Is Everything a Remake?
At a Works in Progress event in San Francisco on October 2, Aria Schrecker gave a talk with the title: "You get what you pay for: why everything is a remake." Through a variety of empirical evidence she framed a puzzle that anyone who has scrolled a streaming menu lately has felt: Why is so much mass-market music, television, film, and fiction derivative of earlier music, television, film, and fiction? At least in part, she tied these phenomena to safetyism, or an increasingly widespread preference for the familiar over the risky.
In response I want to suggest that underneath the puzzle sits foundational questions about human progress. How does a civilization make cultural progress, in the broad humanist sense of becoming able to think, feel, and imagine things it couldn't before? The answer I suggest here is that progress depends on a balance most of us never learned to see — a balance between attractive forces that bring us into agreement and repulsive forces that keep us apart. Remakes are what that balance looks like at a global scale of communication.
The puzzle is manifest in the distribution
Let me begin with a claim that may sound contrarian to her perspective: culture as a whole has not become less original. What has changed is the shape of the distribution of what gets made and who sees it.
Over the past century, technology has pushed the marginal cost of communication toward zero. Radio, television, the internet, and social media each made it cheaper for one work to reach everyone at once. The result is a distribution that has stretched at both ends. At the top sits a small number of enormous commercial outliers, bigger than anything possible a hundred years ago. That is where the remakes, sequels, and franchise extensions live.
At the other end sits a far larger mass of work than existed before digital technology, made by more people than ever (albeit not evenly distributed across the globe), and much of it genuinely original. The typical work in that mass earns less than the typical work once did; the median success has fallen even as the peak has soared. And it is largely invisible through the old channels of bookstores, movie theaters, record stores, and primetime television, which were built to surface the top of the distribution, not the middle.
So it may be that the most relevant question isn't why we stopped making new things, but why the things everyone sees together have become so similar.
What a blockbuster actually sells
A blockbuster sells more than a story. It sells a shared reference. Its value is not only that I saw it, but that I know you saw it, and you know I saw it. Game theorists call this common knowledge: not just everyone knowing something, but everyone knowing that everyone knows. It is what makes a conversation at work possible, a meme legible, a joke land.
Common knowledge is expensive to create. It normally requires a public event that everyone witnesses at once. A familiar franchise is a shortcut: millions of people already know that millions of people know who Spider-Man is. A studio betting on a sequel isn't only avoiding risk. It is buying coordination at a discount.
Social networks intensify this. We learn what we want (at least in part) by watching what others want. When everyone can watch everyone else in real time, taste synchronizes. The incentive for anyone selling to the whole audience is to offer whatever the whole audience is already converging on.
Aria's title fits better than it first appears. We get what we pay for, and what the mass market increasingly pays for is synchronization.
Order is a choice, not the opposite of mess
To see why synchronization is double-edged, it helps to fix a common misunderstanding from high school science. We are taught that entropy means disorder and order means tidiness. That framing hides something important.
A better way to think about entropy is as the number of ways things could be that you can't tell apart. A liquid has high entropy, and it is also highly symmetric: it looks the same from every position and every angle. A crystal is "ordered" precisely because it has given up most of that symmetry. Its atoms have committed to particular positions out of countless equally possible arrangements. Order is what happens when a system picks one.
Every working system, physical or social, balances two pulls: the pull to commit to a shared structure and the pull to stay open to every possibility. Physicists write that balance as an equation for free energy, with temperature setting the exchange rate between them. Culture has its own version. With too little shared commitment, there is no tradition to build on, no common reference, no way to stand on each other's shoulders. With too much, everyone commits to the same thing, and the system freezes.
The watched pot
Physics has a striking demonstration of what too much synchronization does. In quantum mechanics, if you check a system often enough, it never changes. Each check snaps it back to where it started before it has a chance to evolve. Physicists call this the quantum Zeno effect, after the ancient paradox of the arrow that never reaches its target. It is the watched pot that never boils, made literally true.
An attention economy that measures, every second, what everyone else is watching behaves something like that. Every new work is checked instantly against the crowd's existing preferences. Anything that drifts too far from the consensus is pulled back before it can find its audience. Economists know a cousin of this as Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring what you cared about. Optimize for what is already popular, check constantly, and you get a culture that is very efficient at delivering what it has already delivered.
Order that makes room
If frozen order and pure chaos are both dead ends, what does the productive middle look like? Superconductors offer a surprisingly good picture.
A superconductor is a material in which electrons move in lockstep, carrying current with no resistance. The simplest kind is rigid: it expels magnetic fields completely, and when the field gets too strong, its order collapses all at once. A second kind behaves differently. It lets the field pass through in thin threads, tiny islands of ordinary, non-superconducting material scattered through the ordered whole. By tolerating these pockets of difference, it survives fields that would destroy the rigid kind. That is why the magnets in hospital MRI machines are built from it. In the high-temperature superconductors that still puzzle physicists, the strongest order appears near the boundary where competing kinds of order meet.
The lesson is that the most robust coherence accommodates its opposite. Healthy human institutions do this too. Courts publish dissents, so the losing argument stays on the record and can win later; many landmark rulings began as dissents. Science keeps minority hypotheses alive until evidence can decide. The economists Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast argued that the most successful societies sustain open competition in both politics and markets, each keeping the other from locking up. Progress lives at that edge: enough shared order to build on, enough preserved difference to build something new.
What AI changes
Artificial intelligence pushes the cost of producing and moving information even closer to zero. In my own field, patent law, AI agents can already search the world's inventions and draft detailed legal analysis in minutes. What stays hard is getting two parties to agree on what a document means. When arguments are free, agreement becomes the scarce thing.
Culture is heading the same way, and that cuts in two directions. AI could become the ultimate remake machine: trained mostly on the top of the distribution, regenerating it endlessly, tightening the synchronization that already flattens mass taste. Or it could become a discovery engine: an agent for each of us that wanders the vast, original middle of the distribution and brings back what the old gatekeepers never would, matched to our particular, divergent tastes.
Which future we get is not a technical question. It depends on what we ask these systems to optimize. Tuned for engagement with what is already popular, they will freeze the pot. Tuned to help people find and share what is genuinely new to them, they could be the most powerful tool for preserving cultural divergence ever built.
Progress at the edge
Remakes aren't the disease. They are a symptom of a culture that has become extraordinarily good at synchronizing and has not yet become equally good at preserving difference. We built machines for getting everyone to know that everyone knows. We have not yet built the matching machines for keeping the odd, the minority, and the not-yet-popular alive and findable.
Cultural progress, in the expansive humanist sense, has never meant everyone converging on the right answer. It has meant holding enough in common that we can understand and build on one another, while maintaining enough divergence that there is always something new to build. The dissent, the strange novel, the band with forty listeners: these are the threads of difference that keep the whole fabric from freezing.