 The last keynote speaker today is Kirby Ferguson, the man behind Everything is a Remix. And as I mentioned in the opening remarks, Everything is a Remix is a fantastic series of videos that really explain how culture builds on culture. And I love Everything is a Remix for a number of professional reasons, but I think the reason I love Everything is a Remix the most is for a personal reason. That's because working at public knowledge is really hard sometimes to explain to people what I do. I talk to our parties or I visit family members. They just, they don't get what's going on. And Everything is a Remix is something that I can give to someone. I say, watch these videos. I explain this to Congress all of it. This is what I'm trying to make them understand. So the professional reason I love it is a personal way to get through the explanation of what goes on. Thank you so much for these videos. Please join me in welcoming Kirby first. All right, thank you for having me. Thank you to Public Knowledge, probably good work you guys do. Between 2010 and 2012, late 2010, recently in 2012 I was working on a series called Everything is a Remix, Warp Parks video series that distributed for free on the web at the same time. You can check it out, just Google it and you'll find it. Warp Parks, about 10 to 15 minutes each. First one was about music, started music when I did a film, the second one. Innovation in the third one, which is a lot of what I'll talk about here today. And the fourth one I got into the law and that was about just a few months ago. So rather than over-explaining the premise, I think I'll just play a little bit from the beginning of part one. Remix to combine or edit existing materials to produce something new. The tune remixes originally implied to use it. It rose to prominence late last century during the heyday of hip-hop, the first popular music form to incorporate sampling from existing recordings. For the example, Sugar Hill Gang samples the bass riff from Sheeps and Goodtimes in the 1979 hits Rapper's Deluxe. Since then, that same bass line has been sampled dozens of times. Used in video photos, whatever, and distributed globally, pretty much instantly. You don't need expensive tools, you don't need a distributor, you don't even need skillets. Remixing is a folk art, anybody can do it. Yet these techniques, collecting material, combining, transforming, are the same ones used at any level of creation. You couldn't even say that everything is a remix. What does this mean? Remix is simply making new stuff out of old stuff. Forgive the technical jargon, but that's the basic idea. Making new stuff out of old stuff. So you take a couple of previously existing songs, slice them up, you put them together, you make something new, but the pieces of the old things are still recognizable in the new thing. Those little chunks are called samples. So remixing could be thought of as the arrangement and transformation of samples, but I think remix is a good metaphor for any kind of creation. So copying elements, combining them, transforming them, that, for me, is the basics of anything, any kind of creation. Now, this is in opposition to our myths of creativity. As a culture, we don't really have a realistic idea about how creativity actually happens when we have these myths. We have stories and they're good stories, but I think they fundamentally send us down the wrong path. Touch by the hand of God. This is, for most of human history, what we consider creativity to be. Humans weren't considered powerful enough to actually create something themselves. They were channeling the beauty of God, the beauty of nature. And we still have remnants of this idea now, not that we think creativity is divine, but some sort of an elevated, remissible accomplishment that is greater than other sorts of activities. A couple of years ago, the Romantics came along, Beethoven is an early example, and Romantics were, in many ways, kind of an opposite reaction to this very confining role that Artisa had before this. They claimed integrations as their own as the expression of their own unique voices and this is an idea that has also stuck. Real genius is the lone creator who bucks tradition, who goes his own way and does his own thing. Our culture likes this idea of a singular genius. We like the idea of a singular. Anything, you know, if you did it on your own without anybody else, we really like that, even though we know we can really do this. Light bulb, how could I talk about creativity in a presentation about showing a light bulb so there's the light bulb? Box six, it's done. This is our most popular visualization of an idea. So, you know, it's a metaphor for how it happens, happens fast, happens out of black. First it was darkness, then there was light, happens fast. Of course, this isn't a realistic idea of how creativity actually happens. It's a sprawling, messy affair, with a lot of usually a lot of small insights along the way. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm famous painting by Pablo Caso. Nothing like this had been seen before. This was painted. So, you know, this is, this sort of thing is still kind of gold standard. Great creators break the mold and create something unprecedented, something revolutionary. But of course, this was drawn from the influences of its time. So, African arts, classical sculpture, its contemporaries, Caso coaxed this creation out of this culture at this particular moment in time. Okay, so those are myths. What's the reality? How do we actually create? There are three basic elements. First thing you need is domain knowledge. You need to be grounded in the language of your field. So, how to get domain knowledge, copy, flat out, annihilation. You can't contribute worthwhile new works until you've internalized the knowledge and the techniques of your media. So, in order to create for culture, communicate with it, you need to speak the language. You need to speak like everybody else speaks. And you learn to speak by speaking like everybody else speaks. You don't start doing your own thing right away. You just learn words, learn grammar, and talk like everybody else does. You can see this in the career of any artist. So, Bob Dylan, for instance, his first song contained 11 cover songs, almost the entire album was cover songs. And early in his career, he mostly seemed intent on being Woody Guthrie, who was the previous generation's vocal icon. So, it didn't seem like he was intent on being the next to Woody Guthrie. He just wanted to be Woody Guthrie. He was doing his very best to be as much like Woody Guthrie's possible. Richard Pryor, influential standard comic from the 70s, introduced topics like race, sex, drug abuse, just stuff from his life into comedy, which with a couple of exceptions was mostly a fairly shallow deal of expression. But he began his career doing a not very good imitation of Bill Cosby. So, if you watch Pryor's early stuff, he's really doing like a second rate Bill Cosby edition. Hunter S. Thompson invented Gonzo journalism, so took the novelistic first person viewpoint, combined that with journalism, acknowledged that journalism is subjective, can't be objective. But before he did that, he was working as a straight journalist. And in his spare time, he actually re-typed books, a couple of books. He re-typed Great Gatsby and Power of the Arms, just word-for-word sat down, re-typed the whole thing, just to get the feel of writing a great novel. So, once you are grounded in your domain, it's then possible to create something new through transformation. So, taking an idea and creating variations. So using logic, intuition, streamlining, expanding, and burying, making mistakes has a lot of value as a creative technique. It's very time consuming stuff, if you do enough of it, you can potentially produce a breakthrough. James Watt, for instance, created a major improvement in steam engine because he was assigned for a pair of Thomas Newcombe and steam engine. So it wasn't like he was making tea one day, and by hey, he created a new set for mining, for weather, he was a gig. He was assigned to fix an engine that already existed. And he spent 12 years fiddling with that design to get it right. Christopher Laffer-Scholes modeled his typewriter keyboard layout on a piano. Early on, typewriters were commonly referred to as literary pianos, which I think is just a lovely phrase, I wish you'd sign that if you agree with me, but I wish you'd still use that, it's lovely. But this piano-like design slowly evolved over five years into the quartet, keyboard layout, which we still use for about our fourth sound. Thomas Edison, of course, didn't invent lightball. His first patent application was actually turned down, it was considered an infringement. The second one, which was ultimately approved and was the lightball, was called improvements in electric lamps. It wasn't called the electric lamp, it was an improvement on an existing invention. So specifically, he produced the first commercially-filed ball, that was his accomplishment, it wasn't actually an invention, the lightball. And he and his team did this by trying 6,000 different materials for the filament. So again, this is all very time-consuming self-taste place over the course of years. So these are all major advances, but they're not exactly original creations. So they're more like tipping points in a continuous line of invention by a lot of different people. So steam engines, typewriters, light bulbs, these had already existed before this. These particular ones were the versions that triggered major historical shifts. Now it's with combinations that we frequently see dramatic creative leaves. By connecting ideas together, especially when they don't seem to be related, this can produce radical innovation, what business people would call disrupted innovation. Other on-site, let's go to the formula E equals MC squared, but of course you didn't discover energy and mass at the speed of light, you discovered that they fit together in a surprisingly elegant, simple way. You'll have to do this pretty fast, this was invented around 1450. So the components, movable type, paper, ink, these have been around for centuries in Rome and in China. Pivotal element here is the screw press, which is what this guy is cranking on here, because it had nothing to do with printing. It was used for food production, for making, for squeezing things together, juice or oil out of it, like wine, olive oil, it was used for that, so it's a technology that had nothing to do with printing. That was the hidden element that brought it all together. So that's a common source of radical invention, integrating something from a foreign field into your field. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. World Wide Web is kind of the ultimate combination of technology, it's a hypertext layer for the internet, which is a network of networks, it's a bunch of protocols that manage to speak to each other because they speak open protocols, they all speak the same language. And Berners-Lee didn't even have to invent hypertexts, hypertexts that have already been invented, nerds knew all about it, you can see it in Douglas Animal Barrett's technology demonstration from the late 60s, hypertexts that have been around for a long time, so it was his fusion of these things and that they were distributed openly that came to the web. So those are three basic elements of creativity, copy, transform, and combine. You can see all of these are working arts plenty, especially as we all become more and more media saturated, I think you can see it more and more commonly as we can actually take the stuff, the actual media, and slice it up a few things with it, which is a fairly new thing, super common then, but it's been around a long time. And a good example from the 70s, I think it was the film Star Wars, which I nerded out in part two of everything's records. So George Lucas was a big, big film nerd and his influences found their way into his work sometimes in a very rightly conceivable fashion. So his clip is from part two of everything's records. Even now, Star Wars endures and the work of impressive imagination, but many of its individual components are as recognizable as the samples and a remix. The foundation for Star Wars comes from Joseph Campbell. He popularized the structures of Nick in his book that hero with a thousand faces. Star Wars follows the outline of the monomy, which consists of stages like the cult of adventure, supernatural aid, the belly of the whale, the road of trials, the lead with the goddess, and a bunch more. Also huge influences were the flash Gordon serials from the 30s and Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa. Star Wars plays much like an updated version of Flash Gordon, right down in the soft wipes and the opening titles design. From Kurosawa, we get masters of spiritual martial arts, a low-ranking bickering duo, more soft wipes, a beneath-the-floorboards hideaway, and a boastful baddie getting his arm chopped off. Come on, let's do a challenge and we'll put you in the lead. Just watch yourself. We want it big. I am the best systems on the world system. We want it big. We want it big. War films and westerns were also huge sources for Star Wars. The scene where Luke discovers the slaughtered family resembles this scene from the searchers, and the scene where Han Solo shoots Rigo, resembles this scene from the good to bad and the other. Lumactic air strikes and the Danbusters, 633-squatter, and the bridges that took over E, play very similarly to the run and the death style. And in many cases, existing shots or even used as templates for Star Wars special effects. There's also many other elements clearly derived from various films. We have a tin man, like the tin woman in Metropolis, a couple shots inspired by 2001, I grabbed a girl in Swing Scene, like this one in the 7th Voyage of Sinbad, a holographic projection, kinda like the one in Forbidden Planet, a rally resembling this one in Triumph of the Will, and cute little robots, much like those in Silent Running. So this notion that we are remixing the work of others has plenty of implications on our ideas about originality, which are now intertwined with ideas of property. Ideas are considered property, legally, morally, and this is understandable to me. It was like, I think Katie was saying it earlier, it's distal, you know, when you spend years working on something, you endure countless setbacks, failures, you've worked on it for a very long time, feels in your gut like it's yours, you're so familiar with it, it feels like it's yours. But it just isn't, not completely. We all take ideas from others, lots of them, it's mostly what we do, but this tends to not register because of our nature. Humans are more sensitive to losses than to gains. Behavioral economists refer to this as a loss aversion. Our minds are presupposed towards not losing what we had. It's probably some sort of an evolutionary thing, you know, the proto-humans who can track where the bananas work, you know, prosper and multiply, anyone who lost will probably die. So what we're taking from each other, from our culture, from our domain, that doesn't register, the ones we have something of our own that we feel is worth taking, we tend to get possessive. A couple of ideas distorting our view here. The first one is this idea of individualistic creation, the romantic idea of the lone creator. This is an idea that's already in decline, from my perspective. I think a lot of people who do creative work don't think in this way anymore. But it's still a dominant idea in the culture. We think highly successful creators are extraordinary, highly original. So it's an idea that I feel is in decline, but with this project I'm kind of trying to pound another nail in the coffin. Ideas of property, this is doing not in decline at this moment. I think that it may be that first domino falls, that this one might also fall, at least partially. So this is a doozy, this is ingrained in our system of commerce, but it's a very recent idea, it's modern, and it seems leading, of course. Ideas aren't property, they aren't matter. You can't literally take someone's idea while you use coffee, in which case they still have the idea. So that's different, and I think it's important that we acknowledge that difference because it sends you down a completely different path of how you conceive of this stuff. So the metaphor of property for ideas is clearly inaccurate, and I think it causes trouble in our culture. Because ideas contain other ideas, that's how they are built. We build our new ideas out of the old ones. So ownership of ideas is complicated. Just to begin with, even in its minimal form, it's very complicated, but it gets impossibly complicated when we try to coordinate our little creations, you keep others out and delay planning to, you know, our little plot of creative land. It just, if you look closely, our works contain other people's works. This applies to everybody. Another demonstration of that, this is from Part 3 of Everything Is Remix. It shows how Apple built on previous technology, most notably that of Xerox. Eventually Apple got a load of the Alto, and later released not one, but two computers with practical 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 of 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 incorporated that set the Mac on a path towards long-term success. Apple need 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 app. The Mac was for the home, and this produced a cascade of transformations. Firstly, Apple removed one of the buttons on the Mac 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 liked to 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 Auto both featured pop-up menus. But because the location of these would move around the screen, the user had to continually reorient. The Mac introduced a menu bar, which stayed in the same place no matter what you were doing. And the Mac added the trash can to make the leading files more intuitive and less nerve-wracking. And lastly, through compromise and clever engineering, Apple managed to pair the Mac's price down 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 has a demonstration of the explosive potential of combinations. The Star and the Auto 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 Auto and the Star are evolutionary branches that lead back to the MLS system, which introduced windows and a mouse to sketch out the first interactive drawing application. And even back to the menace, a concept resembling the modern PC, decades before it was possible. You can see a hypertext actually at work in that split-screen shot there, which is from the late 60s. There was hypertext, you know, 15 years before the web. I'll close with a quote. This is kind of at the heart of what I'm trying to do. By idolizing those whom we honor, we do a disservice both to them and to ourselves. We fail to recognize that we could go and do like-a-likes. Charles D'Abilly is a sociologist at Harvard. This is kind of, this is what it's all about for me. I'm not trying to diminish the accomplishments of any of the people that I talk about, but I'm trying to show that it's not magic, it's work, and anyone who produces a cute little remix video and uploads it to YouTube, you're dipping a toe in the same pool as all of these guys. I mean, it's very primitive what you're doing. It's incredibly early, but those basic techniques, if you just keep using those, who knows what you can accomplish? That's it. Thanks so much. Are there any questions? I have a quick question. You mentioned at the beginning of your talk that you made these videos for free, and I was wondering, and we always hear that copyright is sort of this necessary incentive so that people can get paid for doing creative things, but you obviously, that wasn't at the core of what you did when you didn't know anything about that. Yeah, cool. I had a job at first, so it's a part-time thing. I thought it would be easy when I started it because, you know, normally I shoot things, so I thought, you know, yeah, I don't have to shoot stuff. This is going to be a breeze. I'm going to just throw this together in my head, and then, of course, it took forever to do an incredibly long time to do it. But right away, it did really well, did a lot better than I thought it was going to do. So I stuck at the job for, I don't know, another six months or something like that. I put up the second part of it, and then at that point it was obvious through doing speaking stuff and commissions and sponsorships ended up coming up. That merchant accent, and I sold some t-shirts and posters and stuff like that, that by putting all this stuff together I could make a living, you know, at as much money as I was making at my job. So that's the route that I want to go down with the work that I do, and it's what I'll be doing with the next thing. You know, the need is free. It'll be even freer than this one because it'll be, you know, original stuff within copyright. All this one is gray, I think, with some of it. So people can take it and they can then reach up it and do whatever they want with it. They can sell it, whatever. After it's out of, you know, after it releases it's not like it's going to happen today. So, you know, I think, you know, the media is a great way to get attention, and then if you have some things outside of that that can generate income from your hard core people, you know, you can make a living. You got to keep it small, I think. You know, that's important too. So you're talking about, I guess, all the ways in which any group's house has tons of influences. What do you think about sort of the state of the law? What should or what does the law do or what should it do to account for, you know, that it's not the slow fire genius model? I mean, I think we basically had it right when it started. You know, it was basically just a way to keep people from getting ripped off. But there's a famous case with Pumple Tom's Cabin, which got translated into German, I think it was. And, you know, the publishers ensued. And they lost, because, you know, the idea was that's so very useful. And now German people can read the book and they couldn't before. So it was very, very confined. And I think that's all it has to do. I think, you know, a little protection goes a long way. And once you go beyond that, then you get into gray areas where people are not just blatantly ripping you off. And you end up losing expression that way. So I think, you know, you just want to get rid of the stone beds, basically. You want to target them. And then outside of that, you've got loads of hack work, loads of derivative stuff, loads of bad art. And that just comes as a trick. I think that's part of it. And that's fine. It's good. Sorry. So you're distinguishing between the bad guys and the hacks? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The difference between this stuff that is intended, especially if you're trying to make money with it, I think that distinguishes between a different lady. But yeah, I think if you have any kind of creative intent with it, even if it's meager, which is what most stuff is pretty meager, you know, if you just put the old twist on it and they feel like they've done something with it, I think that's fine. You know, I think that's just, you know, you take it good with bad. You've got a lot of bad. And I think that's just the way that it's quite comprehensive. Anybody else? Michael? Sure. No? I have a question. Sure. Yeah. Could you stand at the mic, please? Approach licensing like Creative Commons. Creative Commons is interesting. I mean, it's, I, you know, I mean, I'd much rather see the laws change. I mean, I think that's worth the really, that's what I'd love to see happen. I love Creative Commons. But like once you're in that world, you're in that world, and then you can't really mix and match between them. So that's my problem with it. That's why I didn't create a Commons license to this because it's not, you know, a lot of stuff in it is not actually in mind. So I felt like I, I couldn't feel it at the same time. I acknowledged, you know, if you want to do something about that, I don't care. So I think Creative Commons is great as an alternative. But it seems like, I think it's a privilege at this point that it's kind of niche. Like I'm not sure that it's ever going to, you know, be that broadly successful. But I love it. I love that it's there, but it gives people the choice I'm going to use it for my next project. So that's my problem. Yes. So does anyone ever come after you for using Clips? No, never. It doesn't happen. No. The only stuff that I think would be where someone could get a toehold is the way I use the music. I think that's not actually, I use probably. Yeah, I can. I didn't say just five percent. Oh, sure. Yeah, right. Yeah, like George Lucas just doesn't like it. Yeah, yeah. No, it doesn't happen to you. I think, you know, that I do, it is educational and intense, and I think that helps a lot. And a lot of it is, I think it's pretty clearly compared to this. Like the stuff that I do with Apple stuff and with Led Zeppelin is in the first one. George Lucas has stopped the Star Wars clips. You know, that's all demonstrably very clearly compared to this. So I think I'm not a good target in a lot of ways. Anyone else? We're good? Alright, thanks a lot.