Cringe, Remix, Repeat

Remix culture, shifting identities, and the weird joy of editing old writing

I recently wrapped up the immensely humbling experience of revisiting a 10 year old academic paper - my chapter in the Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, which came out in the second edition last week. The piece was based on my Master’s thesis, where I wrote about video remixing as a vehicle for subverting dominant culture and representing marginalized identities. Going back to work you did a decade ago is uncomfortable, particularly when you’ve since transitioned industries and returning to the world of academic prose feels like translating a dead language. But I pulled it off, and it’s got me reflecting on the changes in remix culture since I first wrote this piece in 2013.

Remix as a time machine

The technological world was a much simpler place when I first did this work, in a way that feels almost unrecognizable now. As I wrote this piece, smartphones were just becoming mainstream, we were basking in post-Arab Spring techno-optimism, and algorithmic timelines hadn’t yet begun assaulting us with out-of-network content and advertisements. Streaming video was just becoming feasible - this is the era when Netflix’s online streaming offering was called “Netflix Instant” as opposed to the core Netflix, which was a DVD-rental-by-mail business. Yet, as streaming video became more popular, I was starting to see more video mashups, ranging from absurdity to fierce political criticism.

Even before this era, juxtaposing different media was always happening - many early remixes originated in fan communities and were deeply analog. Early fan-vids were performed live with slide projectors and cassette tapes; in the 80s and 90s, vidding collectives formed to share equipment and lower barriers to entry for remix creation. By the early 2010s, remixing was easier, but still not simple. Most remixers identified themselves as artists, and creating a good remix required skill and equipment. As part of my research for my MA thesis, I worked with remix artist Elisa Kreisinger on her Queer Men remixes, which involved a lot of ripping DVDs, combing through transcripts, and literal hard drive swaps because moving that much footage online was a nonstarter. (Side note: eternal thanks to Elisa for her patience and generosity at this time) Remixing was a core cultural identity, a vehicle for identities and passions, and a technically challenging modality that kept its inner circle relatively small.

Now, remixing is baked into how we communicate on almost every platform. The TikTok idea of having an audio track that others pick up and reuse is remixing in its simplest form. Apps like CapCut have brought video editing into a mobile-friendly format, and even things like the story composer on Instagram, which allows you to juxtapose anything from a song to a gif to a sticker, are facilitating remixing as a mode of communication and social sharing. Rather than a subculture, remixing has become a core affordance of modern social media.

Does this mean that remixes are less political now? Perhaps when expressed as a percentage of overall remixes online, sure. However, political engagement online has taken many forms in the intervening decade - new scholars doing work on this have found that Gen Z is less likely to insert their personal stories into remixing, or see remixes as a vehicle for identity expression. But they’re still remixing.

Looking back is cringe

When I first wrote the chapter, I assumed that it was the start of a long academic publishing career - I was a student at a top-tier PhD program that minted tenure-track professors with every graduating class, so I had no reason to suspect that that was not also my fate. Yet, I also had biannual existential crises about whether I was making a terrible mistake and would be forever torn by the winds of contingent appointments, unable to set down roots or sustain a relationship. In contrast, when the opportunity to edit this chapter came up in late 2023, I almost passed. It had been six years since I’d done any academic writing, and my time in tech had rewired my brain to strip out complexity and substitute bullet points. Plus, I was in the throes of burnout from working through the pandemic and some other challenging situations. But the chapter was getting published with or without me, and I happened to be on medical leave, slowly reacquainting myself with coherent thought, so I figured why not?

Reading this old work as a smoothbrained corpo who hadn’t written a proper citation in years and was emerging from a burnout fugue was rough. Yet, it was a reminder of why academic work is valuable. It can seem navel-gazey to take something that feels like “common sense” and then apply a bunch of theories and big words to it. However, a big part of academic labor is turning common sense, vibes, or slowly-emerging themes into legitimate, citable knowledge that others can build on. Does this suck? To read, sure, lots of the time - and also academia is fraught with disciplinary gatekeeping. But is academic work important? Also yes.

In my eventual dissertation, I argued that non-experts can become deeply literate in legal systems through lived experience - eg. farmers who ran into copyright challenges when trying to fix their tractors became very literate in IP law very quickly. Similar to the jailhouse lawyer, someone with enough time and motivation can learn a lot even when they are institutionally excluded from having “official” knowledge. The explosion of social media has only made this more true (for instance, I think we see this in the increasing validity of self-diagnosis in neurodivergence). But still, we need widely accessible, credible information to be able to build these vernaculars and, increasingly, to combat the rise of misinformation and the refusal of our governments to acknowledge plain facts.

As I worked on the chapter, there were also a number of “oh honey” moments regarding my own queer identity. At the time I wrote the original chapter, I was identifying as “straight-ish,” by which I meant that I had had full-on relationships with women that I thought of as Very Special Complicated Friendships. Since then, I’ve come out as bi (and married a man who embodies Bi Wife Energy) and can now see the ways I was writing about queer culture while half-anthropologizing myself. A tale as old as grad school.

The evolution is the point

I guess what this really has me reflecting on is that anything cutting-edge is bound to feel like common sense later on. This happens all the time in other art forms—old movies seem predictable and dramatic before you realize that they were creating the blueprint for films to follow, classic songs seem simple to our modern ear because they were inventing pop music—and is just as common in academia and tech. And the internet smashes all this together, which is why remixing makes so much sense as a way to engage with culture at the moment - associating different elements helps to transform them, or legitimize them as part of a cultural movement or aesthetic.

So yeah, revisiting a ten-year-old chapter made me cringe, but it also offered a useful checkpoint: for how remix culture has evolved, and how I’ve evolved with it.

How has your relationship to media and identity changed over the past decade? Has your work ever sent you into a time machine? Let me know in the comments.