses.I need to just lay it out for all of you reading this. The current world we live with its oligarchs and kleptocrats and plutocrats in power who will continue to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense needs to be called out. Especially by the creative class. Every year there are less unique ideas. Every year the creative world becomes more and more like They Live. We’re all working to collect fees or up sell. Nowhere is this sentiment captured more than this other quote:“AI will not replace you, but the person using AI will.”And then the other FOMO techno babble feudal phrase,“Stop building your digital presence on rented land!”As if individual people can own the web.Actually we can if we approach it from a decentralized open source model. But that’s for another discussion.All of this hype talk is to stir up fear in an uncertain world. It’s to get you to believe if you don’t get on the train, you’re done. You’ll be poor. You will lose at the Hunger Games. Nowhere has this paranoia set in than with the creative class. People who support themselves with knowledge or imagination jobs. Creators, creative directors, art directors, designers, musicians, artisans of any and all types. You are supposed to just “hustle” and make content that is good because the system is democratized to individually reward everyone who makes “good content.”Whatever. Gold shovel salesmen and grifters who adore the digital feudalism we’re living in will continue this diatribe at peak volume the next 4 to 5 years. Until it eats them alive. The better approach moving forward? Consolidating and unifying creative power. The solopreneurs? Tell them to unify with a few more solopreneurs instead of trying to sell that “Here’s what makes me successful” class for $599. If you were successful, you wouldn’t be selling classes like that. You’d be giving them away. We need to inspire people to bowl more together.Why?We’ve somehow walked backwards into the 1950s. Or possibly the 1850s. The assumption is that in order to be successful in this current phase of the 21st Century one must follow every trend, not critically think and to convert into a ...