It feels like the recent AI bubble beginning to deflate shows that there is change in the atmosphere. Mass layoffs, lack of jobs, offshoring, nearshoring and a number of other workplace trends are leading to new ways to organize in addition to new business solutions looking beyond the tech bubble. Much of that taking place in real life (IRL) scenarios again.

Could the next wave of businesses being formed now in 2026 possibly be way more balanced than the current model due to an injection of humanist thinking over pure tech solutionism? The Bezos, Musk, Zuck approaches (which were just updated versions of a Jack Welchian philosophy) might be looked at in five short years as “cooked” or performed strictly by “fossil corporations.” Change must occur if labor projections showing a mass shortage of workers are correct. Why? If we understand that the coming years will not enjoy the abundance of workers that past decades did, and yet we have a scarcity of solutions that help us with the how but not the what, then everyone’s approach to the labor market will need to change. This is leading to two opposing forces in the business world. One that is THX-1138 meets Blade Runner meets Minority Report themed vs. another Star Trek meets The Orville more humanist approach theme that puts more emphasis on stakeholders over the statistical rank and yank, automate everything, you’re just a human capital asset approach.

Tech solutionism failing is possibly a signal we’re at the end stage of 80 years of neoliberalism. The consequences of prosperity it promised has led to austerity. This is now slowly dismantling as we see the beginning of the end of marketplaces. We cannot “spend” or “automate” our way to a free society it appears. As entrepreneurialism gave way to managerialism we are seeing zero innovation to the problems we face. Markets are not neutral and people are fed up with the crushing of the public sector. We need a mixture of humanism meets futurism as we straddle an old operating system with a new one. This means we need more people who understand and study the humanities as a life learning lesson mission. Who use it as a way to unlock curiosity. The humanities will help give us three elements currently missing from present day tech solutionist styled business leadership.1. A better understanding of people.Humanities fields like history, literature, sociology, and philosophy train people to understand human behavior, motivations, culture and context. This translates to stronger insight and empathy,more inclusive and effective leadership andbetter communication across cultures and teams.2. Stronger ethical judgment and long-term thinking.Right now everyone just thinks in quarterly profit motives. The humanities push us to ask should we? Not simply can we?History has constant reminders for leaders of what happens when short-term profit, cough, Enron, cough, overrides ethical responsibility. Just take a look around us right now. Do we really like this world we’ve designed?3. Clearer communication and persuasive storytelling.Writing, rhetoric, and narrative analysis are core humanities skills.A great idea doesn’t matter if no one understands or believes in that idea. The humanities helps ideas make an impact.Note: The humanities don’t replace technical or financial skills. They balance and amplify them by making businesses more human, ethical, and persuasive.We’ve over-indexed to be either all technical and all financial but not at all human. Not at all caring. And that’s showing now in the larger business leadership world. Things ebb and flow and humans seem to be reacting now in ways that are showcasing the need to put people back in the priority column and not treat us like we’re some metric in a P/L spreadsheet.Iceberg ahead.

In the 1990s the term Keeping it Real was used by many of us in the hip hop community which was lifted from African American Vernacular English. But why did this term in particular resonate? We have to think of what was happening at that time as a scene which had local roots and a foundation in New York City (Bronx and Queens to be precise) in the 1970s started to really grow and create influence across the globe in the 1980s and early 1990s.

With this growth, the era of the “corporate sellout” was in full swing. We could easily spot this “talent.” Pawns of the larger major labels given six-figure record label deals because they had one or two solid hits, acted a particular part, but really lacked a vision for a long tail career that said anything. As more of this talent got signed, an entire underground spawned. Labels, artists, even clothing lines. A backlash to the fakery usually driven by a visual image. And this is where we heard people utter, Keeping it Real more to the point it even ended up as a mantra on a popular reality TV show, “When people stop being polite, and start getting real.”

At its heart, Keeping it Real meant and still means:

* Staying authentic

* Being honest about who you are

* Not selling out, fronting, or pretending to be something you truly are not for status or money

This idea was deeply important in early hip-hop, where credibility and lived experience mattered a lot. Maybe more than anything for a life long career of artistry. It reminds me I was able to meet RZA when I worked at a record label in the early 2000s. He’s the real deal. A prime example of someone honest about his roots, his passions and influences. A lot of early gatekeepers told him Wu-Tang would never go anywhere. But he heard things others didn’t and went with his gut.

The reason I bring this up?

It taps into a universal tension: who you really are vs. who you’re expected to be. And let’s be honest (a phrase that came out of keeping it real), authenticity never goes out of style, even when that word gets overused.

Fast forward to the early aughts and many bloggers that inhabited the web would write out their entire souls to strangers online. There was something wonderful about this. These were normies, people like you and me who simply had a digital mood board. But instead of using it to try to convert into a career of sorts, many did this from the point of how open source works. They approached their writing from a “What Can I Offer the World” point of view. I remember talking to many of these bloggers. Most of them were introverts uncomfortable with their new found fame. One told me something that still resonates. “If people can learn something, cope better with what I share, and unite with others based on shared experiences, then maybe this will help bring humanity together with a common understanding. Maybe we’ll find more commonality with our universal human peers.”

This type of Hopecore continued to spread as online influence grew and social media rose in popularity. Before you knew it, an entire cottage industry of creators and influencers had spawned. Need dating advice? There’s a creator/influencer for that. Need tourism ideas? There’s an influencer for that. Need ideas for an outfit? There’s a creator who does some cool hauls with a style you might like for that. And even how we approached our careers started to transform. “Oh, so and so has 900,000 followers on Insta (ahem, little did anyone know this person bought all those followers), they must be good at social media marketing. Let’s hire them!”

This worked for a really long time. In fact in the past 15 years I would note that I have gotten hired from a great social media presence on LinkedIn, TikTok and now Substack. But when people hired me, they also knew my real credentials. I had the portfolio of work to back it up. And most important? I had the lived experiences. When you meet me, I can tell you all the learnings and relearnings from these experiences. I can talk game.

This is a huge advantage not being talked about much by those so keen to lean heavily on knowledge engines to give them all the answers. IRL is now the moat in a world where prompt addicts think they can just figure out answers from some Large Language Model and be an “expert.” They’re looking more and more like the Matt Damon character in this Good Will Hunting scene…

For the past six years everyone assumed what people tell them they’ve done or even have experience in is all fake quackery. Snake oil. That creative? AI must have made it. The people you say you know? BS to just get a meeting to talk about investment. And part of this is because instead of Keeping It Real there have been so many faking it until they make it with illusions of grandeur that trust has eroded our social fabric. “Should we believe what they say on their resume?” “I’ll just write anything to get it through the ATS systems.” “They said they did this on their website but I don’t believe them.” “They wrote a book, but anyone can write a book because of AI.”

All of this questioning about the truth and about what is real and what isn’t has led to some people, mainly creatives, doing something I never thought would happen. We’re on the fringe edges of it as an eccentric behavior but it mimics what I’m also seeing in current club culture. People are blowing up their online profile. Debranding themselves from the web. Doing what Cal Newport calls “Deep Work” and just going back into making things and doing more IRL instead of telling everybody about those things on these online platforms. Showing people rather than telling them. This has had a profound effect on the entire creator economy cottage industry. There must be thousands of people who do videos talking about brand trends, social media marketing trends or other business trends. Heck, I was one of them with a Top 100 business podcast from 2011-2021. But I also had the resume to back up these discussions. Most of the people now? They’re consultants who have never even held a job at a Fortune 100 but dictating to Fortune 100s what they should be doing. They don’t have any lived experience. But what do they have?

A personal brand.

In the past few years these people could get away with getting hired for decent sized contracts because they were good promoters of themselves. Good stagetalkers. Good hype artists. They might even have an AI avatar doing keynotes. But more and more when I talk to companies who have hired these folks they realize something quick: business impact, making business results, heck, even coming up with a workable strategy and executing it is very different than making good TikToks, highly viewed YouTube videos or mass shared Substacks. As Kyla Scanlon noted in her recent piece entitled The Great Entertainment: “We teach people the only thing that matters is great content. The spectacle. Yet business and life is governed by trust. By realness. The real world doesn’t make for good content.”

We’re entering a realness era again. One that only IRL can secure from all the b******t we’re up to our knees in the past 15 years. Mainly because we are seeking real people, real voices that we can trust. Do they have to have one million followers on Instagram when you can buy those? No. Do they have to make snackable short videos with an Australian accent so they look sophisticated? No. Can they be an expert and maybe have 122 subscribers on some underground newsletter?

Yes.

If anything, we have learned the hard way that people who are a bunch of media elites, podcasters cosplaying in roles they have no business being in, (FBI Director, cough) is what led us to yearn for IRL again. We’re tired of people telling us some narrative we’ve heard time and time again that just gets tired, cooked and washed with time. That only being online will help us feel connected (nope, more alienated). That only tech solutionism alone can build the next wave of business (nope, more humanity will do that). That only the most popular kids online who used pay to play methods should be the people we listen to (nope, quite the opposite unless you love aristocracies).

We are yearning for realness again in life, for people who we can look up to as mentors, for people we would want to apprentice with. For older people who can teach and young people who can also do the same. The tech dweebs wanted you to think you could live life locked in a room with a big headset strapped to your forehead and do everything by yourself in the Metaverse while becoming the first solo trillionaire.

What? C’mon. Stop faking the funk and Keep it Real.

And one more thing…

Geoffrey Colon is founder of Creative Studies, a business consultancy, t-shirt shop and newsletter at the intersection of work + life + imagination. Find him IRL in Seattle, New York City, Los Angeles, London and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

It’s difficult to forecast anything in this day and age. Too many changes, too many system flaws, too many human and technological errors. Too many bad hot takes. But it’s good to discuss what is possible to get a better idea of the behavioral landscape. Some highlights we see on the horizon for 2026:

* What’s tangible? What can we touch? In a world overwashed in digital and made up metrics, people want what’s “real” again.

* There is less risk being taken and a need for managed outcomes. We’ve been seeing this since 2023. This continues through 2026.

* Cost-cutting seems to be the bet on revenue model. Until there is nothing else to cut. Then what? More uncertainty.

* This year will be slower than 2025. Which means if we think things are going to “get better” we’re in for some heavy future shock.

* Being first to market and “FAST” is maybe not the best recipe for success now even though this is what Big Tech sells to customers. Maybe being strategic, deliberate, deep and calculated aka “SLOW” is the better opportunity in a year that looks like a quagmire and uncertain. Why? Going slow allows you to focus. Going fast feels good for dopamine levels until you’re fried.

* Are we seeking monocultures again over personalized feeds because the former leads to less alienation?

* 2026 will be the first year portfolio careers are finally accepted and not looked upon as “weird” by those in career recruitment. All of us have multiple email addresses now to handle the various outputs we participate in.

What are your thoughts for this year? How are you feeling? What are your big bets in business? Feel free to share in the comments.

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This is something we will finally learn in 2026. The year I will dub “The Revenge of the Humanities.”

We seem to have a death of permanence. But all of the broken pieces of how our society operated for much of the last 80 years are not thrown away. They are picked up and re-assembled into a new society. This is what we are witnessing as what we undergo for the 2020s is best described as future shock.

What is it?

Too much change in a short amount of time.

We have all suffered from dopamine deep fry.

When there is a significant amount of changes in a short amount of time, society undergoes what individual humans undergo when they face high levels of stress: literal shock. Everything we’ve been witnessing since the 2008 financial collapse has been one elongated version of shock. Certain generations seem to be okay with this. Writing new rules for a new world. But those who want to go back and make things great again seem to be trying to keep the beating pulse going on what appears to be a dead corpse.

The primary question now for us to answer is, will our society give out and die from that shock or resuscitate and move forward to truly live?

This leads to wondering why we believe that just because we have the capital and power to build certain technologies, if we should do so. We seem to think that innovation and the logic of the markets are the only path to perseverance. But are we overdue for adopting a paradigm of the commons approach for the 21st Century? And what would that look like?

An alternative that has been tried and tested in practice by communities past and present, the paradigm of the commons goes beyond the state and the market and implies the radical self-instituting of society, allowing citizens to directly manage their shared resources.

This isn’t the techno feudal corporatism that exists now. It represents more of a model in which the emphasis is on the importance of self-governance and community stewardship, contrasting with traditional market logic that prioritizes individual profit over shared responsibility. Key aspects of this world to help eradicate future shock could include:

Self-organization: Communities that can directly manage their shared resources without external control, fostering a sense of ownership and responsibility.

Holistic behavior: The commons presumes that humans can engage in more complex, humane behaviors that go beyond selfishness, promoting social solidarity and cooperation. It is no longer focused on the corporate state.

Resilience: The commons can be found in various forms throughout history and organizations including indigenous practices, open-source software, local food production systems, community organizations and city-states where a percentage of all revenue is put toward the larger common wealth and good.

This challenges the rational belief that everything that works best is a marketplace, privately owned and monetized like a casino.

David Bollier describes a future by adopting the commons because:

“Market enclosure is about dispossession. It is a process by which the powerful convert a shared community resource into a market commodity, so that it can be privately owned and sold in the marketplace. Enclosure preys upon the common wealth by privatizing it, commodifying it and dispossessing the commoners of their autonomy and resources.

Enclosures sweep aside the social relationships and cultural traditions and sense of community that had previously existed. It requires the imposition of extreme individualism, the conversion of citizens into passive consumers, and greater social inequality. Money becomes the coin of social legitimacy and participation in a society.”

For all this to happen there must be events that occur that we are not ready for.

Future shocks.

This will result in collapse and reform. Disruption and destruction. Which clears the way for a new canvas to paint on again. A new social contract. New collaboration. New collectivism. Public spaces and the commons, both online and off, are counter attacks to entrenched private power strangling society currently. It’s also a human reaction, a counterculture to the robotic-ism and cold and plastic solutions that have been shoved down our throats by big tech the past two decades. This is the only true path to creating real possibilities and new forms of social organization without being dictated solely by profit, markets or revenue.

I hope you will use 2026 to learn, unlearn and relearn what will make you happy, curious and challenged to become a more well rounded and complete human being in a world over washed in technology.

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In 2008 James Surowiecki wrote the book “Here Comes Everybody.” In it, he made the case that digital connectivity has democratized organization and communication, reshaping how communities form and how collective action happens in the modern world.

We’re now seeing that play out 18 years later as the book reaches a maturation state moving from merely a hypothesis to real life case studies.

Shirky documented what is now showing up in every human state of affairs including politics, business and education. And we’re just at the beginning state of this tipping point.

One of the biggest real life case studies happened recently that may actually dial all of this up to eleven to use a terminology from Spinal Tap.

Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City as a Democratic Socialist. Many point out he did this solely using social media. But what he really did was utilize organizing without organizations. And using something usually not talked about in our heavy technocratic narratives. He got people talking with one another in real life spaces again in one of the biggest cities in the world. And they did this without any formal organization. He copy and pasted Shirky’s hypothesis into real life. Mamdani relied heavily on a decentralized group of volunteers who canvassed for him around progressive policies and a vision that is long overdue to be implemented in a city that has become the playground of billionaires.

As The New York Observer review of Shirky’s book stated, “For the first time in history, the tools for cooperating on a global scale are not solely in the hands of governments or institutions. The spread of the internet and mobile phones are changing how people come together and get things done - and sparking a revolution that is changing what we do, how we do it, and even who we are.”

While the internet is not new, how we are finally using it seems to be rewriting outdated playbooks and systems from a big media monocultural era. This is leading to a reform revolution right before our very eyes where how we viewed the world the past 40 years is no longer how it will function for the next 40. Mainly because the past worked like a military hierarchy. The present? Like a flat collective where everyone has equal power to contribute and be a participant more than a witness.

This, along with an economic system in need of a Nu “New Deal” is making us teeter on the edge of a reset. So what is holding back the complete overhaul of outdated organizational design systems? Is it technology? Probably not, as technology is all around us. Is it the lack of vision to implement new ways of thinking? Maybe, but we’re seeing those cracks now showing as more progressive candidates get elected into office using crowdfunding techniques. Most likely it is the hoarding of power by old systems unwilling to simply give up power. It’s a classic tale of a power struggle. New vs. Old. Future vs. Past.

We know through history how this all plays out. There are 8 stages of collapse. We’re in stage 7. What’s stage 8? Reform or revolution. Note that there is a possibility of reform OR revolution in stage 8. Not everything has to be violently destroyed to be rebuilt.

Reform only happens when we can pay attention to what truly matters when it comes to disruption. Things that are “outside the lines” of our purview. Today we note that AI or the Intelligence Age will be the largest change on our society moving forward similar to how many believed the Space Age and the Atomic Age would make the most important impact on eras of the past. And yet if we look at the past from the present we realize quickly that it was the transistor and birth control pill that were much more revolutionary than either rockets or nuclear bombs.

As Shirky notes: “They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. That is happening again today.”

Technology tools are not simply technology tools. Technology tools are social change agents.

Mamdani showed exactly this when he went from a 1% nobody one year ago to a 50% voting mayor-elect majority ushering in the dawn of a new era on organizing without organizations.

He is not the first to run an organization without organizing and most certainly won’t be the last.

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“How will you make buses free?”

Well, how do we make any public service free?

Libraries, the last I checked have been free for some time.

And not many people complain about those.

The internet has reshaped behavior. Not always in a good way. But now it wants to disrupt how we govern. And this could actually be a good thing. Why? People are just asking that their power as a collective in the form of taxes be directed to the things we want more of. Not what some representative thinks we want more of. In a world where the internet isn’t new, what scares those in power is that what they think we want, maybe we don’t really want at all.

This leads us to the current situation of efficiency over progress. Because big tech has a huge monopoly and stranglehold on the world economy, how we do business, how we communicate, how we police, how we work, how we live; we are seeing moves for them to become bigger, more powerful, to have more oversight where they have an ultimate stranglehold on power. They are becoming nation states unto themselves. Some in the creative class see this and are calling it out. Now this ripple effect is reaching politics. And this is causing many to finally wake up and question old institutions and outdated systems. If you’re an old fashioned politician on either side of the aisle peddling a bunch of propaganda and spouting canned talking points, good luck. Authenticity which wins on social media has now seeped into the political water. And it seems to be winning.

We aren’t asking a cult of personality anymore. We don’t want cult leaders. We see what is happening with the current digital Jonestown in place. We want leaders who remove obstacles so that the collective can rise. We are tired of assuming someone will represent us when we feel like we can represent ourselves better as a unified force. We don’t assume everyone who can’t feed themselves is lazy or incompetent. We are starting to realize more and more that society and the sum of the parts is greater than a few wealthy individuals who use corporate welfare to enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else.

This is a huge shift over the past 40 years where we were told communal thinking was bad, individualism was the only way. Where we were told government was bad, that privatization and the logic of the markets was the only way. Where we were told anybody could be anything they wanted to be, even if the system isn’t really designed to help them be that. We seem to be complacent with the fact we reward people who move pixels around on a screen then people who move physical bodies from a bed to a chair. That one is worth $1500 an hour and the other only worth $15 an hour. We seem to be quick to label ourselves as if that is enough for us to get into the pearly gates of an unproven afterlife while ignoring the plights of our fellow humans in the here and now.

When people say things are not possible, that we’ve tried that and it doesn’t work, that things are going to go to s**t, then we’re giving up on the one skill that has carried us through as humans forever. That allows us to expand our minds in ways not deemed possible.

Imagination.

We’re no longer in the knowledge or information economy. But the powers that used big data to enrich themselves don’t want you to get this memo. They don’t want you to imagine an alternative to what has existed for thousands of years. They want you to stay on the straight and narrow path. Because doing anything different prevents their growth. And these powers want us to simply choose from two very narrow options. Both not that very different from each other. Both dressed up in two colors. Do you want red or do you want blue? Those with imagination are questioning where are the green, yellow, purple, pink, black, white, grey, turquoise, orange options?

We are fully in the imagination era now. If we would actually exercise it. But someone keeps telling you to believe anything the intelligent assistant tells you. This is why big corporations are trying to dig in their heels, laying people off to enrich what shareholders remain holding the stock and seeing the end of the world before seeing the end of a financial system that seems to have run its course.

What if this layoff collapse going on around us is actually an opening? Is it a signal of the emergence of smaller indie creator DIY systems as the next infrastructure of work and a shift from managers to makers? What if we have a barter economy take the place of the financialized one that dominates now? In the design world, we have always focused on human needs. I sense many are finally catching up to this after a hard lesson that big systems will care about you for life (they won’t) and now realizing there’s nobody coming to save us. Only we can help save each other. Only we can use our imagination to imagine what we want the world to look like next.

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Are we now in a world of peak hypernormalization? Watch and decide...

It feels like the 1980s all over again. Just not the 1980s you’re thinking of.

Geoffrey Colon explains how indie podcasts are leading the way on IRL community building by remixing something established 40 years ago by DIY hardcore punk culture and the book Our Band Could Be Your Life.

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* The generative AI boom has sparked interest in technology's capabilities.

* Advertising agencies are grappling with the potential displacement by AI.

* Brands are experimenting with AI in creative campaigns, facing mixed reactions.

* Concerns exist about agencies losing control over the creative process to platforms.

* Data privacy and trust issues are significant in the ad tech landscape.

* The workflow of creative processes is changing due to AI integration.

* Marketers are uncertain about the future amidst multiple disruptions.

* UGC is becoming increasingly prevalent in media buys.

* The creator economy is generating more revenue than traditional media.

* Agentic browsing could create new challenges for advertisers and consumers.

Chapters

00:00 The Intersection of AI and Advertising

05:31 The Future of Marketing in a Disrupted Landscape

10:14 Predictions for the Future of Advertising

Read + Watch + Listen to this episode and more on the podcast for the creative class. Creative Studies.

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I won’t say nothing has happened. Do I have one, stable W2 paying job?

No.

Am I employed with work?

Yes.

Will I ever have another W2 paying job ever again?

Not likely.

And this is what many are missing as they seek to find work in this new normal of the 21st Century.

Finding work is broken along with the fact the economy as a whole is also busted.

Most of this originates back to 2008 but this piece isn’t about the Great Recession. It’s about where job hunting will go next as the job market evolves.

For as long as I can recall over the past three decades as a member of Generation X, we’ve been told that the future of work would be like producing a film. You have a skill, you bring it to the team, you do the job, you depart, you look for your next line of work.

There’s just one issue with this. It’s unstable.

Add in this factor with the fact job board sites like LinkedIn are more like Facebook Lite and a job hunting, referral and networking revolution is long overdue.

Enter Posted.Careers.

When I was laid off last year I noticed that many people wanted to help but the systems and architecture we rely on are all old and antiquated. Spend $20 to apply to an Upwork job with no transparency. Spend $90 for a monthly LinkedIn Premium account to apply with thousands of others.

There’s no differentiating advantage. Zero community.

The new solutions provide all the NEW job posts delivered fresh daily to your inbox so you can apply in a timely manner. And the entire service is donation only of $1, $3, $5 or an amount you want to offer on a monthly or one-time basis.

It’s the de-corporatization or un-privatization of job hunting and it’s long overdue.

Watch or listen to the podcast with co-founders Chuck Heckman, George Nguyen and myself, Geoffrey Colon, on why we built Posted.Careers as a rallying cry for the creative class to find work and create a DIY collective job hunting movement.

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.

Obey

Consume

Conform

Buy More Stuff

Watch more TV

Give up on your dreams

The 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 breathing organism in a world without mind.

Obey.

Creatives can use all of the power they gained from the years of trying to influence others to buy things we didn’t need, and prepare the world for what we need to build next.

How?

By going up against the huge axe being swung at the Bill of Rights and international coalitions by the tech bros who get hot thinking about Ayn Rand in a mini dress.

When it comes to where the world is we need creatives now more than ever. To build new institutions of power. To defend old institutions that provide safety nets. Outside the regular lines of “business as usual.” Creatives are less susceptible to conformity for conformity’s sake and we love collaboration, collectivism and other people’s points of view. We have a lot to share with others. We invite people to the table. We don’t build walls. We’re dangerous to authoritarian voices. Which is why we’ll be the first to be jailed if things hit “start the panic” levels. But sadly, our voices have been drowned out by the technocratic hype machine. Not necessarily AI in and of itself. The hype of it. The narrative of it. The belief it will be accepted by all of us like a mark on your forehead. Might be time for more creative introverts to pick up our swords. The pen and the spray paint.

Why is it important for the creative class to start showing alternative leadership to the finance tech conglomerate hoarding share of voice power? Well, because…

* Curiosity is a clear foundation for a more creative life. A creative life is a better life.

* Being high in openness is associated with higher levels of creativity and increased creative achievement.

* Open people love new ideas and ways of approaching things and have a lower tolerance for routine and convention.

Right now the world is basically on a linear trajectory to nowhere. You have gazillionaires trying to exploit the resources of this world before they launch a rocket to the off world colonies. While people lick their boots and do anything that will ensure the meme coins hit a certain number before the rug pull.

We aren’t indexing toward happiness. We aren’t imagining alternatives.

The command by business culture of now is to build something, anything, that simply goes up and to the right with zero context of how to involve everyone.

It’s basically a society of “every man and woman for themselves” right now. A bunch of posturing.

There’s a lot less opportunity for many of us now that tech has cannibalized creativity. And it will only get worse unless we offer alternative scenarios.

Is this the way the world will end, not with a bang but a whimper? Can we redesign it?

If you ever have read the book Humankind by Rutger Bregman, you will actually have hope for people and the world. Even if everything right now feels awful. Bregman makes the case that how we shape our view of the world is how people will behave within it.

Bregman argues that our view of humanity creates a feedback loop. In other words, we get what we expect from people. By changing our mindsets, we can create a positive feedback loop that leads to a friendlier and more peaceful world.

So that leads to the discussion on how come things still keep leading to enshitification even if we have a positive outlook?

Simple, since the media is the message, how we control or ignore the echo chambers will dictate how we will feel in the world. It’s not enough to just do this ourselves. We need society as a whole to join the ride.

This is where technologists fail. They see a problem and think in lines of code.

Creatives see a problem and design around people.

This is why the powers that be are all trying to divide and conquer through idiocracy, algos and control. Social media empires feel more like we live in a “Dear Leader” world. Creatives can best resist by playing the game of irony. Calling out hypocrisy.

What is needed now is more real in person community, more in person communication, more humor, more laughing together, more local support of small business. More alternatives. Especially becasue one side thinks the only way to live is within a digital city. They seem to have forgotten about the physical ones.

Ultimately Nada won at the end of They Live because he didn’t sellout. He thought of the larger needs of others. He was looking at how to help the greater future. Not just himself.

“We all sellout everyday. Might as well be on the winning team.”

Sure, they may try to buy you, but some of us just aren’t for sale.

Creatives should encourage more alternative paths. Not independent in the sense of working solo. Independent in the sense of being outside traditional systems of corporate power that are now too big to maintain integrity or humanity.

When you make the big trip over their own feet on the way to try to enrich themselves because $359 billion isn’t enough, they will get caught with their hand in the air where you don’t even have to do any creative photo-shopping to unravel their true intent.

The creative class is best suited to help others see the hypocrisy and speed up the timeline for humanity to finally find our true “authenticity” as a human civilization.

We need an entirely new economy where all of us thrive instead of a convenience fees economy where only the wealthy can afford the luxury goods.

That time is now. They live only if we stay asleep.

Thanks for reading and listening.

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Geoffrey Colon has over 192,000 followers on social media platforms which means nothing because of how social media now works at the intersection of a content + audience + interest graph. The Creative Studies newsletter and podcast has over 39,000 subscribers. So what. Geoff reads lots of your best practice social media posts and has created tons of things using Gen AI while many just talk about it. He's held executive positions at Microsoft, Ogilvy, Dell and Dentsu Creative before all these companies started laying people off to hit revenue targets. Check out his book Disruptive Marketing by purchasing a copy from an independent bookstore.

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They're not wrong. But they're possibly missing the point of how the "Wisdom of Crowds" and "Community" got "We Don't Talk About Bruno" to the top of the music charts. A feat that wasn't possible 20 years ago in the early stages of Web 2.0.

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Let's rewind for a second here while also not taking away from the talent who wrote all the music for this film. That talent is a big reason for why the movie has done so well. But talent alone isn't the reason why a non-traditional song topped the charts. Radio has been a huge promotional vehicle for music. We know this and even with the likes of TikTok, YouTube and Spotify it is still a necessity for songs and artists to push mainstream. Just ask any big artist even in the past five years how they truly tipped. It wasn't solely the usage of social media. It was a combination of factors and it relied on the big machinery that we know of as traditional or terrestrial radio.

If it were 2002, the label that released Encanto (in this case, Walt Disney Records) would have sent promo reps into specific radio stations that program Contemporary Hit Radio or CHR to push the song to be added to the playlist. This usually required a ton of data and information exchange. Here's where the song is trending. Here is where it is big. Here is where it was added. Here is the reason you should add it. It was pure barter economy. Maybe the program director would take the risk and add it into late nights for a few spins to see how it would do. Maybe they would program it on a voter listener time slot. When they play the song against another and if it gets enough "phones" it would then be added to the official playlist.

It was a long slog. It would take sometimes a year for a song like "We Don't Talk About Bruno" to maybe ever hit the charts. But now things have changed what tips radio programming. It's called the community sharing effect.

Now we know this isn't news. Lots of things tip because of social media. Lots of things go viral. But there is a combination of "killer data," as I like to call it, stats that program directors and other curators or gatekeepers cannot deny. "We Don't Talk About Bruno" got used in millions of TikToks and tens of millions of views on YouTube and streams on Spotify. It made an undeniable case that if program directors didn't add it into rotation they were denying reality. They're opinion mattered little. The voice of the people is what matters here. And how the crowdswell really helped push this to more people and forcing the hand of gatekeepers who have relied on "data" forever. People wanted the song programmed and they weren't going to take no for an answer. And when it was added and ended up being regularly programmed on big stations like New York's Z100 and Los Angeles' KIIS-FM?

The song just got even bigger.

How? Because it reached even more people who may have not watched the movie. They now heard it and wanted to hear it more.

Radio is now a jukebox taking requests from us via social media. Program directors still think they have power but some artists and songs on the fringe are going to go mainstream whether they want it to or not. As a result it's giving us more interesting, not less interesting artists.

This is why the era we live in is more, not less creative than ever before. Yes, we hear tons of essential reporting about how technology is terrible and used to kill democracy and make big tech even bigger. But then there are stories like Bruno. A little song that in the past would have just been another track on a movie soundtrack. Now it's a Number 1 chart topping hit.

We should be talking about Bruno.