On Embrace the Remix , a TED talk by Kirby Ferguson. Coincidentally enough, the first time I ever heard of the claim "everything is a remix" was on the course promotion poster here in NYUAD, and it was even taught by a professor I know. From an intuitive perspective, my response to the claim back then, when noticing it from the poster, and after watching Ferguson 's talk now would probably be the same: YES, sure thing. While I can go on and on analyzing why this intuition would come to me from a number of angles, including, for example, 1. my almost-belief in the rhizomic epistemology, 2. how "everything is a remix" fits my own modern-postmodern life philosophy of de-and-re-construction, 3. if reality has fundamental/irreducible elements, 4. if there is a single authoritative original meaning or source or ultimate solution, 5. my ambivalent attitude towards transcendental and a priori (which is something that the claim "everything is a remix" seems to deny, as the claim itself ostensibly leans towards almost pure empiricism or constructivism (while I could also argue that it is more of radical perspectivism)), etc. etc.—anyway, I guess it would diverge too much from the original context of the TED talk. So, I'll contain my habitual metaphysical quest and, also, platitudes here. (BTW, as you can already see, we could say that my "intuitive agreement" was indeed a "remix" of those understandings/notions.) I mean, at least to my understanding of the talk, the context of such a "bold" claim is rather clear. "Everything" there wasn't literally everything but rather human-produced tangible or intangible matters; and Ferguson was kind enough to offer a definition for "remix" too: copy-transform-combine (although, to my intuition, it could be closer to copy-combine-transform) (and, to nitpick, the definitions for copy, transform, and combine could also vary). Anyhow, despite Ferguson 's using Steve Jobs' double standard when it comes to the industry behavior as an example, it is also quite evident that he was referring to the fields that are somewhat related to creative creations, which makes our life easier by narrowing it to a domain that is known for "great art steals," as Jobs quoted, and also a domain in which the idea of "remix" is also a remix of a bunch of ancestors—parody, adaptation, intertextuality, collage, etc. That stated, I'm convinced this time to go a bit one-sided and skip arguing for "something is not a remix" for now. In fact, finding something that is not a remix within my own tangible or intangible creations seems already to be a mission impossible. From performing a cover piece to composing my own music, from copy-pasting code snippets to wiring sensors onto breadboards, from quoting and paraphrasing texts to utilizing prebuilt assets... At least I, at this point, cannot comfortably name something that I created or came up with absolutely-solely-entirely by myself, starting from the inspiration, idea, design, philosophy, and plan to the implementation and distribution. Well, just a quick side thought: by this definition, we can even say that Kuhnian paradigm shifts are essentially also "remixes," as a new competing paradigm is also inevitably relying on first jarring with an existing one. And, not to mention LLMs that seem to me the most-ever-ultimate-mega-remix of those massive and almost exhaustive training data, "benefiting" from the digitization/tokenization of text, image, audio, video, and media beyond. (Although, from another perspective, the digital form is a double-edged sword, as it is by definition never analog/consecutive, and even the best simulation tends to introduce trade-offs and limitations.) Anyway, getting back to our track of remix in terms of creativity, I find myself still having to indulge a bit in the vice of resorting to big words and big theories. Earlier this year, I had a chance to research a bit on the intersection of generative AI and musical creativity. One of the frameworks I used back then was Margaret Boden's creativity theory. Here I quote myself: Philosopher Margaret Boden provides a crucial framework for dissecting this, distinguishing between psychological creativity (P-creativity), which involves an idea new to the individual, and historical creativity (H-creativity), where the idea is new to all of human history (Paul & Stokes, 2023). Boden further categorizes the types of novelty based on the underlying cognitive processes. Combinatorial creativity involves generating novel associations between familiar ideas—think surprising juxtapositions or analogies. Exploratory creativity delves into the possibilities within an existing conceptual space or style, perhaps pushing its boundaries but adhering to its underlying rules, like finding a new variation within a known harmonic language. Most radical is transformational creativity, which involves altering the fundamental rules or dimensions of the conceptual space itself, creating something that wasn’t previously conceivable within that style, such as Schoenberg’s move to atonality by discarding the traditional tonal center constraint (Paul & Stokes, 2023). Paul, E. S., & Stokes, D. (2023, February 16). Creativity (E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman, Eds.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creativity/ Without too much justification, I hope it is evident enough here that—well, in my opinion—all kinds of creativity Margaret Boden coined can be considered as remixes. Even for the transformational creativity, the alteration of fundamental rules or dimensions necessitates the existence of previously fundamental rules or dimensions, and, hence, it falls in Ferguson 's definition of remix, not to mention the combinational. I'm not sure where or when my thought here would be refreshed (or remixed), but one of the temporary takeaways I would have, given we suspend the (me-perceived) tension and interplay between the purely empirical version of understanding of remix and a priori and transcendental, and go along with perspectivism for now, is that it is indeed proven to be necessitated to re-evaluate what remix implies in terms of creativity, authenticity, originality, novelty, authorship, and beyond. Sometimes, manipulating the definitions is enough; sometimes it's not.