William Gibson on The Age of The Remix

wordisms writes "William Gibson of Neuromancer fame gives his thoughts on remix and innovation in the digital age, in a short essay at Wired Magazine entitled God's Little Toys. From the article: 'Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.'"

Comments

Buzzword alert

[stupidfoo]

The remix is the very nature of the digital.

Excuse me while I gag...

Re:Buzzword alert

[ramblin billy]

"Who owns the words?" asked a disembodied but very persistent voice throughout much of Burroughs' work. Who does own them now? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us."

Yes, and the links on his site are to places you can BUY his books, not download them for free.

billy - do as I say...not as I do

Re:Buzzword alert

[Anonymous Coward]

The books cost money, but the -ideas in them- are free. The words, the concept, the music of the prose are all part of the culture that created them. Look at all of the derivative fiction that built off of the ideas of Gibson, for instance. How much money do you think he has seen from those? None. Because the ideas are free.

Re:Buzzword alert

[fermion]

Buzzword compliance usually makes me sick, especially when used by marketing drones or other hacks who have no sense of what the words mean. These people truly speak in phrases devoid of any meaning. They have speech writers to create their verbiage, or, even worse, merely copy interesting sounding passages from the web.

Gibson is not such a person. Complaining that Gibson is simply using internet buzzwords it like complaining that Kuhn uses the word paradigm way too much. Both of these people predate and transcend the buzz.

The core failing of remixing...

[Shadow Wrought]

The cor problem with remixing is that it takes something already created to make something new and different. Once everyone is doing it, then the core pieces used to create the remix will gradually dissappear. Someone, somewhere has to be making original content- otherwise there is nothing with which to cut and paste. As more and more of the arts become cut and paste, the more degenerative they will become. I think remixing is indicative of less creativety, not more.

Re:The core failing of remixing...

[SatanicPuppy]

It never seems to work that way though. Ever notice how easy it is to group things into Genres? How easy it is to group music in to periods and influences and styles?

This remixing has been going on for a long time; something new appears, everyone jumps on the wagon, they ride the wagon for all its worth until it gets stale, then some person or group who is bored with the status quo does something original, and the whole thing starts over, but pointing in a different direction.

If you step back, you can see this sort of phenomenon everywhere in the world, in everything that people do.

Re:The core failing of remixing...

[myvirtualid]

Dear grumpy old fart,

Please tell us about when you programmed with punch cards! Or about telnetting to the SMTP port! Or how much happier you were using only a command line!

Human beings innovate. Full stop. End of story. Thanks to constant innovation, we have Linux, new viruses, GUIs, and a myriad other things good and bad. Including cyberpunk. I'll let you decide where it falls in {good,bad}.

There will always be people wanting to say it in their voice. Some will make their voice using the voices of others.

Others will be dissatisfied with copying/remixing/imitating and will attempt to break new ground. Most will fail.

The innovators, whoever they are, will surprise us in ways we cannot imagine.

BTW, FWIW, IMHO: There will always be an audience. The audience consists of the majority of human beings, the passive masses, who neither produce original content nor remix the content of others in any innovative way. When they do express themselves, they simply parrot what they have heard and seen, with nary an original thought.

The participants are the minority and always will be. Protest demonstrations are a useful analogy. In all but the rarest circumstances, protests consist of a minority of the population, and are lead by an even smaller minority. The leaders are the innovators, the makers of new content. Other participants are the remixers and fans.

The rest of us are the passive majority, using up oxygen waiting to die.

How sad it is that even the remixers are more creative, more innovative, more active than most of us ever will be.

The saddest part is how true this is regardless of how violently we agree or disagree with the active minority.

"Age of the remix?"

[Daniel Baumgarten]

Sounds a lot more like "open source" to me.

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing new about remixing. Writers have been doing it for years, making reference to classic works, or their contemporarys.

But we need a bit of something new added each time. I think the modern trend is adding less and less, recycling rather than referring to. A bit like the Hollywood model of making a 4th,5th,6th,etc movie using the same tired old characters, rather than trying something completely new.

Fluffy Article

[copponex]

Baseless and sweeping generalities (like the one I'm writing), even if dressed up by prepending "the" to common words, will always be popular since the vagueness can never be proven to be right or wrong.

But let's prove his theory, and borrow all of his newly released novels instead of buying them. As he says in the article, it belongs to us anyway.

There will ALWAYS be an audience

[Ralph Spoilsport]

TFA quote:

Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.'"

Baloney. There will ALWAYS be an audience, because not everyone is as adept at making things (even remixes require some talent - not much, but some) and not everyone WANTS to make things or finds making things interesting. There are a huge number of people, and I would submit that such a number constitutes a majority of people in general, who aren't really interested in being cultural producers of any variety. They LIKE to be entertained, they LIKE having people do that for them, and they LIKE having people do it for them in a COMPETENT manner.

Remixing is a marginal case, and while it will grow in popularity, it is just the flavour of the month until people tire of hearing Led Zeppelin being mixed over a brain dead hip hop beat with some spacey and/or glitchy atmospherics tossed in for the sake of "creativity". People will want to hear Real Music Made By Skilled Professional Musicians and remixing will go the same route of professionalisation and renewal like the rest of it.

Appealing to William Gibson as an authority is not a wise idea in this case. I have an idea - I'll OCR Mona Lisa Overdrive and remix it. Oooops! Can't really do that, can I? I have to KNOW HOW TO WRITE SCI-FI to do that. Same goes for music.

RS

OOD OOA

[StreetFire.net]

Oh, I get it, Music, Video, art and literature are all objects, I can take these objects and "remix" them into a new program.... Wonder if I can use Rational Rose and Visio for my next music "sample".

It's all fun and games until the RIAA/MPAA crash your little party and remind you who owns what.

Re:Great, until...

[killtherat]

Well considering most cyberpunk/cyberscifi is based on stories he wrote back in the 80s, I'd say he already knows alot about the subject. Watch the matrix, and you'll see some heavy shades of 'Neuromancer' in there. In fact, one of the reasons I heard for people not making a Neuromancer film is because they are afraid people would think it's coping the Matrix, and not the other way around.

The degredation of society..

[B5_geek]

the article could be seen as a summary of the last 100 years of American culture. (or 1000 years of Western culture).

Art is the only true form of originality that exists in the world. It takes a creative mind to 'create' something from nothing.

- an image of beauty from a plain piece of canvass
- a new tool that saves a person the work of 3
- a way of thinking about ones place in the world that is of harmony with nature.

Modern society is more about consuming then it is about co-existing. The 'American' trend of sit-back and be entertained has led us to this cut&paste culture where things are just re-hashed for later use.

I believe that we are approaching the decedant state that Rome was in just before the fall.

The new renaissance should be quite entertaining.

Re:Future shock!

[FLEB]

Please post anything you've written that can compete with Gibson's novels and then you can share your assesments of someone else's writing in such a dogmatic and prickish way.

Now there's an argument I can't stand. Being good at criticism and being good at the object of criticism are two seperate skills. Although knowledge is generally necessary, and adeptitude may help criticism, it's not outside the realm of possibility to be a good critic of something you can't do.

Re:Future shock!

[Isao]

Gibson needs to go back and learn how to write before his techno-utopianism has any credibility.

Techo-utopianism? Have you actually READ any of Gibson's work?

10 years too late, Gibson

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost sad how a man once hailed as the bleeding-edge of science fiction can feel so dated with his latest forays into public essay. The remix, the "record", the DIY nature of "electronic music" and it's culture...this was all old hat 10 years ago. More or less he's speaking of the Empowering Nature of Personal Computers! These things are beyond commonplace to the point where the majority of artists are using them on a daily basis. I dare call them mundane.

I still respect you, Gibson, but I think you're too slow for your own time.

Re:Predicted the Matrix in 1984, we can trust him

[Evro]

Terminator made reference to a global computer network around the same time period. Anyway, I don't see how having one prediction realized means we should "trust" him. Making a sweeping prediction like "we will use computers more in the future" doesn't qualify one as a Nostradamus, IMO anyway. I'm still not sure whether your "we can trust him" comment was tongue-in-cheek or not.

Re:Predicted the Matrix in 1984, we can trust him

[GileadGreene]

For the curious - Gibson is regarded as one of the experts in the field of technology and its effects on human life.

By who? Gibson freely admits that he didn't really use computers until well after he write Neuromancer, and that the technical details of Neuromancer are dodgy at best. "Cyberspace" and "the Matrix", as presented in Gibson's novels, bear little or no resemblance to the internet and the web as they exist today. Nor was Gibson the first writer to envision global computer networks.

I think we can trust his predictions. So far they have been quite accurate.

Really? I don't think so. It's easy to cherrypick many SF authors' novels and find instances in which they were "accurate" - especially if your definition of "accurate" is as loose as the comparison you draw between "the Matrix" and the real internet.

I like Gibson's novels. He's a great writer with some interesting ideas. But he is not some kind of prescient thinker when it comes to the future.

Barf me

[Reality Master 101]

"The remix" is not some new frontier of creativity, as Gibson seems to arguing, it's a symptom of how little true creativity we see these days. In an era where freaking *DJ'S* gain fame without a shred of musical talent, it's astounding that someone thinks remixes are a good thing.

As I watching Pink Floyd on stage the other night at Live 8, I was struck by how much more musically and lyrically rich they were compared to the other acts that we had seen. That's what music is intended to be. Not a bunch of musical wannabes who have to leech the creativity of others.

Bah.

Re:sometimes ripoff, sometimes not

[flyingsquid]

Last night, I put Johnny Cash's _American IV_ on my stereo for the first time. I'm not really sure how it fits into Gibson's ideas. It supports some of his thesis and disagrees with it in other ways. The first song- "The Man Comes Around"- uses samples and "remixes" of the Book of Revelations. So it supports Gibson's idea of remixing. But then, isn't the Book of Revelations sort of a "remix" itself, in that the King James Version (or whichever version Cash is sampling and alluding to) is a modification of the original text? And for that matter, I'm perfectly happy with the Cash version- I simply want to appreciate it, not alter it- which doesn't seem to fit with Gibson's idea that we're all going to be remixing what everyone else has done. The other truly kick-ass song on the CD is Cash's version of NIN's "Hurt". I suppose you could call it a "remix" to have the Man in Black sing Trent Reznor's lyrics and play NIN on acoustic guitar, but artists have been performing songs or reciting poems written by other artists since recorded history began.

And sure, artists today build upon, are inspired by, steal from, improve upon, and desecrate previous works- how in the hell is this new? The Book of Genesis borrows the flood myth from _Gilgamesh_; William Shakespeare borrowed the story for _Hamlet_, the tune of the "Star Spangled Banner" is an old drinking song, and the English language is a "mash" of a Germanic tongue (Old English), French(the language of the Norman conquerors), Latin(the language of the scholars and scientists), and other tongues. Sure, we have new toys that make this easier than ever, but this is just the nature of art and culture.