How a 1950s Ad Man Built the Ideology Now Destroying White-Collar Jobs

The white-collar professionals who spent decades selling corporate America on the supremacy of the “creative class” are now watching artificial intelligence automate their own jobs. The economic displacement hitting knowledge workers is not a technological accident. It is the direct result of a labor ideology engineered in the 1950s to devalue blue-collar work, according to Thomas Frank, author of The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America’s Biggest Racket.

Frank argues that the modern business fixation on innovation traces directly to Alex Osborn, the advertising executive whose agency BBDO dominated Madison Avenue. Osborn popularized the term “brainstorm,” transforming it from a medical description of a mental seizure into a militaristic corporate tactic, Frank said after spending a week reviewing Osborn’s papers at an archive in Buffalo, N.Y. During the 1950s and 1960s, Osborn and his associates systematically collected every published use of the word “creativity” to document the spread of their concept.

That campaign succeeded. By framing economic prosperity as the exclusive product of white-collar ideation, Osborn — who Frank noted was “no fan of the New Deal” — helped establish a hierarchy that classified factory workers as uncreative. The consequences for the American working class materialized over the following decades as automation and outsourcing hollowed out manufacturing centers like Kansas City, where Frank grew up in a neighborhood of General Motors assembly line workers and engineers who shared identical standards of living.

Now the same framework is turning on its architects. Large language models generate copy, code, and analysis, collapsing the distinction between manual and cognitive labor that corporate America used to justify wage premiums for office workers. “I have a lot of fears about it, too,” Frank said during a video interview from his study in Bethesda, Md., wearing a maroon thrift-store sweatshirt bearing the logo “Innovation Fitness.” “I’m right in the crosshairs … nobody gives a damn about the creative class and their innovation districts anymore.”

The technology driving this displacement carries its own structural risks for the broader economy. Frank, who co-founded The Baffler magazine in 1988, pointed out that large language models operate by reproducing established consensus rather than generating original thought. When he recently asked an AI tool to identify a song lyric stuck in his head, it confidently attributed the line to The Great Gatsby. After Frank challenged the answer, the system immediately agreed with him before supplying another incorrect response.

“Do the experts say it? Well, then that’s the truth,” Frank said, describing the operational logic of current AI models. “Expertise evolves constantly.” He warned that relying on these systems threatens to cement outdated orthodoxy precisely when the labor market requires adaptation.

AI has simultaneously accelerated historical research. Frank recalled manually paging through physical copies of Life magazine while researching his 1990s book The Conquest of Cool. Today, entire publication archives are digitized and searchable by keyword frequency. Yet access to raw data does not guarantee accurate interpretation.

Frank views genuine economic disruption as something that historically emerges outside corporate structures entirely. He cited the 1970s punk rock explosion as the only true cultural innovation of his lifetime, noting it was driven largely by unemployed, working-class people operating without institutional authorization or venture capital. It stands in stark contrast to the managed brainstorming sessions Osborn sold to postwar executives.

Frank first tested these anti-establishment instincts early in his career when he exposed The New York Times’ Styles section for publishing fabricated grunge slang invented by Sub Pop Records employee Megan Jasper. The newspaper printed terms including “Wack slacks” for torn jeans and “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” for hanging out, treating a prank as authoritative cultural reporting.

Three decades later, the underlying dynamic remains unchanged. Corporate terminology still dictates labor value, and institutions still treat authoritative-sounding claims as fact. The difference is that the workers currently losing ground are the ones who built the vocabulary.