Rip It Up and Start Again: Creative Labor and the Industrialization of Remix

Abstract

Creative industries rely on workers who use sampling and remix to produce new content assembled from existing materials. In the process, remix cultures are commodified and reshaped by industrial logics. Rip-o-matic videos provide an example. These scissor reels are used as visual storyboards for television commercials. They are produced by video editors who cut and paste clips found on video sharing platforms. Interviews with rip-o-matic producers show the impact of the industrialization of remix on creative workers who face challenges to their ability to assert their creativity, content ownership, and reputation. Other examples, such as social media and fast fashion, nuance the picture. Industrialization also paves the way for automation by generative “AI.” These software tools are based on processes of appropriation and remix that mirror those used by rip-o-matic producers. Remix is in sum at the center of today’s corporate cultural production.

He sits in a bar, alone. He turns around and sees her. She is walking toward him. She is beautiful. He falls in love. If this (heteronormative) sequence rings a bell, it is because you have seen it in many a commercial. Most likely, it has been sampled from a previous commercial and remixed into a new one, and then borrowed again from the resulting clip. And on and on it goes, in never-ending loops of citation. Creative workers use remix techniques to produce content for the mainstream media industries. Be it wanna-be influencers remaking the latest viral video on TikTok, or street photographers who produce collections of ideas for styles to be appropriated by fast fashion designers, the media industry outsources the labor of remix to workers who use cut-and-paste techniques to produce content assembled from existing audio, textual and visual materials. These forms of labor amount not just to a renewed commodification of media piracy and remix cultures, but to their standardization and industrialization. Remix is increasingly at the center of corporate cultural production.

Take rip-o-matic videos. These objects are scissor reels produced by cutting and pasting clips from existing content onto a new video. In one of their most common applications, rip-o-matics represent a step in the production of television commercials: commissioned by advertising agencies to freelance video editors, they are used as video storyboards for shooting the final product. The production process is fairly simple. Video editors receive a script from the agency (she walks into a bar. . . and so on). This script often includes the main message of the planned commercial, a description of the product to be advertised and how the agency’s art directors imagine the final commercial to develop, the dialogs, as well as the target “mood” or other indications about the desired esthetic of the final product. Video editors then scout platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo for pieces of content, often cannibalizing previously existing commercials that can be found on such platforms. Finally, they re-assemble short clips ripped from the material they have found, thus building a new video composed of a remix of clips from a number of existing videos. Sometimes they add new audio. The commissioning agency will then send the resulting rip-o-matic to a director, who will use it as visual storyboard and turn it into a new commercial by re-shooting the scenes it contains. As put by a video editor: “the TV was on and I heard a familiar sound, so I started watching and I was like: but I edited this one! Only it was a well done, professional, uniform version of my sketch.” The very term “rip-o-matic” captures both the practice of ripping content from online platforms, and the churn-and-burn nature of these videos, which are produced in fast time frames and for little money, circulate in short life cycles, and quickly disappear.

In a sense this is nothing new: the whole history of the Western cultural industry is one of rip-off, from Vivienne Westwood turning Chelsea’s street punk style into marketable fashion, to Sergio Leone shamelessly cloning Akira Kurosawa’s plots and characters. Sampling and remix have shaped the work of hip hop collectives such as Public Enemy or Run DMC, as well as experimental filmmaking that used archival film footage through a new language that remodeled “forgotten and neglected” moving images (Russell 2018, 12), and fan fiction communities of queer women in the 1990s (De Kosnik 2019). Today, a renewed language of remix has become part of a more mainstream lexicon co-opted by media industries (Navas 2012), including the creation of an entire class of workers specifically tasked with borrowing, cloning, adapting, and replicating somebody else’s content. Rip-o-matics themselves are inherited from a tradition of time-based mood boards, that is, the use of existing imagery to develop an idea or campaign, sometimes through literal cut-and-paste on pinboards. This “compilation mode” (Russell 2018, 21) has been used for decades throughout advertising and television. Like other forms of sampling and remix, the production of rip-o-matics has become a major step in the global division of creative labor, especially when it comes to TV commercials, show pilots, and even movie projects. Rip-o-matic production is also exemplary of the ways the media industry appropriates cultures of remix while obscuring the modes in which these practices emerge.

The existence of this field confirms that the subversive potential of remix must be weighted against its incorporation in industrial logics. In the 1960s, the Situationists proposed detournement as a tool to challenge the society of the spectacle. The term means misappropriation or hijacking, and was defined as “the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction,” meaning that the subversion of “spectacular” esthetics was key to revolutionary politics in a society dominated by mass media (Debord 1970). The problem is that these forms of grassroots reappropriation can be quickly co-opted by capital. Forty years after the Situationists, Fisher (2009) wrote of capital’s ability to “pre-corporate” alternative cultures, arguing that critical cultures are always-already incorporated by capital.

To study these processes in the context of today’s creative industries, in 2021 and 2022 we interviewed ten freelance video editors who produced rip-o-matics for the Italian advertising industry. ¹ These workers were in their 20s and 30s, mostly white and male, and often without formal education in media production. Freelance jobs for rip-o-matics can be found on platforms such as Fiverr, for instance, but for most of our interviewees the broker was an agency that took up outsourced jobs from major advertising firms. They worked for agencies that orbit around Milan, the city where the Italian creative industry is concentrated. ² Additional interviews with video editors in the UK and US provided context within the broader international industry. We supplemented this material with the analysis of videos produced by Black TikTok creators in Canada and US, and posts by Diet Prada, a popular Instagram account that discusses the cultures and politics of fashion.

Rip-o-matics show how the commodification and industrialization of remix impact media work. First, their production affects workers’ relationship with creativity. Although rip-o-matics may represent the largest output of their labor, most video editors see the cloned, repetitive clips they are asked to churn out as a manifestation of the banality of the advertising industry. They struggle to find ways to express their esthetic preferences and creativity through these objects. Second, video editors producing rip-o-matics have an almost parasitic relation with digital platforms: they borrow content without participating in user-generated content production, thus not making themselves available for platform capture and valorization. Yet the companies that commission rip-o-matics are, alone, able to capture the value generated by this labor. Lastly, freelance video editors who nurture and rely upon forms of self-entrepreneurialism based on public visibility and social media reach are constrained by the private, internal nature of rip-o-matics. They are forced to find other “grey” avenues to publicize their work, which makes them further dependent on corporate decisions they can not control. Taken together, these features of the labor of remix transform workers’ endeavors, ultimately revealing how ideas of creativity and autonomy within today’s cultural production clash with the reality of an industry that is highly standardized, subject to corporate command, and averse to providing its workers with the esthetic autonomy they so crave.

The same features also expose this field to the threat of automation. Indeed, recent “generative AI” tools such as Synthesia, Midjourney, or Runway Gen-2 follow a content generation process that is quite similar to the labor of remix currently carried out by workers: extract snippets of content from the internet in response to a prompt, and then remix them into something new. This type of software adds to the complex dynamics of media work: automating part of the creative process implies a renegotiation of the nexus of agency and control that shapes labor in the field, and interrogates the nature of creativity in relation to gender, race and class (Chia 2022). Creative workers in rip-o-matics and other areas of the cultural industry where remix is being industrialized are not only losing control over the material rewards of media work. They are also confronted with the difficulty to fulfill the imperative to be creative that is crucial for their identity formation (McRobbie 2018).

Remix as Labor

Remix is at times presented as an act of reclamation, self-determination, and fugitivity that resists the “exclusionary canon” of contemporary culture (Russell 2020), for example against attempts at erasing queer people and people of color. While we are sympathetic with this take, we must acknowledge that the picture needs to be nuanced. Indeed, the history of remix is one of participation in the cultural industries since the get-go (Giancarlo 2021). Take music: Jamaican dancehall was born with the goal of integration in the local music industry (Veal 2007); disco culture in New York emerged through independent DJs who saw monetary potential in remix practices (Poschardt 1998) and learnt to transfer their live mixing onto tape, thus allowing a broader commercialization of the genre (Brewster and Broughton 2006). Since the emergence of the commercial internet in the 1990s and interactive “web 2.0” services in the 2000s, even online piracy quickly turned into a business model (Johns 2009) as long it could be made to operate “within the logic of profit and within the terms of commerce” (Lawrence 2015, 168). Studies of remix cultures have stressed how the practice can “redistribute existing formations of power,” but have also pointed out that artists whose creativity is rooted in remix can face “a level of disposability,” especially when the market attempts to reorient the creative process to its own advantage (Campbell 2021, 489–90). In sum, there is nothing inherently emancipatory in media production practices based on remix, and the creative experimentation it allows is often coupled with processes of commercialization and co-option.

Within the ambivalent nature of remix, a materialist reading urges us to focus on the labor process, the creation and appropriation of value, and the inevitable uneven power dynamics that underpin media creation. For instance, Gavin Mueller has argued that piracy is labor and as such can be valorized by the cultural industry. Thus, rather than representing a form of resistance, it may end up being subordinated to capital. We agree with this reading, but take our analysis of remix as labor a step further. According to Mueller (2019), even when subsumed by capital, piracy “is the fruit of a partial victory, a realization of certain kinds of autonomy, even though it falls short of breaking with capitalism” (p. 48). On the contrary, for media workers who participate in the industrialization of remix, autonomy is but a memory: their creativity is almost fully constrained and directed, their freedom limited by intellectual property, the result of their work appropriated by the media corporations that alone can extract value from it.

Our analysis of the modes in which mainstream media industries guide the labor of remix is rooted in Italian operaismo (workerist) theories of capital’s struggle to foster creativity while also controlling the workforce and capturing the value it generates (Hardt and Negri 2004). Production is contingent on “the integration of the working class within the system,” which for early workerist Tronti (2019) is a vital necessity of capitalism. This generates tensions. How do you preserve the openness of the creative process while at the same time controlling masses of workers that are not formally employed and capturing the value they generate? The management of creativity is difficult because it has to deal with the combination of media workers’ sense of professional identity (and esthetic dispositions) with the unpredictability at the core of cultural production processes. There is a Giddensian dilemma at play here, as capital must balance the specific institutional structure within which media work is carried out with laborers’ individual agency, without which there would be no creative process. In sum, neither the individual nor the corporation fully control the production of culture, but capital strives to gain the upper hand when it comes to the appropriation of creative labor.

For instance, among the defining features of the institutional structures of media work is intellectual property. Copyright is often at the center of tensions between creative work and corporate control, and workers must find ways to reconcile themselves with such tension, as shown for instance in studies of television writing (Fisk and Szalay 2017). In sum, intellectual property rights shape the labor of cultural production, generating negotiations and contestations (Han 2012). Video editors who produce rip-o-matics rely on sampling content whose copyright they do not own, but (as per the typical contracts that regulate creative labor) they do not own copyright on the final product of their labor either. Copyright thus constraints workers’ ability to monetize their labor, as it allows advertising agencies to control the content created by the independent contractors they employ. These dynamics take place within the broader landscape of a digital creator economy fostered and structured by digital platforms. Many accounts of the platformization of cultural production tend to overlook seemingly fringe practices that occupy key, albeit hidden, positions in the media industry. The production of rip-o-matics is shaped by video sharing platforms, but does not generate content that platforms can monetize, showing that the value generated by creative labor is appropriated in multiple different spaces.

Finally, when we say that creative labor is “industrialized,” we do not mean it uses the specific technologies of industrial capitalism. Rather, in the vein of workerist ideas, we stress the ways in which industrial logics extend from the factory to society. Early workerist Alquati (2021) called industrialization a process of expansion of “organizational modalities” such as standardization, fragmentation of tasks in a new division of labor, re-skilling, and corporate domination (see also Altenried 2021). In turn, the term “creative workers” recognizes the division of labor that underpins the industrialization of cultural production (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2013). The specific role rip-o-matics in such a division is interesting because it speaks of the “spectrum of formality” that underpins the media economy (Lobato and Julian 2018). Rip-o-matic video editors work with highly informal tools and practices, often appropriating content they do not own. They can do so because other actors, differently positioned along the spectrum, have the resources and power to break down tasks and formalize content–and thus appropriate its value in industrial circuits such as television networks and advertising services. The division of labor in the cultural industries is organized according to industrial logics and increases the distance between creative work and its final products.

Creativity or Banality?

The word “creativity” has strong implications of newness, invention, and innovation. Yet while it is widely used by video editors, its meaning must be weighed against the reality of rip-o-matic production, if not remix cultures at large. The industrialization of remix means that the production of commercials is broken up and fragmented within a complex division of labor. Since it is but an intermediate step that will feed the shooting of a commercial, the production of rip-o-matics is shaped by the client’s strict esthetic and narrative control. Video editors have little wiggle room when it comes to the scripts that guide their work. They also attend briefings where the commissioning agency’s art directors describe in detail the mood, colors, and styles that must characterize a certain rip-o-matic. In sum, workers are asked to surrender their creativity, or as put by Siciliano (2021), to alienate their esthetic judgment. One of our interviewees summarized how the creation of rip-o-matics churns out “remilled copies of things that already exist.” After all, rip-o-matics are “a step in a production chain, because the requests are very standardized, [and] we rarely think out of the box,” as put by another interviewee. Workers must learn to negotiate their expectations of creativity against a background of high volume productivity and control, and are aware of the highly regimented nature of the processes they are asked to participate in (Mould 2018).

The daily reality of media production in this field is of course one where video editors work to borrow and remix existing content. Commissioning agencies explicitly request cut-and-paste techniques as a way to speed up the process: “Often they want a rip-o-matic because they hope I will easily find images used by others,” a video editor told us. Rip-o-matics are also strategic because advertising agencies can use them to pitch an idea to the original client (the company who commissioned the commercial) and then deliver a product that has been pre-approved. In the words of an interviewee: “production follows [the rip-o-matic] very closely so that the client does not bust their balls. The client has approved [it] so they repeat the same movements, framings, mood, lights, and nobody can complain.”

The imperative to be fast, predictable, and easily reproducible means that agencies “are not interested in doing something new if they can have an idea that steals from other ideas.” Yet while stealing is baked in the very definition of rip-o-matic, most workers rather stress banality as the driving force behind their sampling and cloning. For instance, video editors know where to find certain kinds of content–literally certain scenes or even specific camera movements. They routinely cannibalize existing commercials, some of which have become standard sources of clips in the industry. In the words of a worker:

“there are brands that we know to be goldmines for the material we look for. For instance IKEA commercials are always beautiful if you are looking for homely situations, [while] Tiffany is super patinated. Many have become famous. For instance a Lacoste commercial: You need a man sitting at a table who is about to fall in love with a woman? You immediately think of the Lacoste commercial, you and ten other video editors, and if the scene is approved then it is shot again, which is quite funny if you think about it.”

The continuous reproduction of this banality means that video editors who have experience in the field even develop the ability to recognize specific scenes across any number of TV commercials:

“I saw a commercial in a show from Dubai where children run and enter a house made with a sofa and a piece of cloth. I promise you, that image has been used [. . .] for a long time. [. . .] Nobody can demonstrate that it has been copied from another commercial, [but it was] the exact same image! I used it too, saw it re-shot, and then saw it again in things made by others.”

Still, the banality of rip-o-matics does not mean that video editors do not enjoy their labor. For instance, workers are aware that their rip-o-matic will be reproduced quite carefully in the final commercial: “if the sequence and framing [of a ripped clip] are nice and work well, you put it in your rip-o-matic and they shoot it exactly like that,” as one interviewee put it. This gives freelancers a degree of power to exploit whatever chance they have at expressing their own esthetic choices, albeit limited, once the prescribed script and mood are followed: “sometimes taking the initiative is rewarded. Maybe just inserting two images that may mean nothing but provide some breadth, some imagination.” Other interviewees stressed how producing rip-o-matics puts to the test one’s craft in editing techniques:

“It is not my creativity, not my content, because all that is pre-decided, but I like montage work. You take pre-existing images, images created for a goal that’s different from yours, and put them together to make them say what you have been told they should say. This work is very interesting, bending things to tell my own story.”

Others are interested exactly in the division of labor produced by the industrialization of editing work. These tend to be the video makers who have a collective understanding of the profession and see their work as something that sustains the work of the colleagues who write or shoot the commercial. As an interviewee said, rip-o-matics: “participate in production cycles, keep an economic sector function [. . .] I am doing something that will allow others to realize a video. People who will work on it. It is a contribution.”

Finally, not all forms of rip-o-matic production generate frustration due to the limited creative autonomy experienced by workers. Banality is a common feature of TV commercials—Horkheimer and Adorno (1994) spoke of the way marketing engineers “everything with sameness” (p. 94). But video editors who work for TV fiction are required to participate in it much more directly in giving esthetic direction to a clip: for instance, when they produce the rip-o-matic of a pilot for a show that is to be pitched to a TV network. One of them described rip-o-matics as an “enormous creative outlet.” Conversely, those who work in advertising may not find rip-o-matics to fulfill their need for creative expression, but use the income they generate—some called it “easy money”—to pay the bills, thus sustaining the production of other objects that they see as their “authentic” creative output, be it documentaries or avant garde short films they have little chance to monetize. They may romanticize authenticity and originality, but do so within a sophisticated awareness of the industrial logics that govern their labor. In sum, workers find ways to negotiate their ability to express esthetic judgments within the industrial cycles that shape rip-o-matic production.

Platforms and the Value of Remix

The work of producing a rip-o-matic clip is based upon video editors’ ability to retrieve, download and repurpose video reels from video sharing platforms and social media. In turn, this dependance on platforms for the extraction of content produces a specific relation with how value is generated and appropriated. Indeed, video editors rely on video streaming services like YouTube or Vimeo to extract raw material in the form of clips to be cut and pasted onto a new piece of content. For instance, an interviewee explained how that responds to the need for the massive diversity offered by these platforms, as well as the quality of the content you can scavenge there:

“I do not use tv series or movies because that would be too demanding. I would have to download the entire movie, then often you would find rough stuff that wouldn’t work, movies do not have that formal cleanness you find in advertisements. Thus I tend to look for commercials on YouTube and Vimeo [where it is easy to] figure out brands that could have done something similar [to what I have to do].”

Video sharing platforms are not the only sites used by video editors to search for and extract clips that can be remixed into a rip-o-matic. Some workers have access to more formal repositories meant exactly to provide content that can be licensed and re-used. The previous workers described how:

“The second tool I use is stock videos: we have subscriptions to services we can download from, but even though sometimes stock videos have saved our ass, they work only for very basic stuff, like when you need someone who smiles and looks into the camera.”

Yet video sharing platforms like YouTube or Vimeo remain the main source of content. Not only because they do not require video editors to pay a subscription fee, but also because of the ease with which the content hosted by digital platforms can be found, extracted, and remixed. This is crucial for a job that requires workers to rapidly churn out, often in twenty-four- or forty-eight-hour cycles, rip-o-matics that may last twenty seconds each and yet include clips from ten different pre-existing videos. Thus, the easy access to masses of content that video sharing platforms provide is highly valued by video editors who need to respond to industrial logics that require speed, break down processes into single tasks, and outsource these tasks to freelancers. Another interviewee captured the flexibility and speed afforded by the content found on video sharing platforms: “I download everything with a downloader, put it in a folder, then I already know which chunks I have to put in my timeline, and juggle them according to my needs.”

A crucial feature of this labor is how rip-o-matics made by reassembling clips from videos extracted from youTube or Vimeo are not made available for those platforms to capture the value generated downstream. On the contrary, rip-o-matics circulate and are valorized in different spheres. Digital platforms deeply influence the strategies, forms of creativity, and labor processes that define the cultural industries (Poell et al. 2022), including practices that are shaped by or even depend on platforms but are not necessarily datafied, algorithmically ranked, nor subject to automated management nor platform monetization. Rip-o-matic video production somehow parasites platforms in order to cut and paste chunks of content into new material: video editors thus rely on Vimeo and YouTube to extract samples they can repurpose into rip-o-matics, but the content they produce is not uploaded back on to these platforms.

If platforms can not commodify rip-o-matics, freelance video editors are also unable to appropriate the value they produce in the process. Rip-o-matics have a short lifespan and quickly escape a media worker’s control. In the words of a worker: “Obviously this is consumable material: once it has been presented to the client, its life cycle is over, or maybe it will be used as a blueprint” to shoot the final commercial, which is a different step in the division of labor of advertisement production and has nothing to do with the worker who provided the rip-o-matic. Power over the results of video editors’ work thus resides with the commissioning agency. This is partially due to production requirements. For instance, the brand that has commissioned the final commercial “wants control over the content, the look, the colors” of it, as put by an interviewee.

But besides these esthetic concerns, other issues are at stake. For instance, concerns about copyright infringement are somehow baked into the very nature of rip-o-matic clips. The extraction of many of the typically short clips used in rip-o-matics (often just seconds each) from copyright-protected work would probably fall into the category of fair use. Some clips may even amount to “de minimis” use, that is, the amount of material copied is so small that it does not require to be analyzed for copyright infringement if questioned in court. ³ Yet video editors feel that they can use content borrowed from pre-existing clips as long as the resulting product is used internally. Furthermore, the labor of rip-o-matic producers is regulated by specific intellectual property rights frameworks. Many forms of creative labor in Italy take place under a “cessione di diritti d’autore” framework, that is, a specific contract where a freelancer sells IP over a piece of content to the commissioning company, but retains the moral right to be recognized as the author. Rip-o-matics’ authors are instead invisibilized, given their liberal use of pre-existing content, but also because their output is used only internally and their contribution is often not mentioned in the final product. Thus, often there is simply no recognition for video makers as authors. These features of rip-o-matic production contribute to making the capture of value the sole prerogative of commissioning agencies, which will be able to protect with intellectual property rights the final commercial they shoot, and thus eventually sell or publish it. This way, advertising agencies appropriate the value produced by video editors that are made invisible by the very practice of rip-off. Unable to monetize their content through platforms and not owning intellectual property rights for it, rip-o-matic creators must rely on commissioned jobs. They provide, if not creativity, at least their craft as a service (Duffy et al. 2021).

Invisible Entrepreneurialism

As they spend sleepless nights cutting and pasting videos to create rip-o-matics, freelance creative workers experience a constant pressure to acquire new employment while retaining agency and autonomy (Salamon 2020). To achieve this goal, freelancers must deal with features such as the need to build the kind of public reputation that is crucial to acquiring and maintaining cultural and social capital in today’s creative industries. Indeed, the professional lives of creative workers are deeply shaped by the promise of exposure. Yet the production of rip-o-matics alienates from video editors not just the value of their labor, but also the main currency that defines their social capital: online public visibility. As put by one of our interviewees, “from that viewpoint, this content is a disgrace!” Indeed, the work-in-progress and internal nature of rip-o-matics, as well as their opportunistic and informal relation with copyright, generate obstacles to workers’ ability to showcase their work on digital platforms, thus limiting the extent to which they can build a quantifiable online reputation, one of the a key components of their self-entrepreneurialism (Gandini 2016).

In some cases, the reason for this is the rough and low-quality nature of rip-o-matics. For instance, a video editor told us that “one would never use rip-o-matics to show how good they are at montage,” and thus these objects “have never been part of the things we are happy to showcase.” Interestingly, this holds true even for workers whose income is mostly based on the production of rip-o-matics: video editors would rather showcase products that they fully control, for instance in terms of photography, narrative, or colors. Furthermore, these videos are often kept invisible due to the same concerns about copyright infringement that constraint workers’ ability to post them on social media platforms. Indeed, most interviewees thought that sharing rip-o-matics in public would be borderline illegal. In the words of a video editor:

“if I use stock databases, then I can take [the clip] and send it around without worrying about a password, otherwise I use protected links. The fact that I can’t share the thing I produce most often is a bit of an obstacle [. . .]. I sign [a contract] that says I own the rights of all I use but that’s not true.”

For other workers, the obstacle is rather the need to respect the production cycles of the final product, that is, the need to not spoil ideas or advertising campaigns before they are made public by the commissioning company. For instance, a video editor described this concern in these terms:

“I do have a Vimeo showcase with a few [rip-o-matics], but it is old stuff, because I can not show what I did last month or I would get myself in massive trouble. Maybe I make sure first, if it’s from last year, the commercial has already appeared on TV, then it’s OK isn’t it? [. . .] Otherwise I do not publish a reel nor do I send it to another agency.”

Since they feel that their work can not be made visible in public, video editors must rely on “grey” content, that is, atypical items that are not posted on publicly accessible websites. Among others, some academic workers use similar tactics to build social capital within a certain disciplinary community when they need to replace journal publications (Banks 2006). For instance, it is impossible to discern who is the main author in particle physics papers who list all the members of a massive collaboration in alphabetical order. Thus, particle physicists need to publish in other venues, such as conference proceedings or blogs, in order to make their own contributions visible, or must rely on reference letters and other opaque ways to demonstrate their employability (Delfanti 2016). Similarly, video editors who want to showcase the results of their labor of remix would share their portfolio of rip-o-matics through closed password-protected file sharing services, rather than through the personal websites most of all maintain. They must also rely on word-of-mouth communications, informal networks of contacts in the industry, and crucially, the intermediation of the small agencies they work for. Online platforms compel cultural laborers to be “hyper-visible” in various online contexts, and yet “their creative output is enabled by a sprawling network of laborers who are scarcely seen” (Poell et al. 2022, 117). The quote refers to invisible workers like content moderators or intermediaries, but rip-o-matic producers also fit in this category of invisible laborers that allows others to become hyper-visible. “You can promote yourself, but covertly,” as put by an interviewee.

Social Media and Fast Fashion

The industrialization and corporate appropriation of remix are not unique to rip-o-matics. On the contrary, the standardization and outsourcing of remix-based forms of content production is expanding to other areas. This takes place in a number of context-specific ways. Social media platform TikTok is the most obvious contemporary example. TikTok users rely on rip-off and remix techniques to create new cultural products characterized by pastiche and replication, for instance when they shoot a new video that is then juxtaposed to a pre-existing audio file. The very algorithms that select content on the website favor clips based on remix and citation. Yet only the labor of a select few is recognized, for instance through TikTok’s Creator Fund, which allows content creators to monetize their videos. Most users produce unpaid content with the hope of eventual pay off through sponsorships or monetization. In the meantime, the platform has become one of the most valuable social media companies, estimated at $50B in early 2023 (Barinka and Carville 2023). This phenomenon is not race-neutral, but rather in some cases participates in the continuation of a longer history of commodification of Black cultural labor. For instance, monetization logics increase the gap between the highest paid influencers and the ones who are censored for posting Black Lives Matter content (Shead 2020). Kam Kurosaki, a TikTok user who posted BLM videos from Los Angeles in the summer of 2020, noticed that their view counts went from “thousands if not hundreds of thousand of views to barely getting 1,000” (McCluskey 2020). This user was amongst many LGBTQ+, disabled, and racialized content creators on TikTok who have been shadowbanned for their content (Rauchberg 2022, 206).

Another example comes from the fast fashion industry. Calling out the theft of indie designers’ ideas by megabrands is a common genre for the popular Instagram account Diet Prada (over three million followers as of early 2023). Cultural appropriation is often at stake. In posts that appeared in 2022, for instance, Diet Prada called out Israeli brand Nili Lotan for a blouse shamelessly cloned from the traditional Palestinian thobe. Yet appropriation is a more general symptom of the uneven power relationships between indie brands and major fast fashion corporations. Among the dozens of possible examples is the case of Chinese behemoth Shein, which in 2022 was accused of cloning dozens of designs from Bailey Prado, an up-and-coming American Black designer. While fashion has always been derivative, new industrial logics based on the speedy production of numerous designs drive the explosion of the phenomenon documented by Diet Prada. The account itself explained that “Shein represents the newest wave of ultra fast fashion brands that have boomed as consumers seek out trendy new looks at ultra-low prices. They’re able to churn out as few as 100 units of a style in as little as 3 days, allowing them to test styles with their audience to see if they’ll be successful.” Fashion is a good example because it is widely based on forms of top-down appropriation that are outsourced to a specific class of workers. For instance, one could look at the photographers who “steal” pictures of people’s styles from the street and publish them in dedicated industry magazines that fashion designers use as sources of inspiration for their fast fashion collections. Novelty is generated from an existing set of esthetics that must be appropriated and rearranged.

Conclusions: The Labor of Remix

While remix practices differ depending on the context, from TV commercial production to fast fashion or social media content, they all participate in a remix culture rooted in the transformative nature of reappropriation and re-use. Russell (2018) called archiveology the engagement in the “afterlives of texts in critical and productive ways” (p. 33). The labor of remix is rooted in practices of archiveology, yet it is also enveloped in the logics of the media industry. Once the dominion of Black rappers and experimental filmmakers, the art of remix facilitated by the digital nature of today’s media content has become part of a mainstream lexicon adopted by media industries. Thus, while what we are witnessing today is historically bound to practices that display creative workers’ ability to bring to life “dead” materials in new multi-modal ways, the commodification and industrialization of this work indicate a broad co-option of rip-off culture. To understand these modes of production, we need to go beyond the creative process and focus on the material conditions under which the labor of remix takes place.

Meanwhile, the media industry is positioned to organize and control creators’ labor, as well as capture its value downstream. Within the production of rip-o-matics, like in other forms of industrialized remix culture, the imperative of creative production hinges on piracy, sampling and remix as chief sources of value and wealth that must be jealousy held to secure competitive advantage (Mueller 2019). An old tension is at play. As an autonomous form of bottom-up reappropriation, the social practice of rip-off has subversive potential. As an activity fostered and commodified by capital, it obscures the power of creative workers while securing their participation in value production within the contemporary digital media landscape. One could say that rip-off has been ripped-off.

The industrialization of remix labor also makes it vulnerable to being displaced by new computational tools. Since in rip-o-matic production the relation between creativity and standardization tends toward the latter, it is not unlikely that new services could provide the media industry with technologies to do away with the kind of routinary work now performed by workers. Some software tools are already in use. Two good examples of automation in this area came to prominence in 2023: both Synthesia and Runway Gen-2 are commercially available services that automate video production. They respond to a human prompt, browse online resources and databases to scrap pieces of pre-existing content, and reassemble or transform them into a new video. In the process, these and several other “AI” programs such as ChatGPT (for text) or Midjourney (for images) tend to hide the authors of the original content and favor the corporate privatization of the resulting product. These software systems may never fully replace human work, and the extent to which they will transform the labor of video editors remains to be seen. But rip-o-matics offer a compelling example of the ways industrialization processes, with their standardization, fragmentation, and corporate control, set up creative labor for automation. It is easy to imagine feeding a piece of software the very scripts that are now fed to rip-o-matic producers: she walks into a bar. . .

The interaction between automated content production and human labor has been studied in video games, where “procedural content generation” software has been used extensively for over a decade, for instance to produce levels, items, and landscapes (Shaker et al. 2016). In their research on the industry, Chia (2022) argues that the real danger of automation is not job loss per se, but the constitution of “an underclass of workers [. . .] whose creative work is deemed ‘manual’ and doomed to maintain and be managed by algorithms” (p. 402). Their analysis is rooted in a racial capitalism context that differs from the Italian case, but we can generalize the possibility that automation will entrench existing power differentials: without a renewed grassroots appropriation of remix, race, gender and class will continue to separate those who design prompts and judge the final results (the white male upper class art director) from those who work with automated tools to generate content under corporate command (the racialized precarious freelancer).

Automation aside, an analysis of the labor of remix already interrogates the fragility of authorship in our age. The industrialization and commodification of remix production, as well as its relation with online platforms and commissioning agencies, make media work invisible. The value generated by remix is ripped-off by corporate appropriation, thus increasing workers’ alienation from the results of their labor. The labor of remix may not necessarily announce Roland Barthes’ “death of the author,” but certainly blurs and conceals at least some authors within the division of labor that underpins contemporary media production.