Remix Will Kill the Copy, Not the Creator

Here’s a number that tells you where the internet is headed.

In July 2026, the music streaming service Deezer announced that more than half of the new tracks uploaded to its platform each day are now fully generated by AI.

That’s about 90,000 tracks a day. Those tracks make up just 1 to 3% of what people actually stream. And Deezer says up to 85% of the streams AI tracks got in 2025 were fraudulent.

Read that again. Half the supply.

A sliver of the listening. And much of that sliver is fake.

That gap is what this piece is about.

Two ideas belong together here. The first is that large language models are really large remix models: they take an enormous amount of previous work and remix it into something net new.

The second is that money pre-packages belief, an idea I flagged in Part 10. Put side by side, I think they explain what happens to value after abundance.

Here’s my claim: remix will kill the value of the copy, not the value of the creator. Scarcity doesn’t vanish when AI can reproduce anything.

It moves, from the artifact to the source: the person, their attention, the trust they’ve earned, and the chain of who made what.

If we build the plumbing to follow value there, creators come out fine. If we don’t, the money follows whoever owns the remix machine.

Everything is a package of belief

Let’s start with money.

Here’s how I’d put it. Money is make-believe. It’s an abstraction, a way to convey value.

It pre-packages belief as value: a dollar is belief in a country, its citizens, and its companies, all in a single currency. A share of stock pre-packages belief in a company, its leaders, its employees, and its products.

I’m not the first to notice this.

In The Philosophy of Money (1900), the German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that money runs on trust. The security you feel holding money is, in his words, a form of “confidence in the socio-political organization and order.”

He even saw a “further element of socio-psychological quasi-religious faith” in it. (Both lines come from the 1990 English edition, as quoted in Guido Möllering’s 2001 study of Simmel’s theory of trust.)

More than a century later, Yuval Noah Harari made the idea famous in Sapiens (published in Hebrew in 2011, and in English in 2014).

His argument is that humans rule the world because we can believe in things that exist only in our shared imagination, like gods, states and money. His own summary of the book calls money “the most pluralistic system of mutual trust ever devised.”

So a dollar is a wrapper. Inside it is belief in a country, its people and its companies. The wrapper lets that belief travel from my hand to yours, without either of us having to audit the United States first.

Here’s the thing: media is a package too.

A video packages an idea. It also packages the person sharing it: their face, their voice, their taste, their track record, and the fact that they thought this was worth your time. When you share a video, you’re passing along belief in both.

That’s why, right now, the most valuable positional goods online are video and the ideas of individuals. Not the files themselves. The position: being the person whose take everyone is watching.

Positional goods, briefly

In 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen coined “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class. His observation was that the rich didn’t just consume.

They consumed where others could see it: “Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.” Status came from display.

In 1976, the economist Fred Hirsch took the next step in Social Limits to Growth.

He described a positional economy of goods, jobs and social relationships that are “scarce in some absolute or socially imposed sense” or that get crowded as more people use them (as quoted by his son Donald Hirsch, from page 27 of the book).

His most famous example was a secluded beach. A few tourists can enjoy it.

If everyone tries, the thing they came for is gone. Or, as Hirsch put it: “what each of us can achieve, all cannot.”

Sound familiar? Beachfront is the first item on my own list of things that stay scarce.

The key, as a 2025 paper in Economics & Philosophy by Jens Jørund Tyssedal argues, is supply that’s fixed or close to it. Online, the fixed thing is attention.

Anyone can post. Not everyone can be watched. The front page, the top of the feed and the trending tab are the secluded beaches of the internet.

Remix unwraps every package

Remix AI changes one thing, and it’s a big one.

The moment an idea is shared, it can be unwrapped and rewrapped. Your video’s argument, in someone else’s voice.

Your essay’s structure, in someone else’s style. Your melody, in a thousand variations by morning.

Thomas Jefferson saw half of this coming in 1813. In his letter to Isaac McPherson, he wrote: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Jefferson was talking about ideas. The particular expression of an idea, like a specific song, painting or performance, used to be different. Copying it took work.

Not anymore.

Walter Benjamin described the first round of this in ”The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” drafted in 1935 and first published in 1936. Even a perfect reproduction, he wrote, lacks the original’s presence: “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

He called what gets lost the aura. Photography and film did that to paintings. Remix AI does it to everything posted online.

And in 2008, Kevin Kelly drew the economic conclusion in ”Better Than Free”: “When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.”

So remix AI commodifies an idea the moment it’s shared. The positional value of any one copy collapses as copies become abundant.

That’s the doom version. If the copy was the thing you were selling, you’re in trouble.

But look back at the Deezer numbers. The copies flooded in.

The listening didn’t follow them. Something else is still scarce.

Scarcity doesn’t vanish. It moves.

In 1971, the economist and computer scientist Herbert Simon put his finger on it in an essay called ”Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.”

Information consumes something, he wrote, and what it consumes is the attention of the people receiving it. “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

In 1997, Michael Goldhaber gave it a name in Wired‘s ”Attention Shoppers!”: the attention economy.

I made the same point from a different direction in Part 3: Point the Machines at What’s Scarce, when I sorted the reasons things are scarce: “There is also scarcity by human nature: beachfront property, original art, the attention of one particular person. No amount of labor fixes the demand for those kinds of things, which is why money, or something like it, will likely still be needed to coordinate demand around those.”

Remix AI doesn’t touch that list. If anything, it makes the last item more valuable. The more copies there are, the more it matters who’s actually behind one.

So where does scarcity go? I count four places.

1. The person. Benjamin’s aura doesn’t disappear. It moves from the object to the human: the concert, the live talk, the chair someone built with their own hands.
2. Their attention. Everyone has the same 24 hours. A reply, a critique, or a lesson from one particular master can’t be generated, because the whole point is that they gave it.
3. Trust. Kelly again: “Trust cannot be copied.” It has to be earned over time. He listed eight “generatives” that can’t be copied: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability. Every one of them lives with the source, not the file.
4. Provenance. Who made what, from what. Even in 1935, Benjamin noted that an original’s authenticity rests on a history that “must be traced from the situation of the original.” That’s a provenance chain.

Put differently: copies are a flow. A person’s attention is a stock. And the rule from Part 9 applies here too: be abundant in flows, conserve the stocks.

Pay the chain

This is why paying every remix’s sources matters so much.

If value lives at the source, money has to be able to get back to the source. Otherwise remix AI does what every extraction business does: it takes value from the people who make things and hands it to the people who own the machine.

I’d build that from three pieces:

• Provenance by default, so every remix carries a record of what it came from.
• A standard remix license with a set rate, so anyone can remix without asking permission, as long as they pay.
• Collecting bodies, run by guilds, that pool what remixers and models owe and pay it out along the chain.

None of this has to be invented from scratch. In Part 7: We’re Less Than a Decade From the Next Economic System, I argued that every economic transition adopts prototypes that were already lying around. Here are the ones for remix.

The player piano license (1909)

The player piano was the scary new copying machine of its day. In 1908, the Supreme Court ruled that piano rolls weren’t “copies” under copyright law. Congress responded in 1909 with something clever.

According to the Register of Copyrights, Congress was worried that the right to make mechanical reproductions “might become a monopoly controlled by a single company.”

So instead of an exclusive right, it created the first compulsory license: anyone could make a mechanical reproduction of a song, without permission, for two cents per copy.

That license still exists, as 17 U.S.C. §115. Rates are now set by the Copyright Royalty Judges and are “binding on all copyright owners.” For physical copies and downloads, the rate is 13.1 cents per song in 2026.

Two lessons. First, the license has a limit: an arrangement under the license “shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work.”

A remix license would have to go further than any license we have today. Second, the original two-cent rate stayed frozen from 1909 until 1978. Whatever rate we set for remixing has to move with the world.

Collecting societies (1914 onward)

For uses too scattered to track one by one, like a song playing in thousands of bars, songwriters built ASCAP in 1914.

It sells blanket licenses and divides the money among its members. In 2025, ASCAP collected a record $1.945 billion and distributed $1.759 billion to more than 1.1 million members.

Content ID (2007)

YouTube’s Content ID scans every upload against files submitted by rights holders. When it finds a match, the owner can block the video, track it, or monetize it.

In 2025, Content ID processed 2.5 billion claims, and rights holders chose to monetize more than 90% of them instead of taking them down. Through December 2024, Content ID had paid out more than $12 billion to rights holders.

When you give owners a choice between a takedown and a cut, they take the cut. That’s the remix economy, already running.

The catch: only 7,626 rights holders are approved to use the system, according to YouTube’s transparency report. Content ID is provenance for the few. The world we want needs provenance for everyone.

Content Credentials

The C2PA standard, also called Content Credentials, attaches a signed record of where a piece of media came from. It even handles remixes.

When a work is built from other works, the C2PA explainer says each “ingredient” is recorded, creating “a tree of provenance, much like a family tree.”

A family tree of every remix is exactly the map a payout system needs.

The first collective AI license (2025)

And someone has already started on the hard part. In September 2025, Sweden’s music rights society STIM, which represents more than 100,000 songwriters, signed what it called the world’s first collective AI music licence.

AI companies can train on its members’ music, with royalties flowing back from both training and outputs. The license requires third-party attribution technology that, STIM says, traces each output back to the human works that influenced it.

It’s small and early. But it’s a collecting society paying the chain, today.

Why guilds

In Part 4: Quests Should Replace Corporations, I wrote that “Guilds would focus on documenting and preserving the form and function of their craft for teaching other humans, and also for teaching machines.”

Follow that to its conclusion: if a guild is already teaching the machines, it should also be collecting what the machines owe.

History also gives us a warning. In ASCAP’s early years, composers who couldn’t read and write musical notation were ineligible to join.

In 1939, broadcasters founded BMI as a cheaper alternative, and BMI went on to represent blues, R&B, country and eventually rock and roll writers that ASCAP had passed over.

A collecting society that guards its doors becomes a cartel. That’s why the guild charter I proposed in Part 4 includes open admission. Anyone who makes something should be able to join the chain.

Money for the scarce, status for everything else

So what’s money still for?

In Part 6: UBI Won’t Work. Universal Basic Goods Will., I wrote that “some form of money will likely persist for the remaining scarce things (since there will always be some scarcity), while the basic necessities become free.”

That’s the beachfront, the original painting, and the attention of one particular person: an hour with a mentor, a portrait sitting with a specific painter, a seat in a small room with someone you admire.

Those are scarce by nature, and money is a decent way to coordinate demand for them.

But status doesn’t need money. It only needed money because the things people competed over were scarce.

Veblen showed that status came from display. Hirsch showed why that competition never ends: the prizes were fixed in supply.

The fix isn’t to abolish status. It’s to move status onto things that aren’t fixed.

Video games figured this out a long time ago. When Microsoft launched Gamerscore with the Xbox 360 in 2005, it created a public record of achievements that players chase for recognition.

My achievement doesn’t take yours. A million people can finish the same raid and all be proud of it.

The internet already runs on game mechanics: likes, follower counts, star ratings, and two-way scoring, where drivers rate riders and riders rate drivers.

In the world we want, status flows through three non-rival things:

• Craft mastery. A guild can have a thousand masters. Mastery isn’t a ladder with one rung at the top.
• Finished quests. A party that completes its quest has done something real, and nobody else had to lose for it to happen.
• Reputation. Like trust, it’s earned over time and can’t be copied.

Veblen’s leisure class showed off what they could waste. The world we want shows off what you made, what you learned and what you finished.

Objections

Won’t AI slop make everything worthless?

It’ll make copies worthless. That’s different.

Look at Deezer again: half the uploads, 1 to 3% of the streams. Slop is the best advertisement sources have ever had. When anything can be faked, the question that matters becomes “who made this, and can I trust them?”

Platforms are already acting on that. Deezer has said it will keep fully AI-generated music out of its algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists.

Kelly called this findability: when everything is free, the work of sorting it becomes valuable. That’s a craft too. I’d expect guilds of curators.

Isn’t luxury just going to get more extreme?

Probably, at the very top. Hirsch argued that richer societies fight harder over positional goods, not less, and I don’t think abundance repeals that.

But two things change. First, the floor. When losing a status race no longer costs you your home or your healthcare, the stakes drop from survival to pride.

Second, the tax base. As I wrote in Part 18: Every Spending Bill Should Show Up on Your Paycheck, “What’s left is a small tax base on whatever stays scarce: land, luxury goods, and positional goods.” If people want to compete over beachfront, the beachfront can help pay for the floor.

Can provenance survive remixing?

Partly. Here’s where it breaks.

The C2PA’s own explainer asks, “Can the provenance metadata be removed?” and answers, “Yes it can.”

Its fix is to pair the signed record with watermarks and fingerprints, so the record can be found again after it’s stripped. Content ID already matches the media itself, not its labels.

Model-level remixing is harder. When a model writes a paragraph, there’s usually no single source to point to. That’s exactly why music invented blanket licenses: when you can’t trace every thread, you pay into a pool and distribute it by the best evidence you have.

Even simple matching is hard.

When the Mechanical Licensing Collective, a nonprofit created by the Music Modernization Act of 2018, opened in 2021, streaming services handed it more than $424 million in “black box” royalties they’d never been able to match to songwriters.

So provenance won’t be perfect. Neither are ASCAP’s distributions. It has to be good enough, open to audit, and improving every year.

Won’t this just pay the people who are already famous?

That’s the real risk. Today’s systems mostly serve big catalogs: remember, only 7,626 rights holders can use Content ID.

Three things push the other way. Provenance on by default, for everyone, not just approved partners. Open admission to guilds, so nobody is locked out of the chain.

And the floor, so nobody depends on royalties to eat. In the world we want, getting remixed is a bonus, not your rent.

Didn’t Jefferson say ideas can’t be property?

He did, and I agree with him.

In the same letter, he wrote that society can grant rights to the profits from an idea, but “this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society.”

That’s my whole position. Don’t fence the idea. Pay the person.

A compulsory remix license does exactly that: anyone can remix anything, and everyone in the chain gets paid.

The creator was never the copy

Every new way of copying has caused this panic.

The player piano did, and Congress answered with a two-cent license instead of a ban. Photography and film did, and Benjamin wrote about the aura. The internet did, and Kelly wrote about the things that are better than free.

Each time, the copy got cheaper, and the source got more interesting.

Remix AI is the end of that line. Copies now cost nothing.

So the question isn’t whether creators survive. It’s whether the money can find them.

Build the chain. Pay the chain. Let the copy be free.

The creator was never the copy.

And the attention of one particular person includes yours. Who guards it, and who owns the machine that does the guarding, is where I’m headed next, in Part 12: Your First Party Member Should Be an AI You Own.