17 jun I’m fed up with the creativity of scoundrels

I’m fed up with seeing big corporations celebrating innovation while destroying everything that doesn’t give immediate returns. Banks that sell “purpose.” Oil companies that paint rainbows on their logos. Multinationals that finance environmental genocides and then create moving campaigns with smiling children and hashtags about the future. I can’t stand these facade ESGs anymore, this outsourced “social impact,” this sustainable discourse cut and pasted by branding teams. All of this is creativity. All of this is false. All of this is symbolic crime — and sometimes literal.

I’m fed up with billionaires who think they’re creative geniuses and their phallic rockets while people with their feet on the ground die of hunger. Fed up with those who create algorithms that exploit human addiction. A cosmic theater of vanity, a sick mirror of inequality, an empire of data captured without consent. I’m fed up with this logic where creativity is only rewarded when it serves the hypertrophied ego of those who have already colonized the planet.

Ignorance is no longer passive. It’s aggressive. Assertive. Creative. I’m fed up with seeing technological lunatics creating viral content, shaping public opinion, defining debate with malicious memes and slogans repeated until they become doctrine. Stupidity has gained creative agency. And worse: it’s better equipped than ever.

I’m fed up with seeing creativity serving to justify the unjustifiable. Wars planned like marketing campaigns. Genocides disguised as surgical operations. Ethnic cleansings choreographed with technical vocabulary, with cold acronyms and colorful maps that hide the smell of blood. Refugees treated as an inferior race, as logistical failures in the system, as if dehumanization could be solved with good UN visual identity. Contemporary cruelty is creative. It knows how to disguise itself. It knows how to use language, symbols, data. It knows how to tell stories. And I’m fed up with seeing this creativity being admired for its efficiency, when what it delivers is scripted misery, strategic extermination and exclusion with a governance veneer.

And I’m fed up with creativity disguised as economic management, this cynical machine that transforms suffering into metrics. Multinationals exploiting cheap labor in peripheral countries while stamping their sustainability reports with colorful graphics and “inspiring” testimonials. Twenty-first century slavery is highly creative, globalized, legalized, profitable. I’m fed up with the stock market determining society’s fate as if it were an oracle. It produces nothing. It distributes nothing. It only speculates, drains, selects who lives and who dies. I’m fed up with the market god, this monstrous fiction that decides public policies, suffocates social rights and dictates the value of life with the coldness of a graph. All of this with creativity. All of this with storytelling. All of this with innovation awards.

Look at history. Adolf Hitler was one of the most effective creatives of the 20th century. He invented a country that didn’t exist, a race that never existed, a seductive symbolic narrative, visually impactful and emotionally efficient. None of this would have worked if he wasn’t a sick creative genius. Steve Bannon understood this. He created parallel realities with psychometric data, inventing custom micro-universes for each vulnerable citizen. With Cambridge Analytica’s help, he turned Big Data into a machine for manufacturing political fictions with the appearance of destiny. What a brilliant idea! And who benefited from this? Donald Trump, the best-scripted character in recent politics: grotesque, charismatic, crude with method, unpredictable with calculation, a storyboard anti-hero. I’m fed up with seeing this type of mind being applauded for its “authenticity,” when what it represents is creativity kidnapped by the logic of profitable destruction.

And no, it’s not exclusively the extreme right. The left also loves to package innocuous utopias with pasteurized slogans, exciting campaigns and solutions that carefully avoid any real confrontation with the structures that crush us. I’m fed up with seeing good ideas being domesticated to fit into consulting PowerPoints and social innovation pitches that leave everything as it is — just with modern lettering.

I’m fed up with seeing brilliant minds working to increase retention time on platforms that addict children. Of seeing creatives awarded for making campaigns that sell cigarettes disguised as lifestyle or fintechs disguised as liberation. I’m fed up with seeing storytelling being used to cover up violence, erasure, territory plundering, memory usurpation. Creativity doesn’t clean blood. Sometimes it spreads it.

I’m fed up with seeing creativity in service of death and others’ suffering. In weapons design, in neuromarketing techniques that transform desire into compulsion, in green packaging of devastating products. We’re surrounded by a spectacle of ingenuity in service of the worst. And we call this progress. I can’t stand seeing people applauding creative solutions to problems created by other creative solutions anymore. As if recycling straws were redemption after wrapping the entire planet in plastic.

I’m very fed up with seeing people starting fires to then play firefighter. Of religious fanatics who make creative readings of the Bible and other sacred books to justify prejudice, racism and violence, and on top of that wanting to impose their worldview on the rest of society. Fed up with people who have nothing but shit in their heads that they use to distill hatred on social media.

I’m fed up with the idea that creativity is always positive. It’s not. It’s a power — but no power is innocent. It acts in the world. It produces consequences. It feeds systems. It maintains privileges or breaks with them. And this choice, this moral curve, rarely appears in the slides.

And it’s revolting to see the creative, today, educated to obey. Obey the algorithm, the market, the client, the trend. Creativity has become predictable performance. The creative has become a servant of hype. Those who go viral are rewarded, not those who confront. I’m fed up with seeing talented people wasting their capacity for rupture to sell soap with empowerment discourse or create pretty slogans for political campaigns of those who feast on big deals. Nothing against soaps. Nothing against politics as a concept. Everything against the silent surrender of creative power to anesthetic entertainment.

I’m fed up with seeing creativity being treated as a marketing instrument when it should be a tool of cognitive emancipation. Of seeing creative power being reduced to performance. Of seeing talent being trained by spreadsheets.

The problem isn’t creativity. It’s the ecosystem that defines where, how and for what it can exist. It’s the logic that transforms every idea into a product, every language into a brand, every gesture into an engagement opportunity. Creativity has become symbolic currency. And I’m fed up with paying dearly for it with our capacity for real indignation.

I’m fed up with neuroscience in service of manipulation. The same science that could help human beings overcome their most primitive cognitive flaws — impulsivity, tribalism, moral dissonance — is being used to discover which button color generates more clicks, which smell induces more purchases, which image captures more attention. The neural engineering of consumption has become more sophisticated than any mental emancipation project. Instead of investigating how to think better, feel better, decide with more consciousness, there are legions of PhDs dedicated to transforming the human brain into a more vulnerable target for the next advertising campaign. I’m fed up with this sold neuroscience, disguised as innovation, that doesn’t want to improve the world — it just wants to sell it in soft installments with guaranteed dopamine.

Evolutionary creativity is in exile. It’s hidden in alleys, in zines, in self-financed projects, in voices that the system calls “radical” just because they dare to think outside the bubble. I’m fed up with seeing true creativity being discarded because it doesn’t sell, doesn’t scale, doesn’t go viral. As if the value of an idea depended on the number of likes it gets from a numbed and infantilized audience.

Yes, the world needs creativity. But not this kind. Not domesticated, decorative, self-indulgent creativity. Not the creativity of beautiful design over the festering wound. Not “empathetic” creativity that moves without denouncing, that engages without transforming, that goes viral without holding accountable. Not creativity in service of unbridled greed and hypnotizing and idiotizing narratives.

I’m fed up with all of this. And if you’re not, maybe it’s time to ask yourself: what world do you live in?

I dream of a creativity that disobeys. That refuses to serve greed. That builds bridges instead of campaigns. I dream of aesthetic courage that doesn’t sell itself. I dream of imagination returning to its most dangerous role: transforming the world. For the better.