Everything is a Remix Complete Transcript, 2023 Version
This is a transcript for the complete, 2023 version of Everything is a Remix, Parts 1 through 4. The video can be seen here
Part 1
Remix.
To copy, transform and combine existing materials to produce something new.
Remixing is everywhere you look.
Tik Tok is remixing. You do your version of dance moves.
You lip sync to someone else's audio.
You duet -- literally.
Memes are remixing. You take a photo, you repurpose it, then someone else tries it, then there's a flood of everyone trying out combinations, including remixing other memes.
When you take something old and use it in something new, that’s remixing. It might just seem like just copying, but it's actually something much more. Remixing can empower you be more creative.
Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas.
You don’t need expensive tools to remix, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t even need skills or… good judgment. Everybody can remix and everybody does.
From our songs and games and movies and memes, to how we train computers to create, to the way we sense of reality, to the evolution of life itself, everything is definitely a remix.
To explain, let’s start in the Bronx in 1972.
Title: Part 1: The Song Remains the Same
In the early seventies in New York City, a new technique for creating music starts to form. At parties DJs are looping the dancers’ favorite parts of songs.
An early pioneer is DJ Kool Herc, who extends instrumental breaks by switching back and forth between two copies of the same record. And he has partners, MCs, who sometimes speak rhythmically over these beats, just like many black entertainers had been doing for a long time.
Boom, rap music is born, and starts to grow. And in the last few decades of the twentieth century, it will transform popular music and the popular imagination.
Sylvia Robinson spots this new trend and assembles a team to record an actual rap song. She creates a group called The Sugarhill Gang, they copy the rhythm from Chic’s “Good Times”, and score rap’s first hit, “Rapper’s Delight.”
Grandmaster Flash takes Kool Herc’s simple idea, refines it and turns it into a new art. He records the first music created with just turntables.
This technique of taking old bits of music and using it in new music becomes known as sampling. At first rap samples are mostly r&b, soul, and funk–lots of James Brown.
But soon artists are sampling different sorts of music, like rock. Run DMC and producer Rick Rubin sample The Knack’s “My Sharona” in “It’s Tricky.”
A Tribe Called Quest uses the bass line from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” in “Can I Kick It?”
The sampling gets more and more eclectic and more and more complex.
Public Enemy uses nonmusical sounds: speeches, sound effects, noise.
De La Soul brings together sixties rock, seventies soul, and eighties pop into a single song.
And the Beastie Boys and producers The Dust Brothers unite hundreds of samples in their album Paul’s Boutique.
Sampling spreads outside hip hop, into some of the biggest pop hits.
Sly and the Family Stone gets sampled in Janet Jackson's “Rhythm Nation.”
A riff by Tom Tom Club is used in Mariah Carey's "Fantasy."
The group Len samples a forgotten disco hit by Andrea True Connection in “Steal My Sunshine.”
And Britney Spears' "Toxic" uses a highly modified sample from an eighties Bollywood musical.
But one of the most famous and least recognizable samples in pop is in Daft Punk's "One More Time," which slices up a song by Eddie Johns. Firstly, three parts are isolated. Then the song gets slowed down. The second part then loops three times, then the first part plays once, this little sequence then loops two more times, then the third part loops seven-and-half-times, then the first part plays --. This whole sequence loops throughout the song. Eddie Johns' song becomes a Daft Punk song by just chopping it up, stretching it, and rearranging the parts.
Sampling reached its pinnacle with The Avalanches’ album “Since I Left You,” which merges perhaps thousands of samples into a swirl of sound unlike anything else. The album is layered together from distorted bits of obscure songs, sketch comedy, and movie dialogue. The title track loops and speeds-up a variety of forgotten songs from the sixties and seventies, then slices up, pitch shifts, and rearranges a vocal into an entirely new melody.
And finally, sampling leaves behind the twentieth-century, and the world of CDs and vinyl and physical media, and takes to an explosively growing new medium, the internet. Gregg Gillis' project Girl Talk challenges the entire concept of musical ownership with a series of flagrantly illegal mashup albums that can be downloaded for free. Each song is composed entirely of dozens of uncleared samples by popular artists.
Hip hop began at block parties in the Bronx and grew to dominate popular music, and along with it, so did sampling and so did remixing. Remixing is now a core element of music. Even when artists aren't remixing, they're often curating and manipulating sound in a similar kind of way.
But remixing didn't begin with hip hop. Earlier musicians were remixing too. They couldn’t sample, but they could still copy.
Just like rap is a remix, so is rock.
To explain, let’s travel to England in 1968.
After the break-up of the band The Yardbirds, their virtuoso guitarist Jimmy Page starts a new group. He recruits John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and John Bonham to form Led Zeppelin. They play a new kind of incredibly loud electric blues and within just a few years, they’re the biggest band on the planet.
And yet, Led Zeppelin are dogged by controversy. Many critics and peers label them as… ripoffs. The case goes like this.
“Dazed and Confused” features different lyrics but is clearly an uncredited cover of the same titled song by Jake Holmes. Holmes files suit over forty years later in 2010, a settlement is reached and Holmes’ name is finally added to the credits.
The iconic guitar riff of “Whole Lotta Love” is the creation of Jimmy Page but Robert Plant lifts some of the lyrics from Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love”.
“The Lemon Song” is also mostly a Zeppelin original but includes more copied lyrics, this time from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor.”
And the most famous example is Zeppelin’s biggest hit, “Stairway to Heaven,” the opening of which resembles Spirit’s “Taurus.”
A battle is waged in court for years and Zeppelin finally prevails in 2020 when the song is found to not infringe copyright. Opinion among musicians is divided. Many argue that the chord progression is too common to be owned. While others argue that the similarities go well beyond the chord progression.
Zeppelin toured with Spirit in 1968, three years before “Stairway” was released. In his sworn testimony, Jimmy Page claims he never heard "Taurus" before writing "Stairway".
Led Zeppelin made mistakes, but they were also just doing what artists do. Copying from others, transforming these ideas, and combining them with other ideas.
Hip hop artists would do the same thing a decade later. And they too would sometimes get in trouble for failing to credit other artists.
Hip hop artists would sample actual recordings. While rock artists would recreate melodies, chords, arrangements and more.
Chic’s “Good Times,” one of the major early hip hop samples, was itself synthesized from various sources throughout culture, like the funk and jazz of the seventies and the glamorous, sophisticated aesthetic of Roxy Music. "Good Times" famous bass line was inspired by the one from Kool and the Gang’s “Hollywood Swinging.”
Nile Rodger's of Chic: This is a song I wish I had written. So what do I do? I go, damn, well if I wrote Hollywood Swing, it would go like this. And then I write "Good times."
“Good Times,” like every other song, remixes the musical ideas of others.
It was once rare for musicians to admit that they copy, but it's become common.
Like Dave Grohl has spoken openly about copying beats from disco bands when he was the drummer in Nirvana.
Dave Grohl: I pulled so much stuff from The Gap band and Cameo and Tony Thompson on every one of those songs. That's all disco! That's all it is.
And when a controversy emerged over Olivia Rodrigo's song "Brutal" perhaps copying an Elvis Costello riff, Costello said this was fine and he did it too. "It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy."
Musician and DJ Questlove has said that "...the DNA of every song lies in another song. All creative ideas are derivative of another."
But past musicians have certainly known this as well. The folk singer Odetta refused to condemn Bob Dylan for copying from her, and instead said this copying is a form of tradition.
Interviewer: Cause he stole --
Odetta: No, no, no, no. We call it folk music. We call it what do we call it? We don't call it stealing.
Interviewer: Appropriation?
Odetta: Well, we could, but we don't. It is... passing on the folk tradition. That influence, which is like just like a key that opened up something that was of his own stuff. So I can't even take credit for that. I can't take credit for how he heard something.
All musicians are connected, and these connections cross continents and oceans and decades and centuries. They transcend the barriers that divide people, and even unite the living and the dead, whose creativity lives on through us.
When we create, we often seem alone, but we are in fact together.
And yet, copying is complicated. One of the most boring things about popular culture is all the relentless copying. There's very clearly many many many bad ways to copy.
And that’s where we’re headed in Part Two.
Part 2
Memes are famous for being funny or clever or goofy or even amazing, like these things that look like objects but are actually cake.
Memes are fun but what you might not understand about memes is that they are... profound.
Let me school you for a moment. Don't worry – there will be more memes.
Richard Dawkins, seen here in this exclusive footage, coined the term meme in 1976 in the book The Selfish Gene.
"Meme" means "imitated thing." Memes are just ideas that get copied.
And the copies, they mutate, then these meme mutants compete with each other in a global battle royale. And the winner is whichever meme gets copied the most.
So. Memes want your attention. Memes want to spread. Above all, memes want to get copied.
Class dismissed. Here, have memes.
Memes are now the dominant method of broadcast among young people. They're often just photos and text but memes can be anything.
Whatever happens on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or the internet in general is a meme.
Dumping a bucket of ice water over your head is a meme. Skateboarding and drinking juice while listening to Fleetwood Mac is a meme. Swinging your arms from the back of your body to the front of your body repeatedly is a meme. Even buying a stock is a potentially hazardous meme.
The slang words we type are memes.
"Sus" came from people playing the game Among Us.
"Stan" came from just Twitter in general, and was inspired by an Eminem song.
And terms like "Karen" and "woke" and "flex" and "fire" and "slaps" and "yeet" and "lit," all came from black culture. Slang is kinda like the NBA – it's a lotta black people.
It's not just slang words that are memes, every word we speak is a meme that triumphed in the great meme battle royale. The English language, and every language, is a mega-remix of mouth sounds from around the world.
You're paying attention so well. Here, have another meme.
Think of memes like this. Everything you do and then share with the world is a meme.
The gestures you make, the clothes you wear, the jokes you tell, the dances you dance, the emojis you type, the tweets you post, the thumbnails you create, the clickbait you write, the phrases you speak, the nonsense you share.
These are all things we copy and share and modify. They're all memes.
It's our natural drive to copy from each another that creates memes and creates culture. We love to copy and we love it when others copy too – just not from us, more on that later.
Why do we love copying? Why do we love copying? Why do we -- okay I'll stop.
To explain, let's go to the movies.
Title: Part 2: More of the Same But Different
Popular films are all about copying. Pretty much all of them are new versions of old stuff. They are sequels, remakes or adaptations, and that includes prequels, reboots and spin-offs, which are just rebrands of the same things.
Of the top ten box office hits of 2021 thus far, nine of them are sequels, remakes, and adaptations. "Jungle Cruise" is sorta original but it's also based on an amusement park ride -- as most great films are.
Congrats to "Free Guy," the lone original movie in the top ten! Here have a Leo meme.
The domination of sequels, remakes and adaptations is not new. From 2012 to 2021, 92 out of 100 of each year's top ten hits are either sequels, remakes or adaptations. And in four of these years, it's every single film in the top ten.
We have an endless appetite for... more of the same but different. We don't just want the same thing over and over, but we definitely like things more familiar than unfamiliar.
Clip from Free Guy: IPs and sequels. That is the thing that people want.
We've got nine "Fast and Furious" movies and counting.
We've got seventeen Batman films.
We've got 36 Godzilla movies.
We've got roughly 300 Dracula films – I couldn't count them all.
And some movies and shows are now adaptations of fan fiction, stories written by fans based on their favorite characters. If you think that kinda sounds like all fictional writing, yeah, it is.
Oh, and the video you're watching right now is my second time doing this series. Or perhaps third, it's debatable.
Even when movies and TV shows aren't sequels or remakes or adaptations, they're still designed to be like other movies. They stick to the rules of genre, a tres bon French word.
Genre films give us familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations.
When you watch a genre movie, you expect certain things. Just like someone playing a new Role Playing Game expects a quest where they level up their stats, someone watching a genre movie expects the story to deliver the standard elements of the genre.
If it's a sports movie, well, the teams gotta suck really bad. They've gotta be truly pathetic, then there's a new coach, but more humiliating losses, then a montage, then a string of wins, then the brink of defeat, then maybe an inspiring speech, then triumph in the end or at least a moral victory.
All genres come with these sorts of rules, these sorts of expectations. The movies don't have to do all these things, but they gotta do most.
The genre that now reigns supreme above all others is the superhero genre. The Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular has grown to become the highest grossing franchise in cinema history, at over 23 billion dollars.
Superhero films are built around... superheroes. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
All superheroes are similar. Like they all have trademark powers. Superman flies and he's crazy strong. Wonder Woman is also super strong but she also has really weird equipment too, like an invisible jet but she wasn't invisible. She was just a soaring seated person.
Sidetracked sorry. So they all have special powers. They protect the public and do good deeds. They have a dramatic origin story. The bad guy is like a superhero but evil. And their costume is kinda like underwear/suit-of-armor/scuba-suit/fetishwear.
And yes, this clip is from a real Batman movie.
But above all, superheroes are all about justice... of the fist. They fight... a super lot. Endlessly. It's they're thing. They could definitely de-escalate more often.
Sorry, sidetracked again.
When we watch a superhero movie, we expect all this stuff and more. Even movies and shows that subvert the traditional genre, still honor these rules.
The character of the superhero is actually the only thing that defines the superhero genre. Superhero films can be a variety of genres--as long as there's a completely mind-numbing amount of fighting. Do they have a daily face-punching quota they need to get? Sorry I keep doing this. But seriously, what is wrong with you people?!?!
Anyway, superhero films can be different genres and "Avengers: Endgame" actually has scenes in multiple genres. There's even a moment that feels like a quirky indie film.
Beyond the character of the superhero, these movies aren't aren't that different from any popular film. They aren't that different from Frozen or Moana or Dune or The Hunger Games or The Lion King or Avatar or Harry Potter or The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings or The Shawshank Redemption or Ground Hog's Day or The Godfather or The Silence of the Lambs or Spirited Away or Star Wars or Alice in Wonderland or Seven Samurai or To Kill a Mockingbird or It's a Wonderful Life or The Wizard of Oz.
All these and loads more are just versions of what Joseph Campbell called The Monomyth or The Hero's Journey, a series of common plot points found in myths. This underlying structure has been used around the world since prehistory.
Superheroes are simply the newest, most sophisticated, most spectacular, most face-punching-est version of this ancient formula, the mother of all genres.
Genres are sets of loose rules that define different types of films. Writers and directors play a game with the viewer where they follow these rules or twist them or outright subvert them.
All movies build on the movies that came before them. In a way, all movies are sequels.
Here is what we want.
We want characters we know, we went stories we know, we want the familiar. Why?
We want familiar things because we use old things to understand new things. Just like you use words you know to understand words you don't know, we use old stories to understand new stories.
Douglas Hofstadter argues that: "(We) make sense of the new and unknown in terms of the old and known..." (Surfaces and Essences, Douglas Hofstadter)
Hoftstadter claims this process of analogy is "the fuel and fire of thinking."
One of the ingenious abilities of humanity is seeing connections between similar but different things. At the very core of the human imagination we are seeking similarity, we are comparing new things to old things in order to understand them. And we understand new stories better when they are made to resemble old stories.
And now, here is the point of all this.
Jurassic Park clip: Hold on to your butts.
The reason memes and sequels and genres are so overwhelmingly popular is because they make new information easier to understand. They play to our desire for familiarity. And just like we understand new things by building on top of old things. we create new ideas by building on top of old ideas.
When we consume, we mostly consume more of the same but different. And when we create, we are mostly creating more of the same but different.
There is only one way to start creating and that is to start copying.
Some of the most innovative, influential and popular films did a lot of copying.
"Star Wars" pioneered a new genre of science fiction by merging together sci fi with adventure serials, westerns, war films, and samurai films.
Quentin Tarantino's early films clearly copied elements from countless other films.
Jordan Peele's "Get Out" followed the template of "The Stepford Wives" and transformed the feminist horror-drama of the original into a nightmare about secretive racism.
And the best superhero film was created in this same way, by remixing ideas from the past to create something that is both new and familiar. That film is-- I am so sorry, that is not the right clip. That film is "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse."
"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" clip: All right, let's do this one last time.
"Into the Spider-Verse" is inspired by a pair of disrespected American art forms that have conquered pop culture: hip hop and comic books.
The movie has a strong spirit of early hip hop and uses a kind of sampling throughout. It copies from live action film, from 2D and 3D animation, and especially, from comics.
First and foremost, Into the Spider-Verse is a movie version of a comic book.
All the graphic elements of comic books are here:** the panels, speech balloons, captions, these squiggle things, words for sound effects. This trope is so old they made fun of it in the Batman TV show from 1966.
Into the Spider-Verse loves the printed quality of comics. Like it uses Ben Day dots throughout. These small dot patterns are used in printing to create different colors. Roy Lichtensteinn did a version of them at large scale and made them a style.
There's actually a lot of dots in the movie. The portal to the multiverse is inspired by the dot patterns created by Jack Kirby.
The movie also uses misregistration, which is when printed colors didn't quite line up. It's used throughout to create blur. Sometimes it kinda looks like a 3D movie without the glasses.
Into the Spider-Verse is strongly influenced by classic hand drawn 2D animation and anime.
The film uses lines to create definition, which is typical in 2D but rarely done in 3D films.
Even more unusual, a lot of the animation is done "on the twos", that means the characters move on every second frame, which is how classic animation was done, and it gives the movement a sharp, snappy feel.
Lastly, the movie pulls lots of techniques from live action film.
There's a lot of roaming camera movement. Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is the biggest influence on this style in modern film.
There are timelapse shots. Requiem for a Dream was innovative here.
There's even zooms, which is when the camera doesn't move and the image just gets magnified. This was a popular technique in the seventies, especially in kung fu movies.
You can't really point to anything in this movie that is original.
"Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" clip: How many more spider people are there?
And yet the sum total is original. What makes Into the Spider-Verse unique, fresh and innovative is its combination of influences.
And the film isn't the isolated creation of a single genius. It's the product of many, many, many artists and writers, who draw from the deep lineage of Spider-Man stories and copy countless ideas from comics, movies, music and art.
Copying is the wellspring of all creativity. This is where it all begins. As we copy and copy and copy, our own voice and our own style emerges.
Fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has said: "Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.”
First we copy, then we create. Stephen King began writing by copying the text from comic books into his notebooks. "At some point I began to write my own stories. Imitation preceded creation..." (Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft)
18-year old Olivia Rodrigo has been harshly criticized for copying from other artists. But this is what every artist must do. And sometimes young creators will go too far. Would we prefer that they not go far enough.
But copying alone is clearly not the answer we seek. There is obviously a lot more going in great creative works than just copying. How does the magic happen? How do innovative ideas emerge from the seemingly derivative act of copying?
We find out in Part 3.
Part 3
The act of creation is surrounded by a fog of myths.
Myths that creativity comes via inspiration, that new ideas are the products of geniuses, that they come from nowhere, and appear as quickly as electricity can heat a filament.
But creativity isn’t magic. It happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials.
When we create we use just three simple tools. The first of these forms the soil from which all creation grows. We copy.
We think of copying as being uncreative. But copying is at the core of creativity and the core of learning. We can’t introduce anything new until we’re fluent in the language of our domain, and we do that by copying.
Many of technology's biggest successes began as copies.
Minecraft began as a copy of another game. Its creator initially referred to what he was working on as an "Infiniminer clone".
The operating system Linux began as a free clone of the UNIX operating system. Linux is now the backbone of basically the entire internet.
And the clear strategy of Apple is to create better versions of established products and features.
Before Apple Music there was Spotify. *or maybe even Napster*
Before AirPods there were many other bluetooth earbuds.
Before Apple Watch there were many other smart watches.
And lots of iPhone features first appeared in Android.
Although it was Apple that actually invented the smartphone to begin with.
This strategy extends all the way back to the creation of the Mac in the early eighties, which copied many of the best ideas from the Xerox Alto.
Nobody starts out original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. And after that... the sky's the limit.
Title: Part 3: The Elements of Creativity
After we’ve grounded ourselves in the fundamentals through copying, it’s then possible to create something new using the second creative tool: transform, taking ideas and creating variations. This is time-consuming tinkering but it can eventually produce a breakthrough.
Many of the biggest successes in tech began as something very different and didn't find success until they were transformed.
Discord began as a feature for a game. The game wasn't that successful so they dropped it and only kept its chat feature.
Pinterest started as a digital replacement for paper catalogues. Again, didn't really work but people really liked one of its features – collecting and sharing clippings. So this became the site's core function.
And Tik Tok began as a lip-syncing app for short music videos. But over time, it pivoted to what more people wanted: short form video.
TikTok clip: You're done.
These are all huge successes, but they aren't major innovations so much as variations on existing ideas. **But the massive breakthroughs that change the world, rely on the third and final creative tool: combine. Taking the elements you've copied or transformed and bringing them together.**
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press was invented around 1440, but almost all its components had been around for centuries.
Henry Ford and The Ford Motor Company didn’t invent the assembly line, interchangeable parts or even the automobile itself. But they combined all these elements in 1908 to produce the first mass market car, the Model T.
And the Internet slowly grew over several decades as networks and protocols merged. It finally hit critical mass in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web by combining several well-established ideas.
These three tools are the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform, and combine. And nowhere is all of this more obvious than in the realm of games.
Video games don't really try to conceal their copying. They copy from everywhere.
Video games copy ideas from tabletop games.
Alexey Pajitnov began Tetris as a version of a game from his childhood called pentomino. To make it simpler, he made the shapes out of four squares, instead of five, which greatly reduced the number of pieces.
Video games copy from game shows.
Wordle is very similar to the game show, Lingo. In both you try to find a five letter word within six tries, and the game tells you when a letter is correct or somewhere else in the word.
But mostly what video games copy from is video games. The history of video games is a chain of new games taking ideas from old games, transforming them, and iterating on them.
Or sometimes it's a single designer iterating on his own ideas, like Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, who created, a series of hugely influential platform games.
But some of the most innovative games combine from multiple sources.
“Deus Ex” combined three game genres. All of these were done better by other games, but when combined the result was unique and innovative and became one of the most acclaimed titles in gaming history.
Other games copy from sources from outside gaming. "Cuphead" is a run and gun shooter, but it combines 30s style animation with a jazz score, giving it a look and feel that's never been done in games.
Some games even allow the players themselves to modify the game. Mods are customized versions of games which can be shared with other players. Plenty of classic games began as mods.
“The Stanley Parable” clip: Employee number 4 to 7. The job was simple. He sat at his desk in room 4 to 7 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard.
"The Stanley Parable" is a surreal adventure game that subverts players' expectations of gameplay. It began as a free modification of "Half-Life 2."
DOTA 2, otherwise known as Defense of the Ancients, a hugely popular esports game, is a sequel to a game that began as a custom map for Warcraft III.
And sometimes mods even turn into entire genres.
One of the biggest phenomenons in gaming has been "Fortnite", a free-to-play, battle royale game. But the origin of Fortnite isn't really Fortnite. It didn't even start with game developers, it started with modders in a seemingly unrelated realm.
The military simulator ARMA 2 let players make mods and one of these was "DayZ", a survival game with zombies. It's hard to convey how obsessed we were with zombies at this time.
"DayZ" then became a standalone game and people made mods for it.
Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, a web designer, not a game developer and barely a programmer.
Brendan Green: My code is terrible. Like people tell me to fix the game, if I try to fix the game, the servers would explode.
He saw these mods and wanted to make his own. So he created "DayZ Battle Royal", which was inspired by the book and movie "Battle Royale", where it's all against all until there's one winner.
If this sounds familiar to you, it's also the plot of "The Hunger Games."
Eventually Greene's mods turned into another new game, "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds," or PUBG, which also goes on to become hugely popular.
It's only at this point that Fortnite finally enters the scene. But initially it's something very different. It’s a game where players make a fort during the day to survive night attacks by -- you guessed it -- zombies.
But once Fortnite's developers Epic Games got a load of PUBG they created a new version that copied PUBG's best ideas. But Epic then turned it into something quicker, more casual, more cheerful, something that looked great in livestreams, and was less buggy.
Gamer streaming clip: I got a bug then because there's a floating SLR on my screen here and it's shooting right now.
And Epic added plenty of other creative takes on other ideas. It incorporated complex building. They made the game free to play on pretty much any platform and generated income from in-game purchases. The game eventually grew into a rich virtual environment that many consider an early example of the metaverse, an open VR world that may be the future of the internet or may be... nothing.
Meta clip, Mark Zuckerberg speaking: Whoah, we're floating in space. Who made this place? It's awesome!
Fortnite sometimes takes copying too far. Players' signature moves, known as emotes, were sometimes duplicated without permission from popular videos, movies, and television shows.
But overall, it can't be denied that Fortnite is a unique, creative and historic title within the history of gaming.
And this phenomenon was created not just by a major video developer but by modders, by pop culture, and by players.
Fortnite's roots even predate PUBG and the Battle Royale genre, and extend back to games like Minecraft, Unreal and countless others, to b-movies like Death Race 2000, and even to pro wrestling, where dozens of guys would vie to throw each other out of the ring until one remains.
Technology has always fueled creativity. But now technology is becoming more than a tool that we use. Technology is becoming our collaborator, our competitor and yes, our replacement. In our final episode, we'll see how AIs create... by remixing us.
Part 4
In 2015 artificial intelligences started making images based on nothing but text input. This was basically like reverse engineering photo captions. The results were very low quality, but that it worked at all was stunning.
By 2021 AI image generation was doing things like this.
It's better art but still mediocre at best. What was historic was that the AI combined ideas together in a variety of ways. The AI seemed to exhibit... *creativity.*
2022 was one of the most whip-lash transitions of the modern technology era. There were now several image generators and they were making images like these. No human hand drew a stroke here. All these were created with nothing but text prompts.
Creating a sophisticated illustration was suddenly as easy as typing a word or two.
Enter JOY and you get this.
Enter CAT and you get this.
Enter BRAINY EYEBALLS and you get this.
Then you can combine words together for infinite variation.
AI-created art is no longer cute and clumsy. It still has weaknesses, like human anatomy, especially hands, and it mostly lacks the expressiveness and the storytelling of real artists, but AIs are *creating* *art*. And they are doing it with beauty, with stunning versatility, and even with subtlety.
AI has had similar breakthroughs in text generation and coding, but it's AI art that sparked the fiercest debate and generated anger and fear in the art community.
Fran Blanche: I can't imagine that there's any writer or artist on the planet right now that isn't really thinking about this and wondering where they're going to be in five years.
This anxiety was triggered by a profound development in human history. Machines have breached a sacred realm we thought was solely the domain of people.
The first battleground of The Age of AI is art.
Will AI replace human artists? Is AI image generation ethical? Will the future of creativity be ruled by AIs?
In this final episode of Everything is a Remix, we venture into the newly emerging field of Artificial Creativity.
Title: Part 4: Artificial Creativity
Let's begin by addressing the most common emotional reaction to artificial intelligence: fear.
Storytellers have long warned us about the seduction and the danger of technology. The Greek titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was brutally punished by Zeus.
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was subtitled The Modern Prometheus, Dr. Frankenstein is obsessed with uncovering the secret to life.
Frankenstein creates a man, but is horrified by his creation, who then seeks violent revenge.
Stories like these are a warning about meddling with the sacred and unknowable. They're a warning about arrogance.
"Frankenstein" clip: It's alive, it's alive! In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God.
In recent decades, the subject of these tales has taken on a particular form: the computer.
HAL 9000, a prescient imagining of a computer assistant, was one of the first popular fictional computers.
"2001" Clip: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
HAL ultimately decides to sacrifice its crew for the sake of its mission.
"The Terminator" films feature a powerful defense network AI called SkyNet.
"The Terminator" Clip: They say it got smart. A new order of intelligence sighted after eight microsecond extermination.
Our dream of technological progress has reached a nightmare conclusion.
"Avengers: Age of Ultron" Clip: Everyone creates the thing they dread.
We are now imagining the day when we are supplanted by our creations.
"Ex Machina" Clip: One day the AIs will look back on us that same way we look at fossil skeletons in the plains of Africa. An upright ape, living in dust, with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.
The topic of human extinction by AI is no longer limited to science fiction. It's popularly discussed by intellectuals.
Yuval Noah Harari: We are probably one of the last generations of Homo Sapiens. In a century or two at most, I guess, that humans like you and me will disappear and Earth will be dominated by very different kind of beings or entities.
Many of the leaders of the field of artificial intelligence claim the time when our creations will match us is rapidly approaching. Some think human level intelligence, known as Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, will be reached within a couple decades.
Demis Hassabis: I think that it's coming relatively soon in the next, I wouldn't be surprised by the next decade or two.
After AGI comes an "intelligence explosion," with AI rapidly improving itself and spawning superintelligence. Humanity will then be the parents of... gods.
The belief that AI will soon surpass us and take our place is widely held among many brilliant people. So, why not believe them?
Because similarly brilliant people have been making similar predictions for as long as there has been artificial intelligence and they have all been... wrong.
Many people in AI fall into the same old trap that true believers always fall into. They think the great whatever is almost here, I swear it's just about to happen.
Let's take a brief tour of AI's many failed prophecies.
Many of the pioneers of artificial intelligence predicted that machines would attain human-level intelligence by about the 1980s.
More recent predictions have been just as wrong.
Shane Legg, cofounder of Google DeepMind, said in in 2008: "Human level AI will be passed in the mid-2020s.""
It's 2023 right now and I think we can safely say... no.
In 2015 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said their goal by 2025 was to "get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.”
This one is looking like no, no, no and no.
An engineer even claimed a Google chatbot was sentient in 2022.
Blake Lemoine: In order to be capable of convincingly arguing that you are sentient requires sentience.
I have no idea why this is supposed to make sense.
One of the most prolific and optimistic forecasters is Ray Kurzweill. He's spent decades predicting the arrival of "the singularity," which entails AGI among other things. And his date for arrival of AGI is rapidly approaching.
Ray Kurzweill: I've set the date 2029. A machine, an AI, will be able to match human intelligence and go beyond it.
I'd like to get in on the prediction fun too, so I'll say AGI in 2029 is exponentially wrong.
Of course, there are plenty of people in AI who believe AGI is nowhere in sight.
Erik J. Larson, author the "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, "argues that current AI technologies are not going to lead to AGI.
Eric J Larson: Any foreseeable extension of the capabilities that we currently have do not result in general intelligence. Just point blank. They just don't.
Oren Etzioni, an esteemed figure in the field of AI, flatly states that we have no idea when AGI is coming.
Oren Etzioni: My answer to when is, take your estimate, double it, triple it, quadruple it — that's when.
Matter of fact, expert projections on the arrival of AGI range from now... to never. Translation: they don't know.
And here's an unpopular opinion we might want to ponder: maybe human level artificial intelligence is impossible, maybe human level artificial intelligence. Maybe the universe can do things we can't.
We don't know when – or even if – AIs will match human intelligence. It's unlikely they'll murder us anytime soon.
But there is something they want to murder now: your job. And they don't need anywhere near human-level intelligence to do it.
This is why illustrators are so upset. They are the first to suffer what's called "creative destruction". Old jobs are eliminated by new technologies and ideas, resulting in lost livelihoods and real pain.
"Upgrade" Clip: When you look at that widget, you see the future. I look at that thing, I see ten guys on an unemployment line.
However, this also leads to increased productivity and fresh growth.
Automation is now expanding beyond the domain of muscles and entering the domain of the mind. It has crossed over into arts and expression.
But actually, this isn't quite new either. Specialists have been getting replaced for decades... without AI. Let's go back to hip hop.
With the birth of rap music, suddenly you didn't need to play an instrument, didn't need to know anything about music, didn't even need to sing. If you had a turntable, a drum machine and a mic, you could make the most exciting music around.
And this trend has only accelerated. Anybody with a laptop and a bit of music software has tools that would have seemed like science fiction to early DJs like Grandmaster Flash.
And this is more than just music. Anyone can now easily build a website or build an app or launch a shop or shoot gorgeous photos or shoot gorgeous videos.
Art has been getting cheaper, faster and easier since the printing press, which creatively destroyed an entire class of monks who painstakingly hand-copied books with quill and parchment.
If machines can make images as well as we can, then why shouldn't they? What's the issue?
The issue is *how* the machines learned to create images. Let's put image generation on trial and determine if it's guilty or not guilty of crimes against creativity.
Here's the evidence.
The simple version of what the AIs did is this: it studied countless images, without permission, then it emulated them and created its own versions.
So yes, this is just like you. The entirety of this series demonstrates that this is how we all create.
But... it's more complicated than this. Let's zoom in.
Image generation has three steps. I'll explain each, and all of these need to be ethical.
Step 1. Tons and tons of images were scraped from the internet. These images are called a training set.
It looks like a mountain of junk. If you found a folder of this stuff on your hard drive, you would immediately throw it out.
Step 1 is just obtaining a zillion images from the internet. Step 1 is ethical. Search engines do the same thing. And you can go download as many images as you want right now.
Step 2, the AI processes the images and creates a model. This is their version of studying the images and learning from them. Y'know what, this ain't simple. I'll come back to this.
Step 3 is open and shut: the AI processes requests from users, which are written prompts, and creates images. If someone just wrote a program that can draw, that would be fine. Step 3 is indisputably ethical.
It all comes down to Step 2. This is the tricky bit. What the AIs did with copyrighted images is called diffusion. Noise was added to the images over many steps until they're just noise. Then it runs this process in reverse, with the goal of creating a new image with the same meaning. The cat should be a cat, not an identical cat, but a cat.
I have no idea why this works either. But somehow it does.
If diffusion is copying then AI image generation is copyright infringement. Is diffusion copying?
On the one hand, it's kinda like copying because it reproduces the watermarks from stock photos. On the other hand, it's pretty bad at it... so it sorta made something new?
The clear conclusion... is that is unclear. That's why this topic is so controversial. It is truly ambiguous. This is like the dress controversy all over again, except furious.
My guess is that this ambiguity will result in diffusion being considered fair use. It will be hard to definitively prove that it's copying because... this stuff is complicated.
This is going to multiple courts, we'll learn a lot, and we will get an answer.
Let's just assume for now that diffusion is kinda-like copying but not totally copying. And let's take a swing at the most important question of all. Is it ethically right – or at least acceptable – that artists' images were used without consent?
Megan Rose Ruiz: It seems like it's a pretty general consensus in our community that we do not want our work to be used to train A.I. models.
I am sympathetic to how artists are feeling, but it does seem acceptable to me.
For starters, most of the training images are pretty generic and in this context, they seem public domain. Sure, this might be your photo of a pretty girl or a dog or a quesadilla but it's very similar to thousands of others. Nobody owns the idea of these images and that's really what's getting emulated.
The biggest controversy is over a small minority of the images. These are artwork by professional artists and serious amateurs.
Let's get this clear up front. No artist owns their art entirely. If you don't believe me, here's the artist Scott Christian Sava saying the same thing.
Scott Christian Sava: My art is a mosaic, an amalgamation of the art and artists that inspired me on my journey to become the artist I am today.
The collective achievements of art belong to everyone. They are as free as the air.
Too many artists are getting overly possessive about what they believe is theirs. This artist went viral claiming their art was used to train an AI model.
Deb JJ Lee: AI art is theft. It is an awful, awful way to just, like, steal from artists. It's evil. And if you use AI art, you are dead to me.
They based this on images like these, but the only similarities are the color palette and the basic composition. They're otherwise very different, like for instance, this is trash and this is good.
Yes, there is some piracy going on in AI image generation. There's some piracy going on everywhere. I'm doing piracy right now and you're watching me.
There are plenty of caveats. Training AIs on individuals artists' work does seem wrong. Everyone should be able to opt out of all training sets. And maybe AIs should simply not train on images from active art communities.
Also, some company should make an image generator trained on public domain and licensed images, which would avoid this hornets' nest entirely. Somebody please do this.
But for me, I don't see deep injustice here. In sum, AI image generation seems not guilty.
How disruptive AI art will actually be is not yet clear, but it will definitely have some sort of role. Artists are going to have to adapt.
And the rest of us should take note. If you think what's happening to a bunch of illustrators doesn't concern you, think again. The fear and anxiety the art community feels is going to spread. Many of us will have to adapt. Any mind work that can get automated will get automated.
Blue collar workers have been living this for decades. Now it's white collar workers turn.
Of all humanity's technological advances, artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception. It has the potential to create either a utopia or a dystopia. Which reality will we get?
Just like everybody else, I do not know what's coming. But it seems likely that these visions of our imminent demise will someday seem campy and naïve – because our imaginings of the future always become campy and naïve.
AIs will not be dominating creativity because AIs do not innovate. They synthesize what we already know. AI is derivative by design and it is inventive by chance.
Computers can now create but *they are not creative.* To be creative you need to have some awareness, some understanding of what you're doing. AIs know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate.
Most crucially, AIs have no comprehension of the essence of art: living. AIs don't know what it's like to be a child. To grow-up. To fall in love. To fall in lust. To be angry. To fight. To forgive. To be a parent. To age. To lose your parents. To get sick. To face death.
This is what human expression is about. Art and creativity are bound to living, to feeling.
Art is the voice of a person. And whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing, it's not because of what the AI did. It's because of what a person did.
Art is by humans, for humans.
In some videos about AI, the big reveal is that *this video* was actually made by AI. But this video and this series is the opposite: nothing has been AI. Except where I cited AI art, this is entirely human made.
The words are all my mine, but they're merged from the thoughts of countless people. Everything you've seen and heard is from real filmmakers and musicians and game developers and other artists.
All these thoughts and all this media were remixed by me into something new. And yes, I did it it all without permission.
“Everything is a Remix” is a testament to the brilliance and beauty of human creativity. In particular, it's a testament to collective creativity. Human genius is not individual. It is shared.
You, my dear viewer, are a human – the best technology there is, with no successor in sight. The future is ours. And it will be won or lost by us brilliant, stupid, horrible, beautiful humans.
But there is only one complete certainty about what's coming: AI will not stop. And we need the help that artificial intelligence can potentially bring to the complex problems of the 21st century.
We are saying goodbye to the old world and entering a new one. But we are not obligated to accept this new world as is. Our duty is to make it the best it can be, to make this revolution better than the last one.
We are launching into the unimaginable. As we always are. We are always hurtling into some inconceivable future. There is no other way to move forward. So... here we go.
Everything is a Remix Part 4 Transcript
The genes in our bodies can be traced back over three-and-a-half billion years to a single organism, Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. As Luca reproduced, its genes copied and copied and copied and copied, sometimes with mistakes — they transformed. Over time this produced every one of the billions of species of life on earth. Some of these adopted sexual reproduction, combining the genes of individuals, and altogether, the best-adapted life forms prospered. This is evolution. Copy, transform and combine.
And culture evolves in a similar way, but the elements aren’t genes, they’re memes — ideas, behaviors, skills. Memes are copied, transformed, and combined. And the dominant ideas of our time are the memes that spread the most.
This is social evolution.
Copy, transform and combine. It's who we are, it’s how we live, and of course, it's how we create. Our new ideas evolve from the old ones.
But our system of law doesn't acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries.
But ideas aren't so tidy. They're layered, they’re interwoven, they're tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality... the system starts to fail.
OPENING TITLES
For almost our entire history ideas were free. The works of Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Rembrandt could be openly copied and built upon. But the growing dominance of the market economy, where the products of our intellectual labors are bought and sold, produced an unfortunate side-effect.
Let’s say a guy invents a better light bulb. His price needs to cover not just the manufacturing cost, but also the cost of inventing the thing in the first place.
Now let's say a competitor starts manufacturing a copy of the invention. The competitor doesn't need to cover those development costs so his version can be cheaper.
The bottom line: original creations can’t compete with the price of copies.
In the United States the introduction of copyrights and patents was intended to address this imbalance. Copyrights covered media; patents covered inventions. Both aimed to encourage the creation and proliferation of new ideas by providing a brief and limited period of exclusivity, a period where no one else could copy your work. This gave creators a window in which to cover their investment and earn a profit. After that their work entered the public domain, where it could spread far and wide and be freely built upon.
And it was this that was the goal: a robust public domain, an affordable body of ideas, products, arts and entertainment available to all. The core belief was in the common good, what would benefit everyone.
But over time, the power of the market transformed this principle beyond recognition. Influential thinkers proposed that ideas are a form of property, and this conviction would eventually yield a new term… intellectual property.
This was a meme that would multiply wildly, thanks in part to a quirk of human psychology known as Loss Aversion.
Simply put, we hate losing what we've got. People tend to place a much higher value on losses than on gains. So the gains we get from copying the work of others don’t make a big impression, but when it’s our ideas being copied, we perceive this as a loss and we get territorial.
For instance, Disney made extensive use of the public domain. Stories like Snow White, Pinnochio and Alice in Wonderland were all taken from the public domain. But when it came time for the copyright of Disney’s early films to expire, they lobbied to have the term of copyright extended.
Artist Shepard Fairey has frequently used existing art in his work. This practice came to head when he was sued by the Associated Press for basing his famous Obama Hope poster on their photo. Nonetheless, when it was his imagery used in a piece by Baxter Orr, Fairey threatened to sue.
And lastly, Steve Jobs was sometimes boastful about Apple's history of copying.
But he harbored deep grudges against those who dared to copy Apple.
I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this.
When we copy we justify it. When others copy we vilify it. Most of us have no problem with copying... as long as we're the ones doing it.
So with a blind eye toward our own mimicry, and propelled by faith in markets and ownership, intellectual property swelled beyond its original scope with broader interpretations of existing laws, new legislation, new realms of coverage and alluring rewards.
In 1981 George Harrison lost a 1.5 million dollar case for “subconsciously” copying the doo-wop hit “He’s So Fine” in his ballad “My Sweet Lord.”
Prior to this plenty of songs sounded much more like other songs without ending up in court. Ray Charles created the prototype for soul music when he based "I Got a Woman" on the gospel song "It Must be Jesus."
Starting in the late nineties, a series of new copyright laws and regulations began to be introduced...
Titles: NET Act, 1997 DMCA, 1998 PRO-IP, 2008 The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008
...and many more are in the works.
Titles: Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) "Six Strikes Plan"
The most ambitious in scope are trade agreements. Because these are treaties, not laws, they can be negotiated in secret, with no public input and no congressional approval. In 2011 ACTA was signed by President Obama, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, currently being written in secret, aims to spread even stronger US-style protections around the world.
Titles: ACTA Signed by Canada, Australia, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. the EU.
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement To be signed by: Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of North America, Russia and Asia
Of course, when the United States itself was a developing economy, it refused to sign treaties and had no protection for foreign authors. Charles Dickens famously complained about America's bustling book piracy market, calling it "a horrible thing that scoundrel-booksellers should grow rich."
Patent coverage made the leap from physical inventions to virtual ones, most notably, software.
But this is not a natural transition. A patent is a blueprint for how to make an invention. Software patents are more like a loose description of what something would be like if it was actually invented.
And software patents are written in the broadest possible language to get the broadest possible protection. The vagueness of these terms sometimes can reach absurd levels. For example, "information manufacturing machine," which covers anything computer-like, or "material object," which covers pretty much anything.
The fuzziness of software patents' boundaries has turned the smartphone industry into one giant turf war.
62 percent of all patent lawsuits are now over software. The estimated wealth lost is half a trillion dollars.
The expanding reach of intellectual property has introduced more and more possibilities for opportunistic litigation -- suing to make a buck. Two new corporate species evolved whose entire business model is lawsuits: sample trolls and patent trolls.
These are corporations that don't actually produce anything. They acquire a library of intellectual property rights, then litigate to earn profits. And because legal defense is hundreds of thousands of dollars in copyright cases and millions in patents, their targets are usually highly motivated to settle out of court.
The most famous sample troll is Bridgeport Music, which has filed hundreds of suits. In 2005 they scored an influential court decision over this two-second sample.
Funkadelic "Get Off Your Ass and Jam"
That's it. And not only was the sample short, it was virtually unrecognizable.
NWA's "A 100 Miles and Runnin'"
This verdict essentially rendered any kind of sampling, no matter how small, infringing. The sample-heavy musical collages of hip-hop's golden age are now impossibly expensive to create.
Now patent trolls are most common back in that troubled realm of software.
And perhaps the most inexplicable case is that of Paul Allen. He's one of the founders of Microsoft, he's a billionaire, he's an esteemed philanthropist who's pledged to give away much of his fortune. And he claims basic web page features like related links, alerts and recommendations were invented by his long-defunct company. So the self-proclaimed "idea man" sued pretty much all of Silicon Valley in 2010. And he did this despite no lack of fame or fortune.
So to recap, the full picture looks like this.
We believe that ideas are property and we're excessively territorial when we feel that property belongs to us. Our laws then indulge this bias with ever-broadening protections and massive rewards. Meanwhile huge legal fees encourge defendants to pay-up and settle out of court.
It's a discouraging scenario, and it begs the question: what now?
The belief in intellectual property has grown so dominant it's pushed the original intent of copyrights and patents out of the public consciousness. But that original purpose is still right there in plain sight. The copyright act of 1790 is entitled "an Act for the encouragement of learning". The Patent Act is "to promote the progress of useful Arts."
The exclusive rights these acts introduced were a compromise for a greater purpose. The intent was to better the lives of everyone by incentivizing creativity and producing a rich public domain, a shared pool of knowledge, open to all.
But exclusive rights themselves came to be considered the point, so they were strengthened and expanded. And the result hasn't been more progress or more learning, it's been more squabbling and more abuse.
We live in an age with daunting problems. We need the best ideas possible, we need them now, we need them to spread fast. The common good is a meme that was overwhelmed by intellectual property. It needs to spread again. If the meme prospers, our laws, our norms, our society, they all transform.
That's social evolution and it's not up to governments or corporations or lawyers… it's up to us.
Everything is a Remix Part 3 Transcript
Click here to watch Everything is a Remix Part 3. The act of creation is surrounded by a fog of myths. Myths that creativity comes via inspiration. That original creations break the mold, that they’re the products of geniuses, and appear as quickly as electricity can heat a filament. But creativity isn’t magic: it happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials.
And the soil from which we grow our creations is something we scorn and misunderstand, even though it gives us so much… and that's copying. Put simply, copying is how we learn. We can’t introduce anything new until we’re fluent in the language of our domain, and we do that through emulation.
For instance, all artists spend their formative years producing derivative work.
Bob Dylan’s first album contained eleven cover songs.
Richard Pryor began his stand-up career doing a not-very-good imitation of Bill Cosby.
And Hunter S. Thompson re-typed The Great Gatsby just to get the feel of writing a great novel.
Nobody starts out original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. And after that... things can get interesting.
After we’ve grounded ourselves in the fundamentals through copying, it’s then possible to create something new through transformation. Taking an idea and creating variations. This is time-consuming tinkering but it can eventually produce a breakthrough.
James Watt created a major improvement to the steam engine because he was assigned to repair a Thomas Newcomen steam engine. He then spent twelve years developing his version.
Christopher Latham Sholes’ modeled his typewriter keyboard on a piano. This design slowly evolved over five years into the QWERTY layout we still use today.
And Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb — his first patent was “Improvement in Electric Lamps“ — but he did produce the first commercially viable bulb... after trying 6,000 different materials for the filament.
These are all major advances, but they’re not original ideas so much as tipping points in a continuous line of invention by many different people.
But the most dramatic results can happen when ideas are combined. By connecting ideas together creative leaps can be made, producing some of history's biggest breakthroughs.
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press was invented around 1440, but almost all its components had been around for centuries.
Henry Ford and The Ford Motor Company didn’t invent the assembly line, interchangeable parts or even the automobile itself. But they combined all these elements in 1908 to produce the the first mass market car, the Model T.
And the Internet slowly grew over several decades as networks and protocols merged. It finally hit critical mass in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee added the World Wide Web.
These are the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform, and combine. And the perfect illustration of all these at work is the story of the devices we’re using right now. So let’s travel back to the dawn of the personal computer revolution and look at the company that started it all… Xerox.
Xerox invented the modern personal computer in the early seventies. The Alto was a mouse-driven system with a graphical user interface. Bear in mind that a popular personal computer of this era was operated with switches, and if you flipped them in the right order, you got to see blinking lights. The Alto was way ahead of its time. Eventually Apple got a load of the Alto, and later released not one but two computers with graphical interfaces, the Lisa and its more successful follow-up, The Macintosh.
The Alto was never a commercial product, but Xerox did release a system based on it in 1981, the Star 8010, two years before The Lisa, three years before the Mac. It was the Star and the Alto that served as the foundation for the Macintosh.
The Xerox Star used a desktop metaphor with icons for documents and folders. It had a pointer, scroll bars, and pop-up menus. These were huge innovations and the Mac copied every one of them. But it was the first combination it incorporated that set the Mac on a path towards long-term success.
Apple aimed to merge the computer with the household appliance. The Mac was to be a simple device like a TV or a stereo. This was unlike the Star, which was intended for professional use, and vastly different from the cumbersome command-based systems that dominated the era. The Mac was for the home and this produced a cascade of transformations.
Firstly, Apple removed one of the buttons on the mouse to make its novel pointing device less confusing. Then they added the double-click for opening files. The Star used a separate key to open files. The Mac also let you drag icons around and move and resize windows. The Star didn’t have drag-and-drop — you moved and copied files by selecting an icon, pressing a key, then clicking a location. And you resized windows with a menu. The Star and the Alto both featured pop-up menus, but because the location of these would move around the screen, the user had to continually re-orient. The Mac introduced the menu bar, which stayed in the same place no matter what you were doing. And the Mac added the trash can to make deleting files more intuitive and less nerve-wracking.
And lastly, through compromise and clever engineering Apple managed to pare down the Mac’s price to $2,500. Still pretty expensive but much cheaper than the $10,000 Lisa or the $17,000 Star.
But what started it all was the graphical interface merged with the idea of the computer as household appliance. The Mac is a demonstration of the explosive potential of combinations. The Star and the Alto, on the other hand, are the products of years of elite research and development. They’re a testament to the slow power of transformation. But of course they too contain the work of others. The Alto and the Star are evolutionary branches that lead back to the NLS System, which introduced windows and the mouse, to Sketchpad, the first interactive drawing application, and even back to the Memex, a concept resembling the modern PC decades before it was possible.
The interdependence of our creativity has been obscured by powerful cultural ideas, but technology is now exposing this connectedness. We’re struggling legally, ethically and artistically to deal with these implications — and that’s our final episode, Part 4.
What if Xerox never decided to pursue the graphical interface? Or Thomas Edison found a different trade? What if Tim Berners-Lee never got the funding to develop the World Wide Web? Would our world be different? Would we be further behind?
History seems to tell us things wouldn’t be so different. Whenever there’s a major breakthrough, there’s usually others on the same path. Maybe a bit behind, maybe not behind at all.
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both invented calculus around 1684.
The theory of evolution was proposed by Darwin, of course, but Alfred Russel Wallace had pretty much the same idea at pretty much the same time. And Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed patents for the telephone on the same day.
We call this multiple discovery — the same innovation emerging from different places. Science and invention is riddled with it, but it can also happen in the arts.
In film, for instance, we had three Coco Chanel movies released within nine months of each other.
Around 1999 we had a quartet of sci-fi movies about artificial reality.
Even Charlie Kaufman’s unusually original, Synecdoche, New York, bears an uncanny resemblance to Tom McCarthy’s novel, Remainder. They’re both the stories of men who suddenly become wealthy and start recreating moments of their lives, even going so far as to recreate the recreations.
And actually, this — the video you’re watching — was written just before the New Yorker published a Malcolm Gladwell story about Apple, Xerox and the nature of innovation.
We’re all building with the same materials. And sometimes by coincidence we get similar results, but sometimes innovations just seem inevitable.
Everything is a Remix Part 2 Transcript
This is a transcript for the video Everything is a Remix Part 2. Perhaps it's because movies are so massively expensive to make. Perhaps it's because graphic novels, TV shows, video games, books and the like are such rich sources of material. Or perhaps it's because audiences prefer the familiar. Whatever the reason, most box office hits rely heavily on existing material.
Of the ten highest grossing films per year from the last ten years, 74 out of 100 are either sequels or remakes of earlier films or adaptations of comic books, video games, books, and so on. Transforming the old into the new... is Hollywood's greatest talent.
Everything is a Remix Part 2 Remix Inc.
At this point we've got three sequels to a film adapted from a theme park attraction.
We've got a movie musical based on a musical which was based on a movie.
We've got two sequels to a film that was adapted from an animated TV show based on a line of toys.
We've got a movie based on two books, one of which was based on a blog which was inspired by the other book that was adapted into the film. Got it?
We've got 11 Star Trek films, 12 Friday the 13ths, and 23 James Bonds.
We've got stories that have been told, retold, transformed, referenced, and subverted since the dawn of cinema. We've seen vampires morph from hideous monsters to caped bedroom invaders to campy jokes to sexy hunks to sexier hunks.
Of the few box office hits that aren't remakes, adaptations or sequels, the word "original" wouldn't spring to mind to describe 'em. These are genre movies, and they stick to pretty standard templates. Genres then break-up into sub-genres with their own even more specific conventions. So within the category of horror films we have sub-genres like slasher, zombie, creature feature, and of course, torture porn. All have standard elements that are appropriated, transformed and subverted.
Let's use the biggest film of the decade as an example. Now it's not a sequel, remix or adaptation, but it is a genre film -- sci-fi -- and most tellingly, it's a member of a tiny sub-genre where sympathetic white people feel bad about all the murder, pillaging, and annihilation being done on their behalf.
I call this sub-genre "Sorry about Colonialism!" I'm talking about movies like Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, The Last of the Mohicans, Dune, Lawrence of Arabia, A Man Called Horse, and even Fern Gully and Pocahontas.
Films are built on other films, as well as on books, TV shows, actual events, plays, whatever. This applies to everything from the lowliest genre film, right on up to revered indie art fare.
And it even applies to massively influential blockbusters, the kinds of films that reshape pop culture.
Which brings us to...
Even now, Star Wars endures as a work of remarkable imagination, but many of its individual components are as recognizable as the samples in a remix.
The foundation for Stars Wars comes from Joseph Campbell. He popularized the structures of myth in his book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Star Wars follows the outline of the monomyth, which consists of stages like...
The Call to Adventure
Supernatural Aid
The Belly of the Whale
The Road of Trials
The Meeting with the Goddess
and a bunch more.
Also huge influences were the Flash Gordon serials from the thirties and Japanese director Akira Kurasowa.
Star Wars plays much like an updated version of Flash Gordon, right down to the soft wipes and the opening titles design.
From Kurasowa we get masters of spiritual martial arts, a low-ranking bickering duo, a beneath-the-floorboards hideaway, more soft wipes, and a boastful baddy getting his arm chopped off.
War films and westerns are Star Wars other major influences. The climactic air missions of films like The Dambusters, 633 Squadron and The Bridges at Toko-Ri bore a huge influence on the run on the Death Star. And in many cases, existing shots were even used as templates for Star Wars' special effects.
The scene where Luke discovers his slaughtered family resembles this scene from The Searchers. And the scene where Han Solo shoots Greedo resembles this scene from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
There's also many other elements clearly derived from other films. We have tin man like the tin woman in Metropolis, a couple shots inspired by 2001, a grab-the-girl-and-swing moment like this one in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, a holographic projection kinda like this one in Forbidden Planet, a rally resembling this one in Triumph of the Will, and cute little robots much like those in Silent Running.
George Lucas collected materials, he combined them, he transformed them. Without the films that preceded it, there could be no Star Wars. Creation requires influence. Everything we make is a remix of existing creations, our lives, and the lives of others.
As Isaac Newton once said, we stand on the shoulders of giants -- which is what he was doing when he adapted that saying from Bernard de Chartres.
In Part Three we'll explore this idea further and chart the blurry boundary between originality and unoriginality.
CREDITS
George Lucas was the most movie saturated filmmaker of his era, but that baton has since been passed to... Quentin Tarantino.
Quentin Tarantino's remix master thesis is Kill Bill, which is probably the closest thing Hollywood has to a mash-up. Packed with elements pulled from countless films, Kill Bill raises filmic sampling to new heights of sophistication.
The killer nurse scene in particular is almost entirely a recombination of elements from existing films. The basic action is the same as this scene from Black Sunday, where a woman disguised as a nurse attempts to murder a patient with a syringe of red fluid. Darryl Hannah's eye patch is a nod to the lead character in They Call Her One Eye, and the tune she's whistling is taken from the 1968 thriller, Twisted Nerve. Capping it off, the split screen effect is modeled on techniques used by Brian De Palma in an assortment of films, including Carrie.
For an extended look at Kill Bill's references, check this out.
Everything is a Remix Part 1 Transcript
This is a transcript of the video "Everything is a Remix" Part 1.
Remix. To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new
The term remix originally applied to music. It rose to prominence late last century during the heyday of hip-hop, the first musical form to incorporate sampling from existing recordings.
Early example: the Sugarhill Gang samples the bass riff from Chic’s “Good Times” in the 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight”.
Rapper’s Delight, The Sugarhill Gang
Good Times, Chic
Since then that same bassline has been sampled dozens of times.
The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash Grandmaster Flash
Everything’s Gonna be Alright Father MC
It’s All Good Will Smith
2345Meia78 Gabriel O Pensador
Around the World Daft Punk
Skip ahead to the present and anybody can remix anything — music, video, photos, whatever — and distribute it globally pretty much instantly.
You don’t need expensive tools, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t even need skills. Remixing is a folk art — anybody can do it. Yet these techniques — collecting material, combining it, transforming it — are the same ones used at any level of creation. You could even say that everything is a remix.
To explain, let’s start in England in 1968.
Part One: The Song Remains the Same
Jimmy Page recruits John Paul Jones, Robert Plant, and John Bonham to form Zed Zeppelin. They play extremely loud blues music that soon will be known as—
Wait, let’s start in Paris in 1961.
William Burroughs coins the term “heavy metal” in the novel “The Soft Machine,” a book composed using the cut-up technique, taking existing writing and literally chopping it up and rearranging it. So in 1961 William Burroughs not only invents the term “heavy metal,” the brand of music Zeppelin and a few other groups would pioneer, he also produces an early remix.
Back to Zeppelin.
By the mid-1970s Led Zeppelin are the biggest touring rock band in America, yet many critics and peers label them as… rip-offs. The case goes like this.
The opening and closing sections of “Bring it on Home” are lifted from a tune by Willie Dixon entitled — not coincidentally — “Bring it on Home.”
Bring it on Home (Page, Plant)
Bring it on Home (Dixon) Performed by Sonny Boy Williamson
“The Lemon Song” lifts numerous lyrics from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor.”
The Lemon Song (Page, Plant)
Killing Floor (Burnett)
“Black Mountain Side” lifts its melody from “Blackwaterside,” a traditional arranged by Bert Jansch.
Black Mountain Side (Page)
Blackwaterside (Traditional, Arranged Jansch)
“Dazed and Confused” features different lyrics but is clearly an uncredited cover of the same-titled song by Jake Holmes. Oddly enough, Holmes files suit over forty years later in 2010.
Dazed and Confused (Page)
Dazed and Confused (Holmes)
And the big one, “Stairway to Heaven” pulls its opening from Spirit’s “Taurus.” Zeppelin toured with Spirit in 1968, three years before “Stairway” was released.
Stairway to Heaven (Page, Plant)
Taurus (California)
Zeppelin clearly copied a lot of amount of other people’s material, but that alone, isn’t unusual. Only two things distinguished Zeppelin from their peers.
Firstly, when Zeppelin used someone else’s material, they didn’t attribute songwriting to the original artist. Most British blues groups were recording lots of covers, but unlike Zeppelin, they didn’t claim to have written them.
Secondly, Led Zeppelin didn’t modify their versions enough to claim they were original. Many bands knock-off acts that came before them, but they tend to emulate the general sound rather than specific lyrics or melodies. Zeppelin copied without making fundamental changes.
So, these two things
Covers: performances of other people’s material
And knock-offs: copies that stay within legal boundaries
These are long-standing examples of legal remixing. This stuff accounts for almost everything the entertainment industry produces, and that’s where we’re headedin part two.
Written and Mixed by Kirby Ferguson
Follow this project on Twitter Twitter.com/RemixEverything
Full sources, references, and purchase links at EverythingisaRemix.info
GoodieBag.tv
Wait, one last thing. In the wake of their enormous success, Led Zeppelin went from the copier to the copied. First in the 70s with groups like Aerosmith, Heart and Boston, then during the eighties heavy metal craze, and on into the era of sampling. Here’s the beats from “When the Levee Breaks” getting sampled and remixed.
When the Levee Breaks Led Zeppelin
Rhymin’ and Stealin’ Beastie Boys
Return to Innocence Enigma
Lyrical Gangbang Dr. Dre
Kim Emininem
In Zeppelin’s defense, they never sued anybody.
Hi, I’m Kirby, I made the video you just watched, Everything is a Remix. If you enjoyed the video please head over to EverythingisaRemix.info and donate some money. Anything you can muster would be greatly appreciated and will help me dedicate time to completing the remaining three episodes – it’s going to be a four part series. The site has plenty of complimentary information that I think you might find interesting as well. You can also find links to songs and videos and stuff from the video. If you happen to like them you can go there and purchase them. It’s also a good way to keep up with the latest with what’s going on with the series. I think that’s it. Okay, thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time.