Remix book party video

Posted on October 31, 2008 by Lessig

Robert Greenwald and friends put together this extraordinary video for the extraordinary REMIX book launch party in San Francisco, obviously with the intent to demonstrate just how remix can be an extraordinary distortion, because obviously, I don’t use the word “extraordinary” so frequently.

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5 Responses to Remix book party video

  1. JoSeK says:
    October 31, 2008 at 6:07 am

    I could assist the party (very good party!) because I were in San Francisco (tomorrow flying to Corea and the next week returning to Spain). I wrote a post about the party (in Spanish), and also took some photos (obviously licensed as CC-by :P).

  2. Jerrod Hansen says:
    October 31, 2008 at 6:27 am

    Love the Dr. Zeus remix. Can’t wait to read this book. Is it going to be downloadable?

  3. Gregg says:
    October 31, 2008 at 10:27 am

    “Extraordinary.” You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.

  4. Pablo says:
    October 31, 2008 at 10:20 pm

    Law is Code (A Response to Remix)

    Professor Lessig is ambitious enough to toast the “remix.” He has told his students he prefers that his teachings be challenged on exams, not repeated. This limits the scope of my review to this: Susa?

    Professor Lessig has produced books developing the useful abstraction of “code as law.” If this principe that “law is code” is found in the words of Professor Lessig’s new book Remix, however, it is hard to hear it over the wonderfully colorful but, at least as far as serious tribute to “remix” is concerned, woefully anecdotal, stories.

    Why is this? Because even the most banal human- one who can’t compose a symphony or even normalize the spectra we get from stars (think Space invaders but the spaceships sit still and don’t fight back)- demonstrates that law is code, and it is the abstraction that law is code which provides the most appropriate (and humble) temple with which we can begin to apply law to our code.

    I would toast the concept of the “Remix” differently than Professor Lessig. I would toast it first for its central role in the foundation of our being and law. Genomes and Constitutions; remixes you can believe in! Susa was cool, too.

    Only once we have seen our own genomes remix themselves our of the soup, our own laws remix themselves out of… judeo-pagan ethics? I have no idea about the precise nature of the primordial soup of our bodies or laws, but the mechanism by which they arrived to me typing this review is certainly one of remixing. Humans are built on a remixed code, which only strengthens the point that law is code.

    To visualize the mechanism, just let yourself be a computer user. Open the file of your genome (if you don’t have it, start with a polite letter to Craig Venter), or download the Constitution that happens to govern your country (actual Constitution may not apply, note that Religious Texts can also be obtained electronically, to the extent the written law yields to the “iron yoke of arbitrary authority”, digitized version not always available.)

    It is forced on us that both your governing text (U.S. Constitution is mine) and genome (programing color-blindness among other things) can be translated into 1s and 0s. Force on us that everyone else’s can too. Now think about all the 1s and 0s that we haven’t have seen, but that represent the governing code and genomes of our collective past.

    Against this backdrop, play something by Chopin or Beethoven… please not Susa.

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