PART ONE: THE RECKONING
THINK OUTSIDE THE BOTS: A Five-Part Series on Rewilding America’s Creative Economy to Meet the Demands of a Cognitive Industrial Revolution
The Reckoning
I graduated from Breathitt County High School in southeastern Kentucky in 1987, the same year R.E.M. released “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” The lyrics came fast. Manic. Overloaded. Absurd. To my teenage ears, it felt like a cultural transmission from beyond the frontier. Every line pulled me toward the next like a magnet. (Here is one of my favorite live recordings.)
But it was the refrain that stuck: and I feel fine.
It wasn’t optimism. It was clarity. That strange calm that surfaces when you know things are unraveling, but also sense something new pushing through. I’ve got that feeling again. It’s a reckoning with how America creates, why it matters, and what comes next.
Spoiler alert: I’m not betting on the system. I’m betting on the artists and creative pioneers to lead us beyond the frontier of the familiar and into the next great era of American creativity.
Welcome to Think Outside the Bots, a five-part exploration where I propose a radically practical approach to catalyzing a new era of exponential growth in America’s creative industries.
This series is not an academic treatise or a conventional business whitepaper. It is, by design, a provocative and often poetic call to action. I understand that such an approach may elicit a range of responses:
Some may find the ideas aspirational, maybe even idealistic, and reasonably question how terms like courageous imagination or mythic function apply to the immediate pressures of quarterly returns and profit-and-loss statements.
Some might scrutinize ambitious, data-driven frameworks like Creativity America, wondering if they risk becoming just another corporate process, more polished than creatively liberating.
Some may want more traditional metrics for ideas like Creative Brain Capital, or feel that my framing of AI doesn’t adequately account for its potential harms.
I not only anticipate these reactions, I consider them necessary. This series is meant to sit at the edge of current thinking. And those edges are always marked by possibility and ambiguity.
The series emerged after my recent participation in The Business Collaborative for Brain Health’s summit in Houston, hosted with the Brain Capital Alliance. I’ve been part of the Brain Capital Alliance (Steering Committee, 2021) and the Business Collaborative (Advisor, 2023) since their inception.
Throughout, my focus has been clear: to understand how shared cognitive, emotional, and social capacities for creativity, our collective Creative Brain Capital™, can better support innovation ROI across private and public sectors, while providing an organizing framework for reimagining America’s creative industries.
In Houston, Kana Enomoto, Director of Brain Health at McKinsey Health Institute, a lead partner in the Davos brain economy work, projected that investing in brain health could unlock $26 trillion in global value. Mental and cognitive well-being is no longer just a health priority. It is an economic imperative, with costly consequences for inaction and high rewards for proactive investment.
Brain capital is no longer a fringe concept. It’s gaining traction as a practical, evidence-based framework for economic growth. What was once confined to academic journals and policy pilots is now being translated into boardroom strategy and investment logic.
A key moment for me in Houston came during a session titled Enhancing Brain Capital: Lessons from Energy Systems Evolution, featuring Dr. Lawrence Jones of the Edison Electric Institute in conversation with Brain Capital Alliance co-founder Dr. Harris Eyre. Jones described how the evolution of global energy systems, which transform raw inputs into usable, distributed power, could inform our approach to building a brain economy.
Dr. Jones reminded me of something elemental: our biggest challenge to scaling innovation isn't always in generating new research, economic projections, or ideas. The harder work is to build systems capable of metabolizing the promise held within those innovations.
Creative Economy Is Dead: What’s Next?
Innovation is the applied creativity of groups working together to face change or follow a dream into the unknown. This requires a system of creative brain skills that connect two essential elements: convertible energy sources and a story that enables the process.
The concept of metabolism is central to how we think, feel, and move as we transition America’s creative economy to what’s next. Let me be clear. There will be a what’s next. The only question is who will lead it. I believe it should be artists and creative professionals.
Here’s where we are.
The latest available data show that the arts and culture sector contributes $1.17 trillion to the U.S. economy and supports over 5.3 million jobs. But beneath that headline, the structure is fragile.
Just 11 states generate more than 70% of the sector’s total value
In the majority of those 11 states, jobs are declining while economic output rises
We’ve seen this before: economic growth without job growth. This pattern echoes what happened in agriculture in the 1980s and manufacturing in the 1990s.
Look closer at where jobs in the sector are, and the structural risks become clear:
Government overreliance
38% of arts jobs are in the public sector, leaving the workforce exposed to political shifts, budget cuts, and policy changes.Fragmented and unstable private sector
After government, the largest share of jobs is in arts-related retail, mostly low-wage, small businesses, or part-time work with limited stability.
The rest of the field (broadcasting, film, publishing, etc.) is highly specialized and relatively small, leading to:
Limited career mobility across sub-sectors;
Fragile employment pipelines are tied to volatile industries like media, tech, and retail.
Digital volatility
Streaming and web publishing are major employers, but work is often freelance, gig-based, and platform-dependent. Small algorithm changes or policy shifts can instantly disrupt livelihoods.Nonprofit fragility
Museums and community-based arts depend heavily on philanthropic grants, leaving them vulnerable in economic downturns and changes in philanthropic priorities.No scalable commercial model
Innovation efforts remain siloed from mainstream R&D and corporate strategy, limiting long-term job creation and economic relevance.
Pairing these workforce trends with broader megatrends makes the outlook even more complex.
Federal Arts Funding Is Being Dismantled: The current administration proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts in 2025, canceling grants mid-cycle, and triggering mass resignations. While the NEA’s budget has gone up on paper (from $121 million in 2005 to $210 million today), its actual buying power has barely kept pace with inflation. Adjusted for cost of living, federal support for the arts has effectively declined. At the same time, attempts to eliminate the NEA have become routine, proposed five times in just two decades. This signals more than budget politics. It marks a deeper withdrawal from cultural investment at the federal level and a hollowing out of the systems meant to support how we think, feel, and move creatively as a nation.
AI Is Reshaping Creative Work Fast: With 87% of U.S. creatives now using generative AI, human-made work is being crowded out. Daily AI use is the norm, particularly in music and digital art, which threatens visibility and livelihoods for independent artists.
Creative Jobs Are Disappearing at Scale: The U.S. lost 35,000 creative economy jobs this year. The entertainment, media, and design sectors continue to shrink. This isn’t cyclical. It’s structural.
The data is clear. Now it’s a question of what we do with it.
Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, has called what’s coming a Cognitive Industrial Revolution. In his words, AI is becoming “the steam engine of the mind,” extending human reasoning, communication, and creativity. That description is accurate. Generative AI will stretch the boundaries of cognition and language.
But the Wonder Economy, America’s Creative Economy 4.0, brings another dimension. Where Hoffman emphasizes technological augmentation, the Wonder Economy focuses on organizational and industry-level Creative Brain Capital. These cognitive, emotional, and social skills in creativity are the stored-up creative wealth of America.
While global 4.0 frameworks (UNCTAD, 2022; WEF, 2020) aim to upgrade machines, America’s Creative Economy 4.0, the Wonder Economy, upgrades us.
Crisis of Coherence & Consequence in America’s Creative Industries
Joseph Campbell described myths as the “public dreams” of humanity, symbolic narratives entertain and help us make sense of the world. Myths are involuntary utterances from the collective unconscious. They create unity of feeling, paralleling how science creates unity of thought.
This unity of feeling versus thought represents the balance that entertainment industry executives must navigate. Our storytelling infrastructure is what I call the narrative supply chain. It drives song, stage, and screen but it doesn’t operate by the conventional supply and demand principles that govern other parts of the industry like production supply chains. Yet, we continue to produce as though they are one in the same. That lack of nuance weakens the cultural coherence and lasting presence of what we create and the stories we tell.
Stories succeed when they generate emotional resonance. Businesses succeed when they run on logic, structure, and measurable results. Entertainment executives have to manage both.
But here’s the issue: storytelling doesn’t work like traditional supply chains. You can’t treat a story like a product and expect it to behave predictably. Cultural impact doesn’t follow linear input-output models.
Yet much of the industry still tries to force stories into those models, chasing volume, speed, and short-term returns. That approach might fill content pipelines but breaks the emotional infrastructure that gives stories lasting value.
The result? We produce more, but connect less. Stories lose coherence, audiences tune out, and long-term cultural presence gets replaced by short-term noise.
For executives tasked with tough investment decisions, it’s tempting to oversimplify the choice: either invest in form (the creative story itself) or format (the technological delivery mechanism). However, innovation lies in striking a balance between these two dimensions. It’s about creating conditions where the cultural value of storytelling is fully metabolized, leading to immediate profitability and long-term resilience against short-term fluctuations driven by the synthetic culture and demands of platform capitalism.
Our supply chain isn’t weak in ideas. Our supply chain is weak in meeting the demands for coherence and consequence.
We in the creative industries are more than content providers; we are myth-makers. To reclaim our position as keepers of ancestral wisdom, pathfinders of the infinite present, and explorers of future history, we must consciously restore wonder and actively reengage our human imagination, rather than passively feeding algorithmic appetites.
Today's entertainment industry faces a crisis not of scarcity, but of consequence. We have more stories than ever. Few seem to fulfill Campbell’s mythic function: guiding, transforming, and deeply connecting us. When our cultural myths become trapped by algorithms and predictable formats, they lose their symbolic power and resonance.
Our task ahead in the creative industries is to rebuild the systems that create, share, and metabolize our cultural myth-making, revolutionizing how we think, feel, and move within them. It invites leaders to redefine their roles and rewild the narrative supply chain. It’s a call for courage, imagination, and disciplined investment in systems capable of nurturing and commercializing the externalities of mythic storytelling: lasting cultural relevance, brand equity, and resilient profitability in a rapidly evolving world.
Currents of Poptimism
As a culture futurist and founder of Creativity America, I spend a great deal of time exploring the currents that shape our creative industries. So, when economist Noah Smith recently asked why American pop culture seems to have stagnated, his analysis resonated with conversations I'm having with seasoned Hollywood executives, with artists and entrepreneurs on the ground, and in corporate strategy sessions focused on our collective future.
Smith argues that cultural innovation hasn't slowed from a lack of talent, but because the technological and economic systems that once propelled artistic novelty have become constrained. From music to movies, he suggests we’ve reached certain boundaries of form, tracing this flattening to platform dominance, dopamine-driven attention cycles, and the erosion of peer review. For Smith, the decline of the avant-garde isn't a failure of creativity, but a side effect of how digital infrastructure now shapes cultural production and taste.
It’s a well-articulated perspective, touching on symptoms that many of us recognize: the relentless cycle of sequels, reboots, and content that seems more designed by algorithms than by human experience. Yet, from my vantage point, I believe there is a deeper dynamic at play, one that goes to the heart of how we cultivate and value new ideas as a society, and specifically within the creative industries.
Our shared pop culture isn’t out of ideas. I believe it’s increasingly out of consequence.
There's a persistent tendency to diagnose cultural stagnation as a supply-side issue: too many iterations, too few breakthroughs. The prevailing thought often seems to be that novelty would come rushing back if we could only invent a new artistic form or find the next disruptive technology. But that’s not what I see as the core deficit. The problem isn't that creators have stopped innovating. Our collective cultural system, and indeed, many of the business models within the entertainment sector, often lack the capacity to metabolize what they make. This isn't so much a drought of creativity; it's a collapse of cohesion. We’ve inadvertently flattened wonder into fleeting mood, and resonance into engagement metrics.
Much of the debate rightly points to technology. Platforms have undeniably reshaped the creative process. TikTok incentivizes an immediacy that can be superficial. Spotify algorithms, in their efficiency, can inadvertently reward sameness. Short-form formats may narrow the space for certain kinds of expressive possibilities. But the big shift, I contend, goes deeper than distribution mechanics. What seems to be quietly diminishing isn’t artistic originality in isolation. It’s the ritual of recognition. The cognitive, emotional, and systemic infrastructure of the creative industries once had a greater capacity to turn artistic risk into collective transformation, underpinned by stories that linger, shape us, and become part of shared cultural memory.
When we are at our best, the arts go beyond personal expression. For sure, we are more than lagging economic indicators of how much a city’s tax base increased or a healthcare insurance corporation’s costs went down.
That view of the arts forever locks us into the pocket of another person’s desire and chains us to the limits of imagination held by others.
At our most potent, we are a signal designed to shake things up, challenge assumptions, and create new openings. We work more like tricksters than blue-blooded financiers or black coated priests. We disrupt just enough to make people stop, notice, and rethink. Not to tear down, but to build for the long haul.
But even the strongest signal won’t land if there’s no system in place to catch it. For disruption to be productive and matter, there must be a cultural infrastructure that can hold it, process it, and transform it into something shared.
As Smith notes, at least part of this infrastructure used to come from deep connections: between artists, between artists and their audiences, and between the arts and the broader cultural system. Those interdependencies created the conditions where creative work could gain traction and stick.
But that system is under strain. And when the cultural field breaks down, even the boldest work can feel hollow. To be radically clear: it’s not a talent problem. It’s a missing metabolism.
Consider the images from the James Webb Space Telescope. When another new image appears across media channels, it does more than impress; it moves people everywhere. It reawakens a sense of scale, deep time, and intricate interconnection. It sparks wonder and invites us to reunite with our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe.
The great films, landmark television series, and generation-defining music have always done something similar: they carried wonder forward. The public’s reaction to the Webb Telescope images shows our capacity for wonder is still intact. What’s faltering is our shared ability, and the creative industry’s current system-level capacity, to let that wonder reshape how we think, relate, and create.
It’s relatively easy to generate mood or spark novelty. Our brains are wired to respond to both. But the deeper economic and cultural opportunity lies in sustaining the kind of signal that prompts people to reflect, change, or evolve.
Virality captures attention. It does not build lasting brand value. The stories that define eras and the intellectual property that sustain enterprise value come from consequence, not speed or platitudes. They last because they are absorbed, interpreted, and metabolized by culture.
This isn't primarily an aesthetic challenge; it's an emotional, systemic, and ultimately, a metabolic one. Today, taking a significant creative risk no longer feels like an opportunity for revelation but more like undue exposure in an unforgiving market. When this happens, we don't get the thriving avant-garde that pushes boundaries. We reinforce a culture of aesthetic and intellectual self-protection.
As I see it, the path forward isn't solely about a new format or the relentless pursuit of the next big IP. It’s about thoughtfully rebuilding the emotional, cognitive, and structural systems that enable creative risk to translate into meaningful connections once again for creators, audiences, and the long-term health of our creative industries. If our output sometimes feels forgettable and our creative endeavors struggle to achieve a deep and sustained connection, it's likely not a talent problem. It’s a signal that the very operating system through which we conceive, develop, and launch the stories we tell is in need of rewilding.
UP NEXT:
PART TWO - Why We're Stuck: The Internal Barriers and Miscalibrated Systems
America’s creative industries aren’t suffering from a lack of talent or ideas. We’re suffering from miscalibrated systems that can't metabolize meaning. Internal barriers like friction fatigue, fear echoes, and shallow feedback loops have resulted in a creative economy optimized for noise, not resonance. We need a rewilding, not reinvention.
©2013-2025 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved.
This article contains original intellectual property. No part of it may be reproduced, distributed, or adapted without attribution. Quotation or reference is permitted for non-commercial use with proper credit. The views expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of any affiliated organization.
Co-Edit Statement
As a neurodiverse writer, I use AI to support editorial clarity and structure. The conceptual frameworks, metaphors, and systems logic reflect my own thinking, grounded in lived experience and interdisciplinary research. AI contributed to refining language, not generating ideas. Original analysis, arguments, and insights are my own.
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Poetry & Practice: Culture Kudzu: Poetry for Entrepreneurs
Professional Site: Creativity America
Personal Hub: Culture Futurist