Have you ever watched the movie They Live?
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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