In early 2001, in press releases and ads, Apple encouraged its customers to Rip. Mix. Burn. their music on an iMac.

It was an audacious advertising campaign given that the recording industry was in the midst of grappling with the rampaging growth of digitally copied media via Napster, LimeWire, and others. The Mac would soon leverage its position as a media hub with the release of the iPod later that same year. The process of assembling a “mix tape” of songs for a friend would never be the same again… although that process has since disappeared completely. Because everybody just streams now.

This post isn’t about that, though.

If taking prerecorded media and putting it together into a custom mix was the “old creativity,” it didn’t take much in the way of actual… you know, creativity. Assembling and ordering someone else’s music is fine, but… it’s a stretch to call it creative.

Welcome to the new creative. “Rip. Mix. Burn.” has evolved.

Fork. Commit. Push.

That’s right, I’m talking about using GitHub to fork a project, make changes that you commit to your fork, and then push those changes back to the master. If you know about GitHub, this all makes perfect sense, and is absolutely reflective of a creative process happening.

And if you don’t know about GitHub? Well… you need to get on it!

More to come…