That Video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dancing Actually Has a Lot to Do With Higher Ed

As an attempted gotcha, it was a flop. A video that circulated this week on Twitter, showing the newly minted U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop during her college days, was meant to be a black mark of some sort. Instead, most of the internet found it charming.

As a history lesson in miniature, though, the video was more revealing — a reminder of an era when video mash-ups not only ruled the earth (and college campuses), but also struck both wonks and cultural critics as a big deal.

Although the tweet that started it all (now deleted) claimed the video was a “high school” clip of Ocasio-Cortez, the video was actually produced by a center at Boston University while the New York Democrat was an undergraduate there.

According to a 2010 university news release, the video was the brainchild of Raúl Fernandez, assistant director of the Howard Thurman Center. At the time, a YouTube mash-up of famous dancing scenes from The Breakfast Club and some other Brat Pack movies with “Lisztomania,” a song by the French pop-rock band Phoenix, was ubiquitous.

Fernandez thought a university-made video, paying homage to the viral hit, would express institutional values like diversity and connection. So he asked a couple of students to run with the idea. With an assist from the university’s assistant dean of students, they found the perfect stage: the roof of the College of Arts and Sciences.

One Saturday about 20 students got up before dawn to film. “Most people didn’t understand why we had to gather so early,” said one of them, Julian Jensen, “but we shot them and immediately replayed the footage, and they saw how beautiful the light was.”

The beautiful light was augmented by some jokey touches that are at least halfway clever. Rhett, the university’s costumed terrier mascot, re-enacted a scene from Pretty in Pink, taking on the role of Jon Cryer serenading Molly Ringwald in a record store.

The video is goofy and earnest. That’s true now, and it was true back when it was created. But at the time, even the silliest viral phenomena could be seen as heady stuff. Digital technology had opened up new pathways for creating and disseminating derivative art and cultural commentary, while scholars and advocates argued that intellectual-property law hadn’t caught up to that new reality.

Perhaps the most eloquent spokesman for that view was Lawrence Lessig, the professor at Stanford and Harvard who had become an influential guru on technology, law, and culture. For years Lessig had championed what he called “read/write culture,” in which everyday people felt empowered to generate their own creative product, over “read-only culture,” in which hard-line enforcement of copyright and corporate control of the internet discouraged those people from doing so. “We need to celebrate (and support) the rebirth of a remix culture,” wrote Lessig in 2008, introducing Remix, his book-length statement of intent.

To Lessig, the Brat-Pack-meets-Phoenix craze was a demonstration of the fecundity of remix culture. One enterprising creator had thought to mash together a song from 2009 with film clips from the 1980s. A group of enterprising Brooklynites had then turned the concept into their own live-action video. Soon homages had proliferated across the globe — in Riga, in Nairobi, in Rio de Janeiro, and on a Boston University rooftop, where a future congresswoman tried on some of Ally Sheedy’s old moves. The professor incorporated scenes from some of those videos into an online presentation on fair-use doctrine, a much-invoked but erratically understood pillar of copyright law. (For the uninitiated: Fair-use doctrine allows for limited reproduction of copyrighted material in “transformative” cases, like commentary or parody.)

Parker Higgins was the longtime director of copyright activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital-rights advocacy group of which Lessig was once a board member. On Twitter, he picked up the story from there.

As Higgins recalls, Phoenix’s Australian record company, Liberation Music, sued Lessig for distributing “Lisztomania” in his lecture. Lessig, joining forces with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued back. His lecture on fair use had now turned into a lawsuit in which he asserted his own right to fair use.

Lessig’s settlement with the company amounted to a win for the professor. Liberation Music paid the scholar an undisclosed sum, and the record label adopted “new policies that respect fair use,” according to a foundation press release.

Lessig’s days as a copyright crusader are largely over; he’s moved on to fighting against corruption in American politics. In October he published an essay arguing that the Electoral College is itself a form of corruption — “a shadow of slavery’s power on America today that undermines our nation as a democratic republic.” Those words weren’t his own. He was approvingly quoting a rare national politician who had criticized the body. That politician’s name: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Brock Read is assistant managing editor at The Chronicle. He directs a team of editors and reporters who cover policy, research, labor, and academic trends, among other things. Follow him on Twitter @bhread, or drop him a line at brock.read@chronicle.com.

Andy Thomason is a senior editor at The Chronicle. Send him a tip at andy.thomason@chronicle.com. And follow him on Twitter @arthomason.