Bear with me briefly, I need to tell you something in this first paragraph that puts the rest of the article in context. I’m writing this from my Macbook, with my iPhone and a copy of the book ‘The Rebel Sell’ next to me. I also consider myself quite creative.

Apparently I’m not the only one.

For those of you who don’t use it, LinkedIn is a social network with an emphasis on developing professional connections. It’s one of the ways you can search for new jobs or new business opportunities using the web. They recently posted a list of the most common words that people had included in their profiles this year, and guess which one came out on top? “Creative” was the most overused buzzword in Australia, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, The US and the UK.

Taking the LinkedIn profiles to be indicative of similar language that people are using on their CVs, the word “creative” is something a lot of people would like attached to themselves. A majority of us would like to be seen as creative and organisations (full of people who see themselves as creative) want to hire creative people. Why?

The first answer to this is a practical one. In a recession, where redundancies and general job losses are going through the roof, one of the ways you can attempt to increase your job security is by ensuring your company views you as a “creative.” This person’s ideas can’t be computerised and it’s difficult to determine how much an employer is losing if they choose to fire a creative employee.

Another answer, and the general direction of this article is because being “creative” is a very cool thing to be.

Silicone valley has blossomed a whole host of companies accepting ‘cool’ ideas into their workplace to attract creative people. Creativity lies at the heart of good capitalism, so it kinda makes a lot of sense to get as many of those people on board as possible. It’s increasingly common to see offices full of people dressed casually, with hangout zones where cafeterias would once have been. These companies are adapting the modern work place to suit a very particular kind of worker.

It’s based on marrying the bohemian ideals taken from “alternative” cultures with the traditional workplaces. Creating offices more akin to hippy communes, but with rules, and a wage. Remember the grey image of an office that’s presented to us in American Beauty? Yeah…you can forget all about that in this brave new world.

From Chapter 7 of ‘The Rebel Sell’ “From status-seeking to cool hunting”:

It is best to think of cool as the central status hierarchy in contemporary urban society. And such as traditional forms of status such as class, cool is an intrinsically positional good. Just as not everyone can be upper class and not everyone can have good taste, so not everyone can be cool. …because cool is ultimately a form of distinction.

(I wont be able to completely break the concept of cool down here, there just aren’t enough hours in your day, so if you want to, read Chapter 7 of ‘The Rebel Sell.’)

Take a look at the famous Apple advert from 1984, representing a marketing version of the counterculture’s critique of mass society:

They then used key countercultural figures in their “Think Different” ads to really drive the point home: Apple is all about embodying the counterculture.

It’s also a massive multinational corporation with some unsavoury stories told about their dedication to their code of secrecy. (http://www.t3.com/news/another-suicide-at-foxconn-factory) Which is what I’m so interested in…how did Steve Job’s not only manage to merge the hippy ideologies into his workforce and management style, but also into the products it produced?

About half way through writing this article, I had a quick scan over the BBC iPlayer and noticed a documentary on the late Apple founder, titled ‘Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy‘ which went some way into answering these questions. Particularly interesting for me was a quote they used in the first few minutes, from Stewart Brand (Editor of the Whole Earth Catalog) “His Hippie background helped make him a better billionaire.”

This notion of a “business brain with hippy philosophies” was constantly repeated throughout the documentary, from several different people.

In ‘The Rebel Sell’ Heath and Potter make the argument that counterculture will never bring down capitalism, only help sustain it and make it stronger. The creative middle class are embody this blend between big business and teenage rebellion. Whether Apple realised this or not is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. Their products don’t just fulfil people’s needs for entertainment and technology, they have an atmosphere of creative “cool” about them which consumers like myself just can’t resist.

Refs:

Techcrunch LinkedIn article

Inside Facebook BBC program (Very cool offices)

The Rebel Sell

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