It’s just past lunch and I’m already full to the brim with pith. “Innovation is applied creativity.” “Being the best just doesn’t work.” “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”
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I’ve been at Creative Places & Spaces, Artscape’s “creative professional” confab for hours now and my notes already contain enough aphorisms to choke a dog. I’m starting to think in clichés.
Phrases become clichés because of their original utility or poetry. But now and then a phrase is born tiresome, like waking up drunk. Consider the one current here today: “360-degree thinking is going to change the world.”
What does that even mean? Perhaps the koan-like absurdity serves not to impart knowledge but to exhaust the discursive mind, leaving just enough energy for Twitter.
Judging from the scrolling tweets on mounted screens – some quoting speakers, some offering a river of poetically tinged insight – this condition is spreading.
Keynoter Ken Robinson, author of professional self-help tome The Element, offers in his speech at the Carlu that “technology is not technology if it happened before you were born.”
Enter Richard Florida, the author of The Rise Of The Creative Class. Florida’s fascinating – as a symbol, at least. He’s one of the last public figures still referencing Marx (even Marxists are skittish about doing that), but his thinking is in the service of creating a new upper class. He’s given “the artist” clout, but as a fetish object.
I came equally prepared to like or dislike him, but I’m disappointed on both counts. You could be a grassroots radical or a banker and easily believe he was speaking to you.
“The task ahead of us,” he tells the group, “is reinventing this system for mobilizing human intelligence, human talent, human creativity.”
I’m game. To what end? For him, our society’s “great resets,” epochal waypoints usually marked by traumatic structural change, represent the greatest mobilizations. “The first reset [in the late 1800s] moved people off the farms and into the factories, and began to provide simple education… so they could be involved in factory work.”
“Involved”? That’s one word for it. As Florida sees it, resets involve “what economists call a ‘geographic fix'” – a dramatic change in people’s relationships to space – and “are not only depressing periods… [but] periods when innovations that were backed up and couldn’t be capitalized come to the fore.”
Before, those farmers were just people. Take away their land? Hey, presto! They’re capital. Thanks, rural displacement!
In his mind, the current economic crisis triggered the latest reset, but by his own definition it really seems to have been started by the process of “globalization.” Does Florida see his own role in that?
As city after city brands itself as “creative” – Florida’s watchword – it’s easy to see what he terms a worldwide unlocking of imagination as a global panic over competing for ever more mobile corporate investment.
For some, this certainly opens up new “mobility.” But one person’s mobility is a thousand others’ precariousness. “We are moving to a society where people will pack themselves into smaller and smaller spaces.” Why? Poverty? Displacement? Ecological destruction? “Creativity.” Oh, right, creativity. Sorry, should’ve read the banner.
When Florida speaks of the need to involve everyone in generating wealth, especially workers, it’s perfectly genuine.
But can’t we do better than “wealth”? He relates a conversation with an executive from Toyota, which was opening factories in the Midwest while the Big Three were shuttering theirs. “‘We harness the creativity of each of the workers on our factory floor,'” the exec told Florida, who elaborates: “The workers themselves form teams they improve the process themselves without an engineer telling them what to do.”
In other words, new responsibility flowed downward. But I’ll bet you clunkers to cash that the new profits still flowed upward. That’s collaboration? In my day we called it exploitation. And we said it over the telephone. And the phone had a cord.
“What if we began to value the 45 per cent of people in Canada in what we call the service economy?” asks Florida. “How do we turn those jobs in coffee shops and nail salons into creative, collaborative jobs?”
I don’t know. Maybe someone could point me toward the session on prevention of union busting?
The last time I worked service, I couldn’t have cared less about a “collaborative” workplace. But I would have loved a more collaborative life: working less, earning more, spending more time doing that “creating” we keep talking about and less time serving folks like Sir Ken Robinson.
“Some people seem to think service is subservience,” Robinson says with a confused smile.
When Florida says “We need to take down the old institutions,” I believe he means it. I just don’t think he and I are referring to the same ones. For capital-C Creatives, it may be the schools that dragged their gentle spirits down to the level of those who work at bad jobs. For everyone else, it’s the company they’re working for.
Florida has opened a doorway, and for that I’m thankful. I’d just rather someone else stepped through. “Collaboration,” it occurs to me, can only happen among equals. If I say I want to collaborate, aren’t I saying I want as many people as possible to be free to sit at the table with me?
Mr. Creative Class wants to talk about being creative. I’d rather talk about class, or have we finally replaced such words with “social network” and “friends list”? Everyone’s equal on Twitter, after all. Some twits are just more equal than others.
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