Back in the late 1980s, when Adam Curry was a head-banging, be-coiffed VJ for an upstart new medium called Music Television, I was embarking on my most significant period as a young adult: college. During this confusing time, during which I changed majors with the semesters, I dreamed of mixing, mashing and cutting-up—thanks to a steady diet of Burroughs, Deleuze and Guattari, and Joyce.

At the time, rap and hip-hop were nascent forms, still growing up in urban neighborhoods and far from the dominant cultural memes that they have become. Meanwhile folks like Arthur Kroker were writing wild texts about being cyber and the Web was born in a real way. From music to technology, we were learning to be self-referential and communal. We were learning to connect. Hypertext was the new buzzword, and the media tried its best to explain “linking,” something we now take for granted. And so I entered higher education in a hypertextual way, linking from major to major, without much regard for a linear path.

I began my random walk through academia as a physics student, fascinated by the paradoxes of high-energy physics, and really, really itching to smash the atom into its poetically named ephemera. I had read Gary Zukav’s early recombinant text The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which taught me to understand quantum physics through an equally inscrutable lens—Eastern philosophy.

I then remembered I was obsessed with flying, and so began a short career in aerospace engineering, but its jump-suited, Ray Ban Aviator culture turned me off pretty quickly. So I flirted with computer science because it seemed the most polyglot of disciplines—full of esoteric secrets, unlocked only by the study and application of initially inscrutable computer languages, of gnostic expressions of will rendered in ones and zeros. (I now sling these ones and zeros as my day job and know it to be a less romantic occupation.)

Eventually, I settled on a dual major in English and theater. English literature—especially the moderns and the post-moderns—fueled my hungry, iconoclastic passion for literary theory. Theory provided the perfect platform for my own “remixes.” If modernist novels were records, literary theory was turntables and a mixer. I could cut it up crazy, love it, scratch it, fuck it up—challenge it to defy me further. Indulgent as this was, I was sure I was onto something: the formation of a new aesthetic based on a theory of appendages, strap-ons and mixed media in a new culture of rhizomes that would chop down the hierarchies of Greek thought.

Yeah, it sounds as funny now as it probably did then, and I eventually did grow up. But all that time, as I skipped from subject to subject, I was still learning what my hunger for pieces, parts, combinations, juxtapositions, nimble structures, cuts and pastes, Frankenstein’s monster constellations of thought, obfuscated Perl code, occult science, the Kabbalah (yes, that Kabbalah), meditation, synthesizers, sequencers, samplers, turntables, acid trips—and what they all had to do with each other.

Because I’m fond of “chunking”—breaking problems and thoughts up into smaller, bite-sized pieces, which are easily recombined - I began to sense within me a definite vector: What if all of this remixing and recombining is the future of expression?

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Profound and now obvious epiphanies aside, I did happen to learn a few things at school—which is good, because it was freaking expensive. Though during college I’d felt like a child running through a cornfield, randomly stomping down cornstalks, it became clear as I matured that, seen from above, my path resembled crop circles, mysterious but definitely purposeful. The sharp taste of learning hits the 20-something like a first taste of whiskey, but it eventually settles down into what becomes a foundation for wisdom later on. And while this maturation process was happening, I remained true to a couple of constants: music and theater.

I was a director, an actor, a musician and a DJ (well, okay, a radio and a rave DJ, if you must know), and it soon dawned on me that all of these pursuits were augmented by my love for remixing. I was individuating myself, transforming and recombining my exuberant, rebellious anti-aesthetic from a tiresome punk/goth/mod modality into one that, at the time, could only be called (gosh, well, it’s embarrassing) cyberpunk. Please hold your comments until the end.

In short, it seemed that everything that attracted me aesthetically was a product of high-energy collisions of matter. I was combining and conflating physics and art. I saw art as a supercollider and my mind as a bubble chamber where the faint traces of undiscovered particles were spinning out in strange directions, crashing together at high speed.

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Today, of course, we’re surrounded by this very aesthetic. This isn’t to brag that I “liked that band when it wasn’t cool, man,” but rather to recognize that I was standing on the beach, playing in the tide pools, but ever-watching a very large wave approach.

I’m all growed-up now, and I have two jobs. By day, I’m a developer (a fancy term for a computer nerd), and by night I’m the artistic director of a small fringe theater. My life is a lot like it was in college, and I may never be happy Just Doing One Thing. Of course, the remix is everywhere now. Without cut-and-paste, design-patterns open source code, I couldn’t make a buck by day. And my theater’s aesthetic utterly depends on a clash of genres, styles and art forms. This modality is cultural and applies not only to the workforce and to art but to people as a whole.

As author William Gibson recently wrote in Wired : “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.”

An emergent aesthetic is evolving through our digital culture, combining the forms of the past into new and interesting organisms. We’re all doing it.

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But such evolutions are not without their peril. Most significantly, the remix aesthetic has caused a serious dispute over intellectual property (IP). In many ways, this dispute regulates the success of this aesthetic. We’re learning that authorship may have changed over the last 100 years and that it may not be as important as we once thought. As a result, we are witnessing a clash of two forces—a reactive, moneyed, anti-remix IP plantation system and a nimble, connected tribe of digital nomads, to whom recombination is as natural as breathing.

The Plantation, in the name of the artist, bemoans digital culture and its will-to-replication. It acts out its death throes in a seemingly endless and increasingly absurd string of litigations, all the while paying only the most meager stipend to the artists who toil in its fields. The prosecutorial cries of “cease and desist” can be heard even now as I write these words.

The nomads forage at the edges of the Plantation, occasionally stealing artists and artworks from underneath its hol(e)y fences, shuttling them through a digital underground railroad. We believe art and thought should be free. We create social tools, such as del.icio.us, a social-bookmarking Web site, and Flickr, a community-based photo-sharing site.

To answer the entrenched laws of IP and liberate a modernized notion of authorship, the nomads have created some elaborately simple conceptual structures, among them Open Source and its sister, Creative Commons licensing. The original idea behind Open Source came from the software world, where free software included not only the program itself, but the code that was written by its author(s)—the idea being that by releasing the source, other developers could remix and build upon the software and the best ideas would rise to the top to become the next platform in software evolution. This idea has now extended into the world at large. See: Open Source Music, Open Source Poetry, etc.

But what of intellectual property? Shouldn’t authorship mean something, even in a recombinant culture? Yes, it should. Creative Commons licensing attempts to bridge the old world of authorship with the new one by creating copyright structures that allow flexible rights. With Creative Commons, creators can grant some of their rights to the public and retain others.

Right here things get interesting. It is possible that the nomads who support freeing IP actually respect the author more than the extremely vocal Plantation owners. The nomads want authorship to revert to creators while the Plantation, transparently worried about the bottom line, ultimately wants to strip creators of ownership.

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So what, you say? Fair enough. But, envision with me a time when ideas are freely exchanged and litigation is a rarity. Where works of art celebrate each other, augmenting themselves in a chain of ascendance. Where the remix, a modern oral epic told by DJ Chanticler, tells a story of history. Imagine a newly emerged Renaissance woman or man, in whom science and art are close friends—not bitter rivals arguing for funding.

Now imagine yourself within that world. Think of yourself as an author who gets full credit, confidently allowing others to build off of your work, break it into pieces and glue it back together in a new way. Listen to hip-hop, but this time, listen for the subtleties of its construction, the poetry of its self-reference—now lay down a track and respond. Imagine the music on your iPod remixed in real time. Become a digital nomad and travel between ideas with supersonic alacrity. Realize nothing you make or own is forever, unless it lives on replicated by someone else.

Western ideas of perfection and permanence are difficult to shake. Transitory materiality sounds like Eastern hoodoo to a lot of people. And in some ways, they’re probably right. There’s still value to structure, order and hierarchy. But if you can relate to anything I’ve said, you’re probably already outside the system, tweaking its controls and hacking into the mainframe of your own culture.

The changes in IP, a movement toward recombinant aesthetics, a share-and-share-alike mentality, a democratization of media: All these things are signs of a new world shouting to be tried. I think it’s inevitable—but if you don’t agree, feel free to cut and paste the crap out of this essay to refute me. Just give me credit for my work, and send me a link, will you?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, CA 94305.