Who Art in Heaven.

In a single word much of the LinkedIn-centric universe has accentuated its own narcissism and maniacal self-absorption. This word is the verbal apotheosis of every school kid scribble displayed on the refrigerator, every participant getting a trophy and every parent having to skip work for a pre-K graduation.

That word is “creator.”

I’m nearing 69 years of age, and as far as I can remember the word “creator” had for almost all of time been the province of an all-powerful god. What we in advertising call a ZLO. (Zeus-like object.)

You can see from this GoogleBooks Ngram, the word "creator" today is used with nearly three-times the frequency of its previous peak in the early 1800s. The heavier usage in the early 19th Century likely coincides with amerikkka’s early 1800s religious “re-awakening.” We thought a lot about the creator in those days. god was everywhere.

Today, everyone and his cousin, everyone who writes a tweet or shoots with any skill or idea, a seven minute video on Saran Wrap is a creator. 

One of the reasons, probably the primary one that there are so-many creators today is that it’s so easy to create.

This very blog is a testament to that. Out of the roughly two-million words I’ve typed in this space, I’d guess only about one-thousand had any ooomph to them. But press a button and there they are—“published” for the world to see.

AI makes it all even easier.

You can type a “prompt” and quickly get unaccountable drivel based on the stolen writing of others. Here’s a paragraph of what AI thinks is a combo platter of me and William Faulkner.

The Agency Was Already Dead

It was sometime in the afternoon, though nobody could say exactly when because the clocks in the conference room had been stopped for reasons that the creative director said were “brand-related,” that we first understood the agency was dead.

Not dying.

Dead.

There is a distinction.

Dying agencies still have hope. They still have pitches. They still have decks with photographs of young people running through fields, and they still say things like culture, platform, ecosystem, and human truth as if these were not words but medical interventions. A dead agency has none of this. A dead agency has a new business meeting at four and nobody asks why.

You can type that prompt into ChatGPT. And call yourself a creator.

That sounds good, creator. 

It's like saying you're a visionary.

In fact, most modern creator-ing is nothing but thwacking together disparate images to a discordant music track. You're really adestroyer of other people’s sweat and talent and hard-work and years of struggle. An appropriator—a thief. A brain-eating virus.

Not a creator.

I understand the arrogant convenience and encompassing blandness of the word “creator.” By those measures it is similar semantically to another nasty coinage “content.” 

Each is so broad as to be meaningless.

The equivalent of calling yourself a carbon-based life-form. 

Look, I'm a carbonator.

Creator doesn’t include what you actually did. It doesn’t say artist, writer, composer. Terms we always used. It milks those meaningful words dry of meaning like a set of milked-out geriatric goat udders. Content works the same way. It just means something that was made. It doesn’t presume quality or artistry. It just collectivizes made-ness and therefore renders it meaningless.

Years ago when I worked in the now-dead part of the agency business, I’d often be sentenced to a giant conference room where a dozen or so agency people would have to introduce themselves to a dozen or so clients.

To my way of thinking anyone in the creative department who introduced themselves with a title was basically telegraphing their utter-assness. Often people would say, “I’m a Senior Partner, Group Creative Director.” No one listening (if anyone was listening) in actuality had any idea of what they did all day. No one spends their time “group creative directoring,” or “chief creative officering.”

I'm a creator. Or a maker. I'm a content strategist.

I think quoting Robert Capa might make sense here. He once said, "If you're pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." He was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam in 1954, aged 40.

He used real work, real sweat, real life and peril.

At one of those conference room introduction-fests, I always took what I regarded as a more accurate tack.

“I’m a copywriter. I take really complicated things and make them understandable and lust-worthy.”

You can be the creator of Bubbles, an animated gopher. Or the creator of an app that can tell you from anywhere in the world whether or not your refrigerator is open. You can be the creator of something. But to call yourself a creator is the very definition of hubris.

You can either do something important or give yourself a moniker so you feel important.

That decision is yours to create.