Everything Is A Remix [37:30] is a video by Kirby Ferguson. It’s one of the most powerful videos I’ve ever watched in my life.

It dramatically reduced my creative anxiety, because it made me realize that there’s hardly any point in trying to be original. Everything we do is a remix of what we know, what we’ve encountered, what we like, what we’ve seen, what came before.

Everything has influences. You can think of the iPhone as a remix of the Polaroid and the Sony Walkman – both products that Steve Jobs personally admired. Michael Jackson directly referenced Fred Astaire in Smooth Criminal. The iconic cover of Duke Nukem 3D is based on the movie poster for Army of Darkness. The look of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn was directly inspired by Debbie from Blondie.

I wrote a wordvomit about this in 2014.

✱

a lot of people are always wracking their brains trying to figure out how to start something good an interesting consequence of this is that you generally get a lot more bang for your buck looking for something good someone else has started, and then building on that

part of this is bc a lot of the people who start good things don’t have the patience or inclination m etc to stick through with the thing they’ve started. idk the numbers but I’d say maybe 80% of things started by 5% of people, and like 4 in 5 of those ppl are serial starters

most possible configurations of most things simply don’t work. most arrangements are gibberish or noise etc. But if you encounter something in the wild/commons, if you see people sharing it and talking about it, there’s probably something about it that works

✱

I’ve tweeted a lot about this. (from:visakanv remix)

✱

some notes:

remix, plagiarism

https://boingboing.net/2012/05/21/bbc-radiophonic-sound-experime.html

–

4 points by visakanv 673 days ago [-]

Yep, you’re right.As a writer, marketer, creator and consumer of content, I enjoy thinking about things like this. I’ve witnessed my work being plagiarized and edited before. I personally accept it as just the way reality is– some people are lazy about attribution, and other people like feeling talented and special when they diliberately share others’ content without attribution or remixing.

The answer to “Why doesn’t anyone care”- it all boils down to incentive structures. “Parody accounts” can steal with impunity. “Casual randos” can steal with impunity.

– If you’re an artist, and faceless, nameless folks plagiarize your work, going after them actually makes you look insecure or clueless. (Metallica and Napster come to mind.)

– If you get plagiarized by someone Bigger, Badder and More Powerful, then that’s a news story in itself- you’re the underdog, and everybody loves to root for the underdog.

The best response to plagiarism, in my opinion, is to make more art. Some artists get very offended by this- they feel that they are entitled to all the attribution to all their work forever and ever. And that would be a beautiful world, I guess, and maybe discussions like these help to educate people. I also can imagine a world where- when you make a joke that’s been made before (online), or you post an image that’s been posted before, a sort of reverse Google / reverse image search will reveal to readers where the origin of the remix is.

For anybody who is curious about this sort of thing, I highly recommend the video Everything Is A Remix: