The conceptual role of “creativity” in our age of austerity has blurred and diverged and appeared in a strange array of contradictory positions. On the one hand, there is the opposition between art and work: Young people all want to be artists, but the economy needs engineers. Students of literature forfeit their future; they should have studied something more practical. Entitled millennials all just want to be artists— it’s no wonder the economy falls to pieces in their soft, uncalloused hands. On the other hand, there is the identity between art and work: Just as modernists innovated, so too do the tech startups. The creative work of “writing” is absolutely necessary for the writing of advertisements or technical manuals. What was once the day job has become its own creative reward.
On the one hand, making art is positioned as a defiant or stupid gesture against nine-to-five existence and white-collar respectability; on the other, it is used by the economic machine to remarket itself as hip and fun, and to justify existing distribution of rewards.
But this is not particularly new. Before tech startups merged with indie rock to solidify claims of being hip and creative, before the ideals of 1960s radicals were consummated in a Levi’s commercials, new industrial rich took the architecture of European aristocracies to affirm their social authority. Political-economic elites appropriate the cultural and symbolic languages of their rivals, as new outsiders and opponents articulate new forms of resistance or differentiation. Hence, perhaps, the hipster who denounces the band as soon it gains mainstream recognition.
This sense of art as reappropriated legitimization is nothing new: As Soviet rulers adapted paradigms of Orthodox Christian religious authority, so too do contemporary political-economic elites adopt signifiers of social authority pioneered by their rivals. The architecture of the classical academy or paideia, where the distinctions between chrematistics or usury and useful work were formulated, are repurposed to lend grandeur to the bastions of the financial sector. The abstract expressionist aesthetic, pioneered by leftist radicals, was used by the CIA as Cold War propaganda, before a more general modernist aesthetic emerged as a reliable indicator of class, and Rothko and Pollock’s paintings became speculative canvasses over which the financial speculators could stretch their profession.
But this role of legitimization becomes doubly important in this era of bubble capitalism. If the halls of power have long borrowed social authority along with architectural forms, the possibility of leveraging others’ creative work directly for profit has only recently come into its own. With money entering the economy increasingly taking the form of debt leveraged by investors, keeping investors excited is the single most important feat in many industries— even more so than making a profit. An image of being creative and exciting will keep money flowing in— even if very little in the way of monetizable products flow out.
If the value of corn or t-shirts can be measured in a meaningful way, the production of art, iphones, or property values cannot be. In a bubble economy or in non-commodity exchange, the worth of a firm or product depends much more on its social esteem or the hype surrounding it than on any stable metric, such as a firm’s physical capital or the difficulty of a product’s manufacture. As such, cultural reappropriation of the sort I’ve been talking about is not just ironic or propagandistic— it’s directly economically exploitative. Uncompensated creative labor becomes the basis for huge profits extracted from political-economic elites. “Free labor” (the term was popularized by Italian theorist Tiziana Terranova) could crowdsourcing, domestic work, and unpaid internships. A housewife washes dishes out of social expectation or patriarchal arrangements of power; Linux is used in Android smart phones, and the freely developed software becomes a major source of revenue for a for-profit corporation; user jokes or innovative uses become sources of billions for investors in web services like Twitter or Instagram. As theorist Adam Kotsko tells “The Story of Twitter,”
Some guys came up with a web service called Twitter that would facilitate sending group text messages. They imagined people would use it to help coordinate in-person socializing — for instance, you could send a message to your group of friends saying you were at a certain bar, and they could come by. In principle, that seems like a useful service.
As it turns out, though, people started using that service for completely different purposes, because it turned out to be a flexible and convenient way to communicate brief thoughts, links, etc. Often the platform actively impeded the uses people were finding for it, and the implementation of supplementary features (such as discussion threading) was slow and inconsistent.
Now there’s been an IPO and the people who created this service are multi-millionaires. The people who actually turned Twitter into what it is, however, get nothing — unless you count the increased number of ads.
Free-market bureaucrats extract immense profits from the incidental work of others leading a social existence (telling jokes, creating fashions, making music). Commie hippie pioneering leads to markets for $800 hippie dresses, a modernist aesthetic emergent from various anti-capitalist creative groups sets the design foundation for Apple’s fortunes. The cultural language of white hipness is transplanted from working class or creative groups to the realms of business and finance in order to keep investors excited— and in speculative finance, investor excitement translates directly into profit. The unpaid work of aspirants or hobbyists, the diffuse work of cultural pioneers, or the expected work of feminized labor is extracted or harnessed to facilitate the fortunes of rich white dudes; ditto the government: Economist Mariana Mazzucato documents how government research is used by private companies like Google and Apple, who did not make the investment, and do not share the returns. This is another instance of the “socialization of risks, privatization of profits” that describes bailouts of the financial sector.
We see creative work become free labor in marked up hippie dresses or inflated stock prices for Twitter, but the phenomenon becomes more diffuse and more dramatic in the gentrification process. Artists, hipsters, or punks— some rebellious, probably white subcultural variant— moves into or emerges from a poor, probably colored city or neighborhood. Attracted by a low cost of living, and therefore partial liberation from the demands of the market, incomers are able to live for some time without rents going appreciably up; though, eventually, a good music or arts scene, a general “hip” reputation, will emerge: Brooklyn, Austin, San Francisco, will become more “hip” than “dangerous,” and companies will move in, relying on the city’s reputation to help them attract employees, establish a brand, and foster hype. Real estate speculators buy up properties, increasing land values in anticipation of the process’s continuation, and the area’s original inhabitants are forced into financial difficulty or made to move to the periphery of their developing city. Tech companies brand themselves as innovative, creative, and spontaneous as they kick out the beat poets who vaulted these into the pantheon of American values in the first place. “Keep Portland Weird” is taken as a slogan for firms in marketing, tourism, and services that target new monied workers in tech as these phenomena make the city demonstrably less weird. The cheap rent that had facilitated free time for the creation of music, or the possibility of low-income work in independent art is undone by the creation of music and independent art. Speculators are able to profit from the hype around the hip area, tech companies are able to attract employees and build hype, and banks benefit by creating new money as investors leverage debt for all these exciting new investment opportunities. Political-economic elites are able to extract money from others’ free labor due to their privileged position in the mechanism of money-creation in financialized capitalism, and the process will continue until even the first-wave artist-gentrifiers are expelled for the very development they incurred!
This process highlights not only the uncompensated nature of creative work under financialized capitalism, but also the arbitrary nature of monetary worth. In a bubble economy, the only value is “being exciting to white people.” Banks create money by getting others to take out debt, and as alternative forms of money creation (most obviously, government spending) are stripped away, banks are given a greater share of socioeconomic power. Additionally, as markets for basic commodities are saturated (one can only eat so much corn, buy so many cars), non-commodities and investment bubbles come to pose new avenues to profit; but these things derive their worth from hype or social esteem rather than any stable or intrinsic measure of value. The free labor of an uncompensated creative class bases financial growth, but a culture’s worth is only determined by its relatability for the arbiters of value. If hipsters are harbingers of “development” or marks of “revitalization,” these are just euphemisms to mean that they create environments amenable to those-with-money, or those able to create it. White artist-gentrifiers set the stage for tech companies because SXSW is more exciting to Silicon Valley than Atlanta trap music; but, in either case, the vast majority of creative workers (musicians, organizers critics, scenesters) responsible for these movements will not be compensated by the money-extracting elites who will force them to work more hours at the coffee shops, fast food restaurants, or retail outlets that employ them, before they are eventually driven out of their native or adopted neighborhoods entirely.
As I’ve emphasized, this process rests mainly on the money-creating privilege of financial elites. The simplest, most direct solutions then, are obvious: create money in different ways. This would lessen the amount of private debt, decrease the likelihood and destructiveness of bursting financial bubbles, and potentially reward more socially valuable work than the money-creation and wealth-extraction of free-market bureaucrats. Courses of action could include: more publicly-funded services and ventures, more income for government workers, a universal basic income, or minimizing taxes on consumption. If someone says “there isn’t enough money,” they either want to maintain money-creation privileges for themselves, or they’ve been duped by those who do.
“The creative life” is posited as both the remedy for and the actuality of market life. One sense turns to the other as political-economic elites repurpose cultural forms and symbolic languages created through the free (in both the sense of voluntary and unpaid) creative work of others’ incidental social existence. Ciphers of hipness developed mostly by working class, radical, or other creative or outsider groups, are harnessed to create a sense of social legitimacy by political-economic elites and foster hype that is leveraged to inflate prices of non-commodities and create money for banks and speculators. Artist-types make a neighborhood appear hip and attractive to the money-creating classes, and those beneficiaries will leverage the neighborhood’s new appeal for immense profit before kicking out those to whom they owe their fortunes. The work of creative outsiders to the economic processes of money-creation and value-extraction is capitalized upon by the very elites to whom the outsiders stood opposed, even as creative workers are reconceived as subordinate to and derivative of political-economic elites in popular narratives: Entitled millennials forfeit their future studying art, but entrepreneurs are the true creatives anyway. In reality, an alliance of business, finance, and real estate utilize a privileged political-economic position to extract money from the unpaid outsiders on whom they depend for their fortunes.
