Everything is a remix, still

Anybody who sat in one of my classes at Portfolio Center between about 2009 and 2020 has heard me go on about Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix. Former students have told me, kindly, that I would not shut up about it. Fair.

The argument, if you haven't seen it: nothing is original. Copy, transform, combine - that's the whole creative process, from Led Zeppelin lifting blues riffs to Star Wars lifting Kurosawa to every rebrand you've ever sat through. The genius isn't the spark from nowhere. It's the choosing and the combining and the transforming. It's a lovely film and I still think it's the best breakdown of the idea out there.

I've been thinking about it a lot lately, for the obvious reason, which is that the machines are now remixing at a pace nobody dreamed of. And I'll be honest, when that started I expected it to make the idea feel smaller. Cheaper. If a model can copy-transform-combine ten thousand times before I finish my coffee, what was the point of the sermon?

Turns out I had it backwards.

The remix was never the hard part

The film's whole point is that the copying is ordinary. Everybody does it. The part that separates a remix worth hearing from noise is the taste of the person choosing. What to keep. What to cut. Which two things, put next to each other, say something neither said alone.

A model has no taste of its own. It has the average taste of everything it read, which is a different thing and, IME, a worse thing for the interesting problems. When I ask a Qwen model on my shelf to combine two ideas, it gives me the combination most people would make. Which is useful! And it's exactly the combination I'd have skipped, because everybody would make it.

So the sermon got shorter but it didn't go away. Curation, distillation, having a well-considered point of view. That stuff isn't going anywhere. If anything it got more load-bearing, because the raw material is now free and infinite and the only scarce thing left is somebody who knows which piece to pick up.

What I tell folks now

A former student - I won't name him, he'd be embarrassed - asked me a while back how he was supposed to compete with a machine that could produce a hundred logo directions in a minute. I told him he wasn't. He was supposed to be the guy who looked at the hundred and knew the one, and could say why, out loud, to a client who was nervous. That skill was never on the machine's side of the table.

Then I told him to go watch Everything is a Remix again, because of course I did.

The remix goes further back than you think

I wrote in a comment a couple of years ago, half joking, that maybe the real remix is every single thing we've experienced and encountered since we were born. I've stopped thinking it was a joke. Every song in the car, every stranger, every wave that closed out on you. That's the training set. You don't get to pick it and you don't get to see it and it's entirely yours.

I don't have a big conclusion. I just think the thing that makes a remix worth anything is a person who's lived a specific life picking from a pile, and the pile getting bigger doesn't change what the person is for.

What's the remix you keep going back to? Film, record, building, whatever. I want a list 🙏