remixing

April 2023

Remixing is the lifeblood of creativity and technology.

Creative work is a “mental kaleidoscope” of old ideas configured into different “curious combinations,” as Mark Twain put it. Ideas that appear novel either have obscure inputs or combine familiar inputs in a new way.

Music loves to be remixed. It’s normal to take other artists’ work and build upon it. DJ and record producer, Mark Ronson, has a rockstar TED talk about how artists have spent the last thirty years co-opting narratives from songs through sampling. By doing this, they link themselves to the original track and future spin-offs.

It’s also rampant in fashion, partly due to the laxness of copyright restrictions around clothing. Nothing is produced in a vacuum. Luxury brands develop new designs inspired by what they see on the streets, and then fast fashion retailers copy the catwalk and sell it to the masses, sowing the seeds for the next trend.

The internet is a “giant meme propagation machine.” Memes are digital units of information that have the capacity to spread virally. Creators want to make memes - content that captures attention and proliferates widely.

Great memes are remixable because, to paraphrase Eugene Wei, they can evolve through variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance - just like natural selection. Memetic content wins on the internet and survives the longest. Da Vinci once said: “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

So, how to make content memeable? Jack Butcher put it nicely: the best memes have a familiar, easily reproducible core, while still leaving room for others to inject their creativity. Ideally, there should be a constrained format that eliminates the “blank canvas” problem while allowing space for people to add their own twist.

Jack’s Checks NFT collection did just that. The simple grid format provided parameters for remixers to work within; they only had to insert their own symbol.

Legendary designer, Virgil Abloh, had his 3% Rule stating that any work only needs to change 3% from its original form to become something new. As he described:

“A creative only has to add a 3 per cent tweak to a pre-existing concept in order to generate a cultural contribution deemed innovative – for instance, a DJ only needs to make small edits to innovate a song. Likewise, a designer would only need to add holes to an iconic handbag to leave his mark [...] But as long as you’re bringing something different to the table then you’re saying, ‘I like this but it could be better’ or, ‘If it was just done this way then it would have an impact.’”

We wrongly assume we have to keep reinventing the wheel to create value. But humans crave certainty and novelty. We want things to stay the same and be different. The 3% Rule achieves harmony between them because “it fosters newness without being disconcerting.”

Tom Ford has echoed this:

“I was often accused of being a retro designer and of having really created nothing, which actually may have been the case. But I never necessarily saw that as my job. My job was to feel the zeitgeist and to take an idea or a mood and turn it into something tangible, which often was something that had a history and a past [...] In today’s world, we move so quickly you need to have something recognisable, so you feel comfortable with it, so you can accept it quickly, but at the same time feels new, so I always try to put a new spin on things.”

Back to music, Mark Ronson said the same about sampling: “You can’t just hijack nostalgia wholesale; it leaves the listener feeling sickly. You have to take an element of those things and then bring something fresh and new to it.”

Replicating something one-for-one is dull; nobody cares about that. There’s a limit on how large tribute acts can become. You must bring something new to the table, but much less than you think.

Remixing is going to get supercharged by AI and crypto.

With AI tools, anyone can easily use existing creative work as an input to generate new content in all mediums. Everything that’s ever been produced can have an infinite number of derivatives.

NFTs open up another avenue for remixing by strengthening the incentive to promulgate memes. Audiences can now own a stake in creators’ work, giving them a financial interest in promoting it to more people.

Matt Ridley teaches us that remixing is at the heart of technology. People often depict innovation as a series of breakthroughs when in reality it’s an iterative process of constant tinkering.

Progress comes from combining and recombining ideas. It’s a form of exchange unique to humans, allowing people to specialise in specific skills since they can obtain things they don’t produce themselves from elsewhere.

In Ridley’s words: “It looks disruptive when you’re looking backwards. But at the time, it’s surprisingly gradual. The first version of a new technology looks surprisingly like the last version of an old technology.”

Nowhere is the power of remixing in technology more evident than with open source software. Open code enables composability so components can be used and reused by developers permissionlessly. Anyone can remix and re-engineer existing code to build on top of other programs or create something completely new.

Like Naval says: open source means “each problem only has to be solved once.” Instead of every project starting from scratch, they can leverage the existing body of learning. Over time, this accelerates the rate of innovation.

Product builders we consider visionaries borrowed ideas from those who came before them. David Senra talks about this with Steve Jobs; many of his ideas came from Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography and co-founder of Polaroid. Years later, Evan Spiegel combined the ideas of both men to build Snapchat.

The future is in the remix.