Remix as Growth

Definition

Remix as growth is Kelly's claim, borrowed from economist Paul Romer and technology theorist Brian Arthur, that "real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new resources but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable." Applied to technology, "all new technologies derive from a combination of existing technologies" — and because the number of possible combinations of existing elements grows combinatorially, the supply of possible new inventions and media forms is effectively unlimited even without any new raw material.

In the Book

The "Remixing" chapter traces this mechanism through digital media specifically: because digital bits are "supremely fungible," older forms (the newspaper article, the 30-minute sitcom, the 4-minute pop song) get unbundled into their component elements and recombined into new genres — the web listicle, the tweet storm, six-second Vine loops, fan fiction built on top of a bestselling author's characters (one archive lists 1.5 million fan-created works). Kelly's point is that each new genre becomes raw material for the next round of remixing, so "the more new genres, the more possible newer ones can be remixed from them," producing exponential growth in the variety of cultural forms available, not linear growth.

Why It Matters

Remix as growth reframes where to look for new value: not toward undiscovered inputs, but toward unexploited combinations of inputs that already exist and are already cheap to access. It also predicts a compounding dynamic — every successful remix becomes a new primitive that can itself be remixed — which explains why innovation in mature fields tends to accelerate rather than plateau once the base of combinable components (technologies, genres, APIs, ideas) grows large enough, and why openness to recombination (permissive licensing, modularity, interoperability) is itself a growth strategy.