Thomas Frank Calls 'Innovation' America's Biggest Racket in New Book

By Grace Kim

Thomas Frank has a new target, and it's the word on your hoodie. His latest book, The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America's Biggest Racket, attacks a 70-year-old idea that business journalism — this outlet included — treats as gospel.

"These words are everywhere now," Frank said in a video interview from his study in Bethesda, Md., pulling at a thrift-store maroon sweatshirt stamped "Innovation Fitness." "It's total saturation."

Frank has spent three decades arguing that Americans misread their own economy. His 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas? probed why voters in his native Kansas City area backed policies he saw as against their class interests. The new book, published two decades later, takes aim at something closer to home for business readers: the cult of innovation and creativity itself.

Who invented 'creativity'?

Frank traces much of the modern concept to Alex Osborn, the "O" in ad agency BBDO and a Madison Avenue man straight out of central casting. Osborn popularized the term "brainstorm," which once meant a mental seizure of sorts; he turned it into a militaristic business term, as in storming an idea with your brains.

Frank spent a week in Buffalo combing through Osborn's archives. He says Osborn and his colleagues collected everything that used the word "creativity" in the 1950s and '60s to document the spread of their pet idea.

"The word I use in the book is 'ideology,'" Frank said, describing the belief that "this is how history works, this is how a country prospers … We've been saying that since the 1950s."

The problem, he says: it just "hasn't really worked out." Osborn, "no fan of the New Deal," pushed the ideology toward treating blue-collar workers as uncreative. "It has hurt us," Frank said. "It's hurt us really bad."

The takeaway: for Frank, innovation talk isn't neutral business language — it's an ideology with a paper trail, and he's read the paper.

Why does AI change his argument?

Frank says AI has made his case harder for white-collar workers to ignore. Just as "innovation" came for the working class — automation and outsourcing devastated communities like Kansas City — AI now threatens the same displacement for the supposed creative class.

"I have a lot of fears about it, too," he said. "I'm right in the crosshairs … nobody gives a damn about the creative class and their innovation districts anymore."

His own AI use is mixed. He says the technology has "revolutionized" archival work: when he wrote The Conquest of Cool in the 1990s, he sat in a library paging through old issues of Life magazine. Now the full run is searchable, and he can count how often a word appears.

But when he recently asked a large language model about a song lyric stuck in his head, it confidently and wrongly attributed it to The Great Gatsby. When he pushed back, it said "you are absolutely right" — and offered another wrong answer.

His deeper complaint: AI replicates journalism's fatal flaw of treating authority's answers as truth. "Do the experts say it? Well, then that's the truth," he said, noting that "expertise evolves constantly." People want "the correct answer with a capital C," he said, and AI "reproduces orthodoxy."

"In some ways, it's easier to get your hands on the truth than ever before," Frank said. But in others, "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 hopes "digging" for the truth doesn't disappear in the mixture.

In short: the tool speeds up research, but Frank thinks it slows down doubt — and doubt is the job.

What does real innovation look like?

Frank's answer is punk rock. An early journalistic coup at The Baffler, the magazine he co-founded in 1988, exposed how The New York Times' Styles section printed Seattle grunge slang that Sub Pop employee Megan Jasper had invented — including "wack slacks" for old, torn jeans.

"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," Frank said. It was "totally unauthorized" and "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."

He dismisses generational framing. "In America, we like to talk about generations, but we hate to talk about social class," which he calls "really obviously the motor behind everything." His father was an engineer for General Motors; all their neighbors worked the GM assembly line. "We all lived in the same kind of houses," he said. "The idea that blue-collar and white-collar would basically have the same standard of living … at the time, that was a cliche."

The Baffler's first anthology, 1997's Commodity Your Dissent, carried the subtitle "the business of culture in the New Gilded Age." "That was a bit early," Frank laughed. "You don't get a prize for being right about these things."

His advice for readers: "Think for yourself. Do the research and read this book." As AI rewrites the jobs of the people who preach innovation loudest, Frank's 70-year audit of the creativity gospel has arrived at the moment its believers need it most.