The Creative Industry Scams (And How to Stay Free)
- Jesse Jacques
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
A field report for those still building beyond the noise.
Something real is happening underneath the noise.
In 2025, creativity is being shaped into a tool for reprogramming, not by individual bad actors, but through systems that have restructured a culture most people don't even realize they're serving.
In 1924, the Futurists celebrated the rise of industrial creativity, believing the machine age would unleash new human potential.
A century later, the surface energy they glorified has overtaken the field itself, shaping not just how we create, but what we believe creation is.
Most of the people participating aren't trying to harm anything. They're moving through incentives they didn't design, often unaware of the shape they're helping build.
The result is quieter than a collapse, but just as real: a slow erosion of real creative power, a thinning of substance into surface, a forgetting of what it means to build something true.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a pattern. And it’s visible everywhere if you know how to look.
A field guide for seeing clearly and moving differently.
In this piece, we'll trace six patterns:
Perpetual Starting Line Syndrome
The Personal Brand Industrial Complex
Fake Authenticity
The Business of Empty Inspiration
Spec Work Culture
The AI Creativity Scam
Scam #1: Perpetual Starting Line Syndrome
What it is:
A scam environment that sells the illusion of progress without arrival.
You’re encouraged to stay in a permanent state of almost-ready, emotionally rewarded by products, platforms, and programs that profit from your endless preparation.
Mastery isn’t celebrated. Completion isn’t rewarded. Ownership is made harder to see, harder to claim.
Not because these things are impossible, but because the system has no reason to reward what cannot be endlessly optimized, repackaged, or sold. It’s easier to keep people moving than to help them arrive.
Platforms reward constant activity over depth. Courses promise better optimization, not the end of the journey. Programs celebrate growth cycles that never conclude, because true arrival would end the transaction.
The Starting Line Syndrome feeds an entire secondary economy of false solutions, a system built not to help you cross into your own ground, but to keep you emotionally, financially, and creatively tethered to "almost."
It looks like:
Buying course after course, believing the next one will finally be the real beginning.
Reworking your brand or identity, instead of deepening your actual craft. Optimizing your tools, gear, and messaging, while the real work stays unfinished. Talking about projects "in development" for years, but never crossing into real release.
The longer you stay on the starting line, the easier you are to sell to. Not real crossings. Not real craft. But endless "solutions" in the form of masterclasses, mentorships, branding clinics, side hustle blueprints, each promising to finally prepare you, while quietly profiting from the belief that you're still not ready.
Not every course or mentor operates this way. But the larger system profits most from those who keep you cycling, not crossing.
Why it matters:
Mastery isn’t a certificate you’re handed. It’s a transformation that happens when you cross the invisible line between gathering knowledge and becoming the knowledge itself. The structures that profit from your hesitation were never designed to celebrate your becoming.
How to stay free:
At a certain point, you must declare yourself active. You must begin to move, to build, to claim ground, even when you still feel unready. Waiting for permission is a trap. You cross the threshold by crossing it, not by perfecting your form before you move.
Scam #2: The Personal Brand Industrial Complex
What it is:
A culture that teaches you to shrink your full self into a marketable persona. Not to evolve. Not to expand. But to become a permanent, predictable product that's easy to categorize, easy to sell, and easy to forget.
It looks like:
Feeling pressured to define yourself by one narrow tagline, even as you change internally. Building a public image you quietly outgrow, but feeling too afraid to lose audience approval by shifting. Turning your natural creative cycles into content calendars to "stay consistent for the algorithm."
Why it matters:
True creative life is evolutionary. You are meant to change, to contradict yourself, to discover new terrain.
When you freeze your identity into a brand, you amputate the very forces that would have kept you alive, strange, and free. The system wants you to be easy to describe, because true mystery, true becoming, cannot be managed.
How to stay free:
Resist the pressure to define yourself too tightly, too early, or too finally. Allow your creative identity to stay porous, unstable, unfinished.
The ones who build something lasting are not the ones who "stay on brand." They are the ones who outgrow their containers and keep moving.
Scam #3: Fake Authenticity
What it is:
A culture that turns vulnerability into a marketing tactic. Pain, struggle, and failure, not as sacred experiences but as currency for attention and conversion. Real emotional experiences are mined, polished, and weaponized to build trust quickly, cheaply, and artificially.
It looks like:
Sharing carefully edited "failure" stories, designed more to drive engagement than connection. Packaging personal tragedy into inspirational posts with call-to-action links at the bottom. Feeling pressured to disclose private struggles, even when it doesn’t feel natural, just to "humanize" a brand.
Why it matters:
True vulnerability is sacred. It can open real connections, build unseen bridges between souls.
But when it’s packaged for gain, it loses its spirit and leaves both the sharer and the audience emptier than before. The more fake authenticity spreads, the more numb people become to real human signals.
Trust erodes quietly, replaced by emotional marketing cycles that feel meaningful but disappear on contact.
How to stay free:
Share from your life if and when it feels true, not because the market demands it. Protect the sacredness of your inner world. Not everything real needs to be public. Real authenticity isn’t announced, it’s felt.
Scam #4: The Business of Empty Inspiration
What it is:
A culture that sells inspiration as a product, not as fuel for real transformation, but as a substitute for it. You pay for access, for proximity, for community, but often leave with nothing real to build from.
The surface shines. The transmission never happens.
It looks like:
Conferences packed with panels of buzzwords and vague advice, but offering no structural change. Paid speaking events where motivation replaces method, you feel energized, but carry nothing concrete back into your work. "Networking" spaces where everyone is marketing an aspirational identity, but few are building anything lasting.
Why it matters:
Inspiration without structure evaporates fast. You believe you're moving because you feel moved, but feelings fade.
When the system monetizes your longing to belong, to succeed, to matter, it keeps you cycling through emotional highs without ever anchoring into your own creative power.
It keeps you reaching for proximity to perceived success instead of building your own ground.
How to stay free:
Use inspiration as a spark, not a substitute. Look for spaces where real transmission happens, where builders still build, where the work speaks louder than the marketing.
Measure any room you enter not by how it makes you feel in the moment, but by what you carry out into the long, unseen work afterward.
Scam #5: Spec Work Culture
What it is:
A system that normalizes asking creators to work for free, under the illusion of opportunity. We're not talking about true independent spec work, where you build something on your own terms. But corporate-driven models, where creators compete, pitch, or produce fully realized work without any guarantee of compensation or ownership.
Creating speculative work for your own purposes is not the problem. The problem is when systems ask you to gamble your labor, your ideas, and your energy for their gain, not yours.
It looks like:
Brands running "contests" for fully finished campaigns, choosing a winner, but keeping the unpaid ideas from everyone else. Agencies demanding unpaid custom pitches "to see if you're a good fit," then using the ideas even if you don't get hired. Creatives sinking time, money, and energy into speculative work they don’t own, with no real protection or leverage.
Why it matters:
True creative labor has value, even before it's bought. When the culture normalizes free labor as a rite of passage, it trains creators to devalue themselves and trains clients to expect everything for nothing.
Spec work, in its exploitative form, strips creators of agency, security, and dignity. Over time, it collapses the entire creative economy into a race to the bottom.
How to stay free:
Create spec work on your terms, not theirs. If you create something as a gamble, make sure it's for your own portfolio, your own growth, your own power, not as a desperate offering to a system designed to waste you.
Real builders build leverage first, then choose where they give it.
Scam #6: The AI Creativity Scam
What it is:
A culture selling the illusion that creativity can be automated, and that meaningful work can be generated instantly without lived experience, transformation, or real agency.
The scam isn’t AI itself. That's becoming a part of daily life. It’s the lie that human consciousness, the core of real human creation, is optional.
It looks like:
Mistaking generated imagery for true artistic vision. Outsourcing the creative process to algorithms trained only on the past, and mistaking recombination for innovation. Confusing surface-level stimulation with actual resonance or soul.
Why it matters:
Real creativity isn’t just output. It’s process. It’s the slow, painful, luminous act of becoming something new through the work itself.
When you bypass that process, you don't just lose the craft. You lose the internal evolution that makes the craft and work matter.
The more we normalize creation without transformation, the more hollow the human field becomes.
How to stay free:
Use tools consciously, but never let them replace your own lived fire. Create things that change you in the making. Protect the slow, mysterious, costly journey of becoming, because it’s the only real source of anything that can survive the noise.
That's the work.
The surface changed. The machinery changed. But the drift underneath the slow forgetting of real creative work only deepened.
That’s the landscape. It won’t explain itself. It’s yours to move through now.
There’s no map after this. You build, or you dissolve. The choice was always yours.
When you're ready to shape the unseen into image, the path opens. Let's begin.
