Perhaps the recently erected Twitter glossary, designed to explain things like “retweet” and “favorite” to bewildered new users, is indeed helpful to someone (dads?). But to whatever extent it is a guide to what Twitter is, it’s also a glass-and-steel-condo-like monument to what the Internet was, when some words meant other things, like “favorite,” which was (n) a thing you liked more than any other thing, not (n) a hollow unit of social currency or (v) a thing that one does to remind another human that his or her life has some value to you that is greater than absolutely nothing.

Let’s look at how some other words have changed over the last ten years, like one of those always mesmerizing gritty-and-authentic-then-but-clean-and-gross-now slideshows.

Hashtag, Urban Dictionary, 2010:

A hashtag is a stupid thing people put in front of random words for no reason. It is just the pound sign you can find it on social networks like Facebook or Twitter. It is just another 21st century made up thing. A hashtag is, #Beautiful #Urbandictionary”

Hashtag, Twitter, 2014:

The # symbol is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users.

FF, Urban Dictionary, 2004:

FF means many things, some already said, I might (most likely will) repeat.

#1. Fist fucking- the act of stuffing a fist up a pussy *owch*

#2. Foot fucking- a type of masturbation that women do to their male partners dick.

#3. Final fantasy- a game played by geeks, such as my boyfriend, that I should probably learn to play.

#4. Fan Fiction- a type of writing that uses already made characters from books and movies and such that have sex, also called slash… gay LOTR ones at www.libraryofmoria.com.

#5. Father fucker- a person who likes to fuck their dad/friend’s dad.

#6. Fucking freak- … me…

FF, Twitter, 2014:

#FF stands for “Follow Friday.” Twitter users often suggest who others should follow on Fridays by tweeting with the hashtag #FF.

@, Urban Dictionary, 2007:

A symbol standing for the word “at” that in turn symbolizes lazyness and stupidity. I mean, seriously, who sat down and thought up a symbol to shorten a two letter word? WHY? Your time could be better spent counting blades of grass in your front lawn. At least that might teach the retarded bastard to count! If you now anyone that abbreviates the word “at” as “@”, cease all conversations with said person, as their retardedness may rub off on you.

@, Twitter, 2014:

The @ sign is used to call out usernames in Tweets, like this: Hello @Twitter! When a username is preceded by the @ sign, it becomes a link to a Twitter profile. See also Replies and Mentions. Read more about replies and mentions.

Bio, Urban Dictionary, 2005

Used in many MMORPG’s to indicate that you will be away to go to the restroom.

Dude1 “Hey dude, sorry, but I need to take a bio break because it feels as if I have a turtle-head poking out.”

Dude2 “Dude, please, just say your going bio. I don’t want a picture dude.”

Bio, Twitter, 2014:

A short personal description of 160 characters or fewer used to define who you are on Twitter. Read about how to change your bio.

Twitter, Urban Dictionary, 2009:

The gap between a womans TWAT and SHITTER. The female equivelent of the BARSE. NO MANS LAND.

I licked her TWITTER.

Twitter, Twitter, 2014:

An information network made up of 140-character messages from all over the world. Sign up!

Photo by j-No

Who Really Owns The Internet?

by David Burr Gerrard

Why are a tiny handful of people making so much money off of material produced for nothing or next-to-nothing by so many others? Why do we make it so easy for Internet moguls to avoid stepping on to what one called “the treadmill of paying for content”? Who owns the Internet?

The People’s Platform, by Astra Taylor, was published this week. You can buy it wherever capitalism allows you to obtain books:

• Metropolitan Books

• McNally Jackson

• Amazon / Kindle

• Powell’s

Previously in this interview series:

A conversation with Matt Taibbi and Molly Crabapple.

Discussing the labor of sex work with Melissa Gira Grant.

Returning to Marxism with Ben Kunkel.

In her excellent new book The People’s Platform, Astra Taylor thinks through issues of money and power in the age of the Internet with clarity, nuance, and wit. (The book is fun to read, even as it terrifies you about the future of culture and of the economy.) She brings to bear her estimable experience as a documentary filmmaker — she is the director of two engaging films about philosophy, Zizek! And Examined Life — as well as a publisher and musician. For the past several months, she has been on the road performing with the reunion tour of Neutral Milk Hotel (she is married to the band’s lead singer, Jeff Magnum). We spoke over coffee on the Lower East Side during a brief break from her tour.

Can we solve the issues that you talk about without radically reorganizing the economy?

No. (Laughs) Which I think is why I’ve been so active. I’ve been thinking about this in connection with all these writers who are coming up who found each other through Occupy, and why all of us were willing to participate in that uprising despite all the problems and the occasional ridiculousness of it.

But the economy can be revolutionized or the economy can be reformed, and I don’t discount the latter option. That level of social change happens in unpredictable ways. It’s actually harder to think of a revolutionary event that has had a positive outcome, whereas there have been lots of reforms and lots of things that people have done on the edges that have had powerful consequences. Would I like to see an economic revolution? Definitely. But I think there are a lot of ways to insert a kind of friction into the system that can be beneficial.

This book is about economics, and the amazing, probably very American ability to not talk about economics — particularly with technology, which is supposed to be this magical realm, so pure and disruptive and unpredictable that it transcends economic conditions and constraints. The basic idea is that that’s not the case.

To a lot of people this is self-evident, but I was surprised at how outside the mainstream conversation that insight was. When money is brought up, there’s this incredible romanticism, like the Yochai Benkler quote about being motivated by things other than money. But we’re talking about platforms that go to Goldman Sachs to handle their IPOs. Money is here. Wake up!

The people at the top are making money.

In that conversation about creativity and work, there’s so much ire directed at cultural elites. And rightly so. Newspapers suck. They’re not doing the job that they could do for us. Book publishers publish crap. Cultural elites deserve criticism. The punching bags of this Web 2.0 conversation all deserve it. But when we let the economic elites off the hook, that’s feeding into the tradition of right-wing populism. Ultimately, the guys getting rich behind the curtain aren’t being treated as the real enemies.

You mention that when you wrote to people who posted your films online, you either received no response or a very angry response.

One thing I took away from that experience is that it’s almost as though people really believe that the Internet is a library. “I should be able to watch on YouTube a full-length film about philosophy. It’s a library, it should be full of edifying, enlightening things!

My response was that I spent two years making this film, and I want a window — I didn’t ask them to take it down forever, I asked for a grace period of I think two months. Conceptually, we’re not grasping the fact that even though there are private platforms that increase our access to things, first those things have to exist. How have we not thought through how these products are funded?

I empathized with the person on the other end, who wanted these films. I made them because I hoped that people would want them. But I can’t invest another two years of my life in an esoteric and expensive production if all I can do is put it on YouTube and pray that it goes viral.

And even if it goes viral, you might not make any money from it.

Right. The whole model doesn’t work in that context. And I can see both sides. Especially on the copyright issue. As a documentary filmmaker, you’re so dependent on gleaning from the world, gleaning from other people’s creations. You’re not always the author of the words on the screen. I don’t want some closed, locked-down scenario where every utterance is closed and monitored by algorithms who have no ethical imperatives and have no nuance and who don’t understand fair use.

Another person I’ve talked to for this series is Benjamin Kunkel, who said his introduction to Marxist theory is already a bit antiquated because of Jesse Myerson’s Rolling Stone article, which recommends, among other things, a universal basic income. As I was reading your book, I was thinking about how a universal basic income might help.

I actually mention universal income in passing, in the chapter that looks at the enthusiasm for amateurism that was actually a bit more prominent a few years ago, when I started writing. “We finally have a platform that allows non-professionals to participate!There were things in that conversation that were so reminiscent of utopian predictions from centuries past about how machines would free us to live the life of a poet. “We’ll only work four hours a day.Why didn’t those visions come to pass? Because those machines were not harnessed by the people. They were harnessed by the ruling elite.

I was struck by how ours is a diminished utopianism. It wasn’t that we would use these machines to free us from labor; it was that now in our stolen minutes after work we can go online and be on social media. How did it come to this, that’s that all we can hope for? And the answer is in how the economy has been reshaped by neoliberalism or whatever you want to call it over the last few decades.

The idea of labor-saving devices has been around. Oscar Wilde, Keynes. But it was pretty common in the 1960s, when there was a robust social safety net. So I think you’re exactly right, that we need something in the public-policy and social sphere, not the technological sphere, to address these issues.

It’s great that people are talking about a universal income, at least in our little tiny circles. You step outside bubble of the young intellectual left of New York, and people will say: What the fuck are you talking about?

We think this idea is getting traction, but it’s because we all follow each other online and we’re all reading the same magazines. Not everyone is reading Kathi Weeks or Ben Kunkel in their free time. I don’t agree with Ben that his book is out of date because of that one article in Rolling Stone. We need to keep harping on these basic concepts.

I think it’s a ripe time for it, considering recent research into the employment prospects for millenials. College indebtedness is insane right now. That’s why I got involved with StrikeDebt. When the economy is forcing you to separate the romantic idea of what you consider your calling from what you have to do for money since there are no fucking jobs that have anything to do with your degree, you start to think that maybe a universal income might make a lot of sense.

If the economy won’t support you to do what you love for a living, you’re already halfway there.

Can you talk about Occupy and how you got involved?

I was working on this book before Occupy, and the tech realm was where a lot of our political hopes were being invested. If you think back, there wasn’t a vibrant protest movement in the US. Instead, there was this idea of democracy through social media, and technologically-enabled protests abroad. That might account a bit for why I gravitated towards this subject.

Then Occupy happened. If anything, it distracted me from The People’s Platform. I wound up putting out five issues of the Occupy Gazette with n+1. Then I got roped into, or rather I roped myself into, this offshoot of Occupy called StrikeDebt that has been doing the Rolling Jubilee campaign.

But my work with the Occupy campaign suffused my analysis more and more. Calling attention to the economic elite fits very well into Occupy’s idea of the ninety-nine percent and the one percent. The amount of value being hoarded by these companies is just mind-boggling.

So these projects did go in tandem. Both of them are thinking about power today. In this book, I was trying to think through how power operates in the technological sphere generally, but particularly in relationship to media. So no longer are you just watching what’s been chosen for you on television. Now you’re supposed to be the agent of your own destiny, clicking around. But there’s still power; there’s still money.

People will say, “How can you criticize these technological tools that helped people overthrow dictators?We constantly use this framework of the people against the authoritarian dictator. There was a lot of buzz about how social media empowered the protests in the Middle East which mostly turned out to be false. But what about the US? There’s no dictator. There’s a far more complicated power dynamic. The challenge of our generation is how you build economic association and aggregate economic power when you’re not going to be doing conventional workplace organizing, because there are no jobs, let alone stable, long-term jobs.

So, this is depressing. Could you talk about solutions?

The solutions aren’t that radical: The library model that we project on to the Internet but that doesn’t quite fit — we can invent something analogous to it. There are lots of cool things we could be doing. But we’re locked into this model that’s really stupid and inefficient: the advertising model. That’s the most ridiculous way to create these services and platforms. The advertising model is commonsensical because it’s common, but it’s not sensical.

What would socialized social media — and non-social media — look like?

Ben Kunkel has an essay where he talks a bit about this. But first, we have to get away from the idea that the government is the bad guy. One thing that we’ve learned in the wake of the NSA scandals is that the public and private sectors are really intertwined; government surveillance piggybacks off of corporate surveillance. It might be less technological and more about funding things for their own sake. If you look at countries with robust cultural policies, under the broadcast model a lot of them instate quotas. There would be a lot of protectionist regulations, and they would invest in their own work.

Quotas are complicated, obviously. But you can look to the model of public broadcasting. Public broadcasting wasn’t a government propaganda machine. Liberals and conservatives both worry that this would create something bland. But when public broadcasting came under fire, it was usually for being too edgy and provocative. There are mechanisms that you can introduce to prevent whatever visions of sad iron-curtain art you have in your head.

One thing that comes up a lot in some liberal critiques of Edward Snowden is that he might be a libertarian.

I don’t know Snowden, so I can’t comment on him. But I think that a lot of us are libertarians. Libertarianism is the default ideology of our day because there’s something deeply appealing about the idea of free agents — people on their own in charge of their own destinies. That has to do with the retreat of institutions from our lives, which results in an inability to imagine a positive role for them to play. We’re still dependent on institutions; we just don’t recognize it or give them much credit.

This ubiquitous libertarianism, particularly in tech circles, was a major target of my book. All of these things you want these tools to bring about — an egalitarian sphere, a sphere where the best could rise to the top, one that is not dominated by old Goliaths — within the libertarian framework, you’ll never get there. You have to have a more productive economic critique.

But I also think that if you’re on the left, you need to recognize what’s appealing about libertarianism. It’s the emphasis on freedom. We need to articulate a left politics that has freedom at its center. We can’t be afraid of freedom or individuality, and we need to challenge the idea that equality and freedom are somehow contradictions.

At the same time, even on the radical left, there’s a knee-jerk suspicion of institutions. When we criticize institutions that serve as buffers or bastions against market forces, the right wins out more. It’s a complicated thing.

When I defend institutions in this book, I knew I might provoke my more radical friends. The position that everything is corrupt — journalism is corrupt, educational institutions are corrupt, publishers are corrupt — sounds great. And on some level it’s true. They’ve disappointed us. But we need more and better — more robust, more accountable — institutions. So I tried to move out of the position of just criticizing those arrangements and enumerating all their flaws and all the ways they’ve failed us. What happens when we’ve burned all these institutions to the ground and it’s just us and Google?

One of my favorite aspects of your book is your emphasis on the physical aspects of the Internet. It reminded me of the scene in Examined Life where Zizek is standing on the garbage heap, talking about how material stuff disappears.

That image we have of the Internet as weightless — it’s so high-tech it doesn’t really exist! — is part of why we misunderstand it. There are some people doing good work around this, people like Andrew Blum, who wrote the book Tubes, asking what the Internet is. There’s infrastructure. It’s immense, and it’s of great consequence, especially as more and more of our lives move online. The materiality is really important to keep in mind.

We’re moving to a place where we have a better of grasp of this. People are finally realizing that the online and the offline are not separate realms. It’s not really like I have my online life where I’m pretending to be a 65-year-old man in a chat room, and then I’m Astra at the coffee shop. Those identities are as complicated and as coherent as any human identity has ever been. That can extend towards thinking about objects.

The other night I was re-reading Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers — the sort of book that makes you feel like you’re just reheated whatever, and that this person did it so much better the first time around. He outlines planned obsolescence, stuff made to break. It’s so relevant to our gadgets, our technology. He wrote it in 1960, at that moment where the economy had been saturated, so everybody had their fridge and their car. So how do you keep GDP going up? It’s actually patriotic to make things that break.

You talk about Steve Jobs in that context.

Steve Jobs is the ultimate incarnation of that plan. You have to have a new iPod every year. But he presented himself as this artist-craftsman who would never sacrifice quality. That’s such a lie.

You talk about how both sides of the Internet debate, if you will, see a radical break with the past, whereas you see more continuity.

I think that that’s crucial to understanding where we’re at. This standard assumption that there would be a massive transformation blocked us from seeing the obvious outcomes and set us back in terms of having a grasp on our current condition. If we had gone into it with a bit more realism, more respect for the power of the market, less faith in technology’s ability to transcend it, we’d be better off.

Could you say more about respect for the power of the market?

You don’t want to be too deterministic, I suppose, but the market drives the development of these tools. Especially once you’ve gone public and you’re beholden to your shareholders.

There’s confusion because we’ve been here before with the first tech boom. One thing that got me thinking about this — and that confused me — was that I came to New York right at the tail end of that. I didn’t work for a startup or anything like that, but I had friends who did, friends who were fired. I followed what was happening in the Bay Area, they lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. You think: okay, we learned from that. We learned that because of the way the market sought investments, they propped up some really stupid ideas, there was a bubble, and it burst. What’s amazing to me is that fifteen years later, the same commentators are suddenly back, talking about social media, Web 2.0, and making proclamations about how the culture will evolve. You were wrong then, partially because you ignored the financial aspect of what was going on, and here you are again, ignoring the money. Give the market its due.

Do you have advice for what people — people like me — who write or produce other work for the Internet can do about this situation?

I’m encouraged by all these little magazines that have started in the last few years. Building institutions, even if they’re small, is a very powerful thing, so that we’re less isolated. When you’re isolated, you’re forced into the logic of building our own brand. If you build something together, you’re more able to focus on endeavors that don’t immediately feed into that. That’s what an institution can buy you — the space to focus on other things.

What would help creators more than anything else in this country are things that would help other workers: Real public health care, real social provisions. Artists are people like everybody else; we need the same things as our barista.

I quote John Lennon: “You think you’re so clever and classless and free. One thing we need is an end to artist exceptionalism. When we can see our connection to other precarious people in the economy, that’s when interesting things could happen. When we justify our position with our own specialness…

You talk about how Steve Jobs would tell his employees that they were artists.

Right. How could you ask to be properly compensated, don’t you see that you’re supposed to be an artist? Grad students were given that advice, too.

That’s where this ties in to Miya Tokumitsu’s essay on the problems with the concept of “Do What You Love.”

Exactly. Now, precarity shouldn’t be a consequence of being an artist. Everyone should have more security. But it’s more and more the condition of our time. One thing I say in passing is that the ethos of the artist — someone who is willing to work around the clock with no security, and who will keep on working after punching out the clock — that attitude is more and more demanded of everyone in the economy. Maybe artists can be at the vanguard of saying no to that. But yes, there would have to be a psychological shift where people would have to accept being less special.

David Burr Gerrard’s debut novel, Short Century, has just been released by Rare Bird Books. He can be followed on Twitter. The interview has been condensed and edited.

“In the olden days, nobody even locked their front doors, not in the neighborhood I grew up in. And the choice is either live behind the locked door or don’t. And for me freedom is choosing not to live behind the locked door.” — This from a man who posted his usernames and passwords into the Washington Post comment section, asking readers to break into his accounts and do as they please. Nobody bothered to do much at all, which is terrifying in its own right.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

:’)

after Anthony Opal’s cento sonnets

In the wet dreaming room seventeen and a half boys
masturbate on seventeen and a half make-believe beds,
sleeping hands tied round seventeen and a half blue roses
blooming to the organ-grinder’s song.
In every way, they are their sustained melodic breakdown,
un-adorned emotion cast off outside our atonal
scudding. O let me dream not the logic of boats
but of rooms billowing with brackish wine,
you and me lost at sea, reed-deep in the technical journals.
We are a helpless make-believe presence deteriorating
except in alcohol. Do you want me to take off my human
myself? Sailboat, frail boat — ugly and marvelous body!
There is no such thing as a patternless universe.
There is really no such thing as a birdless place.

Annelyse Gelman is a California Arts Scholar, the inaugural poet-in-residence at UCSD’s Brain Observatory, and recipient of the 2013 Mary Barnard Academy of American Poets Prize. She has new work in Hobart, The Destroyer, The Economy, Indiana Review, and elsewhere, and is the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone (Write Bloody, 2014). Find her at www.annelysegelman.com.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

I believe the expression you are attempting to articulate is “OMG.” And rightly so. [Via]

Beastie Boys + Link Wray + Friday = play. Solved. [Via]

“On Sunday pot smokers will gather across the US to mark what has become a hallowed date in their calendar — 4/20, or 20 April — by smoking marijuana, possibly at 4:20pm.”

I met Aye Aye Win a little while ago aboard the Karaweik, a two-story barge on Kandawgyi Lake in the middle of Yangon, Myanmar. The barge, like the lake, is artificial: It’s actually a building made out of concrete and stucco, sunk into shallow waters. Inside was a buffet restaurant with a stage, and on it, extravagantly costumed dancers. I hadn’t been sitting at the banquet table for long when a woman with a kind face and elegant cheekbones asked, softly, if the seat next to me was occupied.

Then she told me some of her life story, beginning with her father’s name.

My father’s name is U Sein Win. He passed away four months ago. He was with the AP from 1969. By then he had been jailed twice in his life as a journalist, for the stories that he had done. He had his own paper, but even then, he was jailed. He was arrested again in 1988. He was an A-class prisoner, so that’s not bad.

In my father’s time and before, from ’1948–62, he saw a window of absolute press freedom. We had a very, very free and vibrant media then: Chinese, Hindi, Burmese, English papers. Many were very influential in the region. Burma was the richest country in Southeast Asia, you know. The airport was one of the best in 1950s. From that, we became the least developed in the region. Twenty-six years of socialism ruined everything.

I went to Yangon University; that’s where all my siblings and parents graduated, too. In my parents’ time, they had to do at least two years in university. My mother’s a doctor. There’s a lot of attachment to the university here. The stupidity of the regime at that time, in the sixties, seventies — it was seen as a hotbed of protest, and moved out of the city center. They think they can contain any protest, and I think it works. It did work. They shut down the university, the buildings were dilapidated, and now kids don’t understand what a university is. The new ones are out in the paddy fields; most of the students do correspondence courses. When we were young, no one wanted to take the correspondence course or study in a desolate condition. You don’t call it a university life anymore. There are no bookworms around. We lost that.

In 1979, I graduated from university here in Yangon and said to him, “Dad, I want to be a journalist.” He said, “This is absurd, this is not a woman’s job.” But he agreed to train me. How many years do you think it took? Believe it or not it took me ten years. It was a dictatorial regime then, and my father did not want me to work. I was teaching English at university after I graduated. In those days, it was still a socialist era, and unless you were a member of a party, there were few jobs and little choice.

But by ’89, I became a full-blown journalist. I think I wore my father down. I burned his ears. I think he knew he couldn’t stop me anymore. I started with the AP 24 years ago and I’ve been here throughout everything. I think that’s a privilege.

I always say, in many of my speeches: a knock on the door at midnight scares me. The last 22 years was worse, even worse. There were more journalist arrests. I was once asked questions until two in the morning, then they let you sleep. But I don’t want to sleep because my mind might not be clear when I wake up. This is a lot of stress. Sometimes they would pick us together, my husband and me. My husband was put in jail once during the peak of the monk protest. He was there about a week, in a cell with two straight backed chairs so he cannot sleep. After three days he convinced the guard to bring him a deck chair. He is a diabetic, and his diabetes went out of control. He has a diabetic ulcer on his feet, and the ulcer went gangrenous. He almost lost his foot. The authorities didn’t know how to handle him, and he wasn’t accepted at the prison hospital because he was a prisoner without a number. He said to his captors, please do something about me, my foot is in pain, so finally, they sent him back home. I took him to hospital, where he had a very intense treatment, and finally, after 3 days, the doctor said he was OK now. He didn’t have to lose his foot.

I lived with a lot of trauma, though I’ve been sleeping very well in the last few years.

The music got very loud, and dancers streamed into the spaces between the rows of people sitting at banquet tables, to dance beside them. I leaned in very close and asked her how much different the country and its ruling class was today.

I have always told everybody not to get too excited or enthused. These are the same group of people; they just changed from uniform to civilian clothing. The mindset is still the same; the sense of distrust toward the media is the same. Under the new democratic system, it’s always an open-and-shut case. They are arresting journalists again. They will charge them under criminal laws. A girl was in the eastern district, interviewing a lawyer about a corruption story. The lawyer was very angry with her questions, and she was charged with trespassing and use of abusive language, and given three months in very remote prison. A young girl. This is very harsh. This was last December. She was freed in February.

In the past, there were no trials. Even my father, in 1965, was kept three years without trial. We didn’t know where he was taken. For eight months, he was in solitary confinement. We only found him after my mother traveled around the country, asking for where he is. Now, under the present regime, if you are arrested, you are allowed to engage in defense lawyer. But in the districts, lawyers are afraid to defend. You are not given the benefit of the doubt. When you are charged, they really assume you are guilty.

Currently five journalists are in prison. They wrote a story about a chemical weapons factory. They were very junior, and were not clever in the way they put it. They very bluntly said there was a chemical weapons factory — not allegedly. No one has seen, or not seen, this chemical weapons factory. The government won’t let the media go and visit. They keep saying, they are breaking an official secret. No one can really visit the place where the factory is not supposed to be.

When my father was arrested in 1988, he was already charged with high treason, which is a death penalty. We were worried, nervous. But there was a change of head of state and he was released a month later. As soon as he got in, he went straight to his telex machine, typing all the things he saw along the way from prison to home. When he went in, the situation was very tense, out, people cheering, democracy banners. immediately he went downtown just to see the mood, the people, the crowd. He didn’t write about his release. He wrote about what he saw, from prison to home — the amazing energy, enthusiasm.

You drop into a world where you do not really have freedom, it’s unfortunate, but it’s also fortunate. Sometimes freedom, if you are free, you don’t really value the meaning of not being free.

I’ve been working in my home office for last 22 years. Now that the AP has opened a full bureau here, I will mostly be working very comfortably at home. My sources know where to find me. Three years ago there was a big fire, some explosion, that happened in eastern Yangon. I was woken up by the explosion, and three minutes later I started getting phone calls, maneuvering my team. Even getting phone calls at midnight now, it’s no sweat. It’s kind of an addiction. The challenge makes the work more interesting. Now, I’m getting a little bored. My husband used to say, we are like Bruce Willis, playing cat and mouse with the authorities. We are not doing the Bruce Willis movies anymore.

Ryan Bradley is a writer and editor in New York. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Photo by Anthony Tong Lee.

by Awl Sponsors

This is the last in a three-part series about the history of interactive theater, presented by Heineken. Check out Parts One and Two, which detail the early years of interactive theater and its Twentieth-Century flourishing. In this final installment, we discover where the form of entertainment is headed, with Heineken leading the way.

A few weeks ago Heineken premiered a unique one-night only immersive theater experience in New York City. Watch the video above to see how a few brave guests became The Guest of Honor. This unique one-night-only experience put just one person at center stage and asked them to share their unique talents as actors guided them on a bizarre, dream-like experience.

Immersive theater has really come into its own over the last several years, solidifying its status as a cutting-edge art form that’s been embraced across the globe.

Theater audiences experienced an entirely new way to experience the traditional stage play and literally get inside characters heads when American Standard debuted in Los Angeles in 2005. The audience had the opportunity to hear the inner thoughts of the characters via a headset they wear throughout the show. Audience members could switch from character to character, hearing what’s going on inside the actors’ heads.

In 2007, The Boomerang Kid allowed audiences to make choices for the main character using handheld wireless technology. This would allow for over 50 possible variations in the narrative, like a crowdsourced “choose your own adventure” story.

Running in parallel to these productions is perhaps the most famous immersive theater production yet, Sleep No More, which happens to also take place at The McKittrick Hotel, seen in the above video. It’s a reimagined remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as told through a series of brief encounters between actors and spectators. Audiences actually are able to move about the hotel, exploring rooms and objects, interacting with actors and environments. They wear masks as they move about a chilling 1930s environment before they are ushered into a cocktail lounge for a final musical performance.

Finally, we have The Guest of Honor, brought to you by Heineken. In the video we see a new level of immersion. This production builds on the work of everything we’ve seen before and offers something fresh and now by literally asking show attendees to take the stage. It’s a natural extension of the form, leading the way for a new generation of entertainers.

What Do TV Shows Want To Be When They Grow Up?

Human reviewers have mostly been apologetic when measuring Fargo the TV show against Fargo the movie, because how can you compare a film to a series? An apple to an orange? And apple to… ten apples? But the machines, who do not apologize, have it settled: According to Metacritic, Fargo the series (Rating: 87% — ‎38 reviews) is better than the Coen brothers’ movie (Rating: 85% — ‎24 reviews). We are meant to understand that these numbers don’t really say what they seem to say, but could you really explain how? To an alien?

The clearest explanation for the existence of the show is this: “The concept was born out of MGM’s desire to get more of its movie properties onto television, and the goal was to franchise Fargo without remaking it.” This seems to be a crucial difference between Fargo and, say, Hannibal, or even Friday Night Lights, both of which are casually understood to be based on films but which are really based on much richer books. Fargo treats its inspiration like a trope; its relationship to its parent movie is an awful lot like Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s relationship to 1941’s Captain America Comics #1. (Winter Soldier, however, is expected to adhere STRICTLY to the mythology of the much newer and super-lucrative Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is less than a decade old. The intellectual property cosmos is confusing and beautiful, just like the real cosmos.)

This has been going on for a very long time, the movie-to-TV thing, but look at what it’s given us: A catalog of cash-ins and flukes and low-rent animated series. This is one of the best pages on Wikipedia, by the way: It’s where you can learn that, in a closet or on a hard drive somewhere, there are 39 episodes of an Ace Ventura: Pet Detective cartoon. In 1990, CBS produced an Uncle Buck show in which the kids’ parents were dead and John Candy’s character, played by Kevin Meaney, had taken full custody.

Movies have produced a lot of TV, just not a lot of ambitious TV. But Fargo is good, or very good. Maybe great. So if it’s a success, why not assume every beloved modern film has the commercial potential of a 50-year-old comic book or a blockbuster children’s movie? Where is HBO’s Pulp Fiction or AMC’s The Shawshank Redemption?? Showtime’s Point Break? I mean they’re already talking about doing the Truman Show. I would probably watch all of those, except for the Shawshank one.