Everyone on the Internet Is a “Secondary Creator,” to One Degree or Another | 100 Big Questions About Life

If memes tell us that “at heart, humans are just copy machines,” then the existence of secondary creation is saying: even if we are copy machines, we're probably copy machines with some character of our own.

If you've ever run across the music term “remix,” you should have no trouble with a related one: “Remix Culture.” In short, it names a cultural phenomenon — people take an existing work and, as if they were remixing music, combine it, edit it, take it apart and build something new out of it. That is what we call “secondary creation,” or “re-creation.”

The term came from Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard. In his book Remix he also lays out a pair of ideas: “the read-only culture (RO)” and “the read/write culture (RW),” where “read” and “write” can roughly be taken to mean “receiving” and “creating.” In the first, creator and consumer have clearly divided roles and the consumer is fairly passive; in the second, the line between them blurs and the two borrow from each other. The internet's reach and its low barrier to entry are exactly what a “remix plus read/write” culture needs.

If you accept Lessig's framing, it isn't hard to see that every internet user — that is, all of us — counts as a creator. Lessig also points out that this creative culture is extremely broad: any form of participation can count as secondary creation. At the same time, because secondary creation keeps so much of the original's setup or imagery, it leans heavily on cultural background and context.

That's still abstract, so here's a simple example. You see a piece of trending news and reply in the comments with “ji cao wu liu jie zuo.” First, that alone is a complete “read/write” cycle. Second, the meme you just used is shorthand for a longer line — “this is a basic move, stop typing 666, everybody sit down” — and it splices together several text memes from different sources: “basic move,” “double-tap and type 6,” and classical-Chinese phrasing. So it counts as a small act of secondary creation in itself. The form is simple, the content dense: without the context, or without having met the meme before, you can barely tell what it says. Both traits fit Lessig's definition.

In an earlier piece we looked at the “viral” nature of memes. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who coined the word, wrote in The Selfish Gene that memes copy themselves by being imitated, and that to seize the attention of the human brain a meme has to “compete” with others of its kind — which is why, up to a point, we can call them “selfish.” The memes that survive that competition aren't the “better” ones. They are the ones better “suited” to spreading.

But Dawkins also cautions that humans alone can resist the “selfish” memes planted in our heads, that we alone can “rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” Seen that way, the strange gift of “secondary creation” is that it overlaps with the original without ever overlapping completely. It can be the making of a new meme that conquers our minds all over again, or it can be a revolt against the over-copying of an old one, a push toward variety. The seed is the same meme; the flower it opens into can be a different kind — creation.

Secondary creation, or remix culture, sounds lofty enough. So what about us, the ones who perform the act — creators, executors and haulers all at once? We don't seem especially aware of any of it. We just stare at our phones, scanning around, and when something turns up that's worth imitating or reworking (the internet calls this “having a meme in it”), we grab it, turn it into a catchphrase, a short video or a sticker, and put it back online. At that point it stops being ours. The next person finds it and carries out a third round of creation, and a fourth, and what finally comes out the other end is the “pop culture” we see today — along with pop culture's own cycle of arriving, evolving, dying and occasionally coming back.

Note that what we're discussing here is only the act of creating, not how good the results are (although Piergiorgio Odifreddi, author of Dictionary of Human Stupidity (《人类愚蠢辞典》), once filed such work under a “stupidity disease” that is “spread through the entire universe, more of it in some media and less in others”). And the lines between “first” and “second,” or between online and offline, can be blurry too — think of the ancient memes that have been used and altered so many times that no one can trace where they began.

Film reviews, book reviews and translation are forms of secondary creation too, but they carry a barrier to entry, which is why they never quite went mainstream. The internet's own brand of remix has almost no barrier at all: nearly everyone can turn it out, indiscriminately, every day, on purpose or not. By QDaily Research Lab's count, this kind of creation comes in roughly six varieties, which sort into three groups:

Imitation

1. Catchphrases and stickers

A fair share of catchphrases and stickers are distilled from some original work or event, and once we start using them in every kind of situation they become a sort of metaphor in their own right. Look closely and you'll notice that catchphrases and stickers, simple as they look, never stop evolving. Take “quanyuan eren” (“everyone's a villain”), the Chinese title of a Takeshi Kitano film: as it spread it sprouted riffs like “quanmian xiaokang” (“moderately prosperous in all respects”), “quanrizhi jiunian yiwu jiaoyu” (“full-time nine-year compulsory education”) and “quanbu mingtian yao chongzuo” (“all of it has to be redone tomorrow”) — every one built on quan, “all.” Or take the line “tongyang shi jiunian yiwu jiaoyu, weishenme ni zheme xiu” (“we all got the same nine years of compulsory education, so how did you turn out this slick?”), which had already fused two memes, “nine-year compulsory education” and “slick moves.” It then compressed into a four-character abbreviation, “tong jiu yi he ru xiu,” and from there into name puns — “Chen Duxiu,” a historical figure whose given name contains xiu, the word for slick, and “Xiu'er, is that you?” Or take pixia, literally “under the skin,” originally a medical term, now also used for the person or team running an official account: the operator hiding beneath the account's skin.

None of these examples are especially fresh, but they're enough to show how continuous secondary creation is in catchphrases and stickers. From the moment one appears, through its spread, through its mutations, every stage involves borrowing a meme and blending it with another. Every stage carries the shadow of remix.

2. Short video

“Short video” here, spelled out in full, means “performance art that spreads like a meme, with short video as its medium.” If you had to trace it to a source, it's something like a cross between the old flash mob and the viral video.

Take last year's “Seaweed Dance.” Seaweed Dance started out as a song and a music video. Then came inventive spinoffs like “getting the family cat to do the seaweed dance,” and more and more users piled on with a second round of creation, and an nth: a pet version, a kids' version, a celebrity version, a street version. Search any short-video app today for the tag “#SeaweedDance” and you'll turn up tens of thousands of imitations and remakes, each with its own moves and its own way of shooting. A similar case is the internet-famous chef “Salt Bae”, who has more than 17 million followers on Instagram — the man behind the famous salt-sprinkling GIF. After a year or so of being passed around, you can now find people in certain down-home Chinese food videos imitating his gesture, solemnly showering salt over their málà tang, red-braised pork or tomato-and-egg stir-fry. If mashing things together counts as remix too, then these 15-second clips are probably the purest display of internet users' collective mashup instinct.

3. Shipping (CP)

CP — short for Coupling, or Character Pairing — is more or less standard equipment for fan secondary creation, or more precisely for the fanfiction world. Worth noting: the Chinese word for fanfiction, tongren, already carries the sense of “enthusiasts re-creating characters from a particular work of literature, animation, film or game.” Thanks to the internet, CP culture broke out of its niche long ago. The formats of “re-creation” have expanded from classic prose and comics to video, panel comics and skits — better suited to the way the internet spreads things in fragments — and the source material is no longer confined to anime and games either. In an earlier poll we ran, “Ship Them”, we mentioned a few pairings that look offbeat but are held in high regard inside certain communities: the famous Voldemort x Lin Daiyu pairing (“Fu-Dai”) on Bilibili; Jia Ling x Song Joong-ki, which took off after Descendants of the Sun; “Venom x Eddie” from the film Venom, treated as all but canon. Text, stickers, mini skits — finely made and endlessly varied. Whether or not you know about this sort of matchmaking, or approve of it, one fact is hard to argue with: by any measure, CP fans' output in secondary creation is abundant and has no ceiling.

Interaction

4. Comments and danmu

Comments and danmu — bullet comments, the text that scrolls across the screen — are internet creation too, but they differ from the remix forms above in leaning harder on interaction, to the point that the interaction itself becomes the work. If you've ever watched a video on Bilibili, you know that danmu on versus danmu off, or posting danmu versus not posting, are opposite experiences. For videos with especially heavy danmu traffic, the bare original and the version layered with comments can be treated as two different works, and sometimes the danmu — “brace for impact,” “danmu shield,” “too much oil, I'm out,” “eye-protection squad” — is more fun than the thing it's covering. Comments, reposts and likes carry the same sense of invention through interaction. The classic tag “God, top-right” (the running joke about the funniest reply landing in one particular spot), or habits that formed on social media like “grabbing the first reply,” “threads inside threads” and “reflexively reading the top comments” — all of them are cases where the interaction between the reposter and the original poster forms one complete work.

Unboxing videos, game reviews and any other work built around “experiencing” something belong in this same category of re-creation produced by interacting with an original.

5. Talent shows

A term connected to both talent shows and secondary creation is “cultivation-system idol”: a young idol groomed to a plan, with fans taking an active part in the grooming — colloquially, letting fans watch their idol grow up. Of all the star-making formats, the talent show is probably the one that best embodies the idea that an idol is a joint secondary creation by fans and producers. Through a talent show, fans, producers and the idol stay in tight interaction. Everything the idol says and does comes from the idol, and also carries the producers' steering and the fans' expectations. Their image, their talents, their work and their reputation all depend heavily on fan approval and fan support — to some degree they are made jointly by the fans and the platform. On this year's much-discussed talent show Produce 101 China, the contestant Wang Ju told viewers, “What you hold in your hands is the power to redefine China's number-one girl group.” Which can also be read this way: to redefine is to create again, and this time the creator is finally the audience itself.

Personification

6. Building a persona

“Building a persona” here is meant broadly — the kind where anything can be personified, as we've written before. It comes last because it isn't fully independent; it needs one of the earlier forms to exist at all. You imagine something as a person and invent a fitting image, set of rules, backstory or style for it; the versions that fit particularly well get taken up and passed along as memes. The “[X], personified” panel comics that have run on social media for years are a good example: schools, provinces, brands, plants, animals — anything you can see, human imagination can turn into a person. Seen that way, the labels you stick on other people, the online personality you build for yourself, the celebrity personas everyone has grown used to, are all the same thing at bottom: fragmentary elements stacked together and made concrete. And the shape that comes out of it — the foodie, the adorably dim one, the burnout, the shut-in — is a sophisticated act of secondary creation by whoever built it.

Having read all this, you may still feel that “secondary creation” is too ordinary to give you much sense of achievement as a creator. But you may also come to see that having a sense of secondary creation is, in fact, a piece of luck for us as human beings. Imitation and repetition are unavoidable. It is only because remix exists that we don't end up as pure vessels for memes, sunk entirely in mindless, parrot-like copying.

It's true, “at heart, humans are just copy machines.” But turn it around: every remix you make, even the plainest imitation, inevitably carries traces of your own style and your own material. Isn't that how genes work in biology as well? There is inheritance, there is mutation, there is consistency and there is variety. Even if everyone is a copy machine, we're copy machines with personality, with something particular to us. For those of us afraid of being buried under an endless stream of secondhand experience, that counts as a small but indispensable comfort.

Cover image and illustrations by: Zheng Shuya