My Favorite Movies of 2021

February 28, 2022 by Eugene Wei

The John Wick Universe is Cancel Culture

January 08, 2020 by Eugene Wei

“Si vis pacem para bellum”
translated
“If you want peace, prepare for war”

I hadn’t planned on seeing John Wick 3 - Parabellum, but out for a walk in Stockholm in May, I got caught in a sudden downpour without an umbrella. I was in Sweden for the first time thanks to an invitation from the Spotify product team and had decided to spend some of my downtime seeing the city. Sweden, by the way, is the country with the second highest unicorns per capita. Fascinating, and a topic for another day. I sprinted out of the rain and into the nearest building, which happened to be a movie theater. Checking Dark Sky on my phone, the rain didn’t look to let up for another hour or two, so I scanned the theater listings and found a film in English. John Wick 3: Parabellum it was.

Like many I enjoyed the first John Wick movie for its lean and elegant plot and balletic fight choreography. Keanu Reeves was inspired casting given his unfussy acting style. However, I thought the sequel was unnecessary. I wasn’t expecting much from yet another entry, the third, but I rarely regret spending two hours in a darkened theater. Watching an American film in the company of a Swedish audience also promised to be a form of cultural field work, and on that front, I felt fortunate the house was packed with locals.

John Wick 3 - Parabellum begins directly after the events of the previous film, and at first, all seemed familiar. But after having spent two films worth of time in this universe already, sometime midway through the third film, it dawned on me. The rules of this film franchise mapped with uncanny precision to something that everyone had been complaining about to me for years now: cancel culture.

With that, the films took on heightened resonance. Here I present my theory of John Wick Universe as an allegory of cancel culture.

[SPOILER ALERT: Here is where I must warn people who haven’t seen the films that I will reveal key plot points to the three Wick films below. I don’t feel like the charms of this film series lie in the plot details—what happens isn’t surprising in the least to even the most casual of action film fans—but I disagree with those who say spoiler culture has ruined film criticism. Instead I’m happy to let my readers choose their own acceptable quota of narrative novelty. If you prefer not to learn the plots of the John Wick films, stop reading here.]

Wick’s character motivation can be described thus: my name is John Wick. You stole my car. You killed my dog. Prepare to die.

Reeves plays Wick from cinema’s storied tradition of zen-like hit men, almost placid in their mastery of their craft, which, in his case, is the violent dispatch of other humans from the realm of the living. This is Alain Delon in Le Samourai, Robert De Niro in Heat, Jean Reno as Victor "The Cleaner" in La Femme Nikita. Less sexual than Bond, not quite as overtly cruel as Matz and Jacamon’s Killer. These hit men have a heart, but their highest order bit is the code by which they live. Whether personal or business, there's little difference, the job is killing.

And kill he does. In John Wick 3: Parabellum the signature choreography of death remains, a style which can only be described as baroque. Not John Wick for a single gunshot to the head when he can first maim with a few amuse bouche bullets to the torso and limbs. Why engage in a simple fist fight when one can hold a confrontation in a store filled with display cases lined with all manner of knives (in case of emergency, break glass with the skull of your combatant). Why simply perforate assailants with automatic weapons when they can be simultaneously be relieved of their genitals by an attack dog?

It wasn’t until Michael Bay’s terrible 6 Underground on Netflix that I saw a film with more cartoonish violence this year.

For some, this is entertainment enough. I’ll never hesitate to offer my opinions on any piece of entertainment, but I do not begrudge anyone their pleasures. Certainly, the crowd of Swedes who laughed and cheered at the escalating violence seemed more than entertained. For me, however, films are even more compelling when they speak to the world outside the edges of the screen. I'm nothing if not a sucker for subtext. What fascinated me about John Wick was how its absurdist universe acted as a wry commentary on cancel culture.

Do I think this subtext was intentional? Doubtful. Some filmmakers reward subtextual readings more than others. Still, the advantage of making a film with such a lean universe design is its semiotic flexibility.

John Wick’s real name, we learn, is Jardani Jovonovich, a Belarussian gypsy raised as an assassin. Wick is nicknamed Baba Yaga, the Boogeyman, for he is the master of assassination. Who are most gifted in using social media to sow chaos and division in the world, especially the United States, than the Russians? Having lost the Cold War they’ve come back in a more fluid and confounding form.

When the first film begins, Wick has left that world of violence behind for a peaceful domestic life with his wife Helen. But she dies from an illness, though not before leaving him a beagle to keep him company. The dog, along with Wick’s car, a 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1, are recognizable to anyone as the two iconic totems of an American’s most sacred values.

When a group of Russian gangsters try to buy his car and Wick refuses, they break into his home, steal the car, and kill the dog. In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta complains to Eric Stoltz that some vandals keyed his car. Stoltz commiserates.

“They should be fuckin’ killed, man. No trial, no jury, straight to execution,” he says.

“What’s more chicken-shit than fuckin’ with a man’s automobile?” says Travolta. “Don’t fuck with another man’s vehicle.”

“You don’t do it,” agrees Stoltz.

In America, the car is the symbol of a man’s property and an expression of his individual freedom. The dog is the symbol of unconditional loyalty, man’s faithful companion as he rules over his domain.

The two totems of American sacred values

In a social media context, we can think of Wick’s dog and his car as representing those beliefs we hold sacred. When Wick loses his car and his dog, he is every one of us who sees one of the values we consider intrinsic to our personal identity impugned by some stranger on social media. That the perpetrators are Russian is nothing if not reminiscent of Russian agents sowing discord in American society in the run up to the 2016 Presidential election.

It turns out John used to work for the father of the leader of the gangsters who stole his car and killed his dog. That father, Viggo, upon learning what his son Iosef has done, calls Wick and begs him to let it go. Don’t feed the trolls, we are told time and again. But we, like Wick, cannot. His permanent sabbatical from assassination has come to an end.

As on social media, violence begets violence. Since Wick refuses to let the matter go, Viggo, to protect his son, sends a preemptive hit squad to assassinate Wick at his home. We never fight a single target on social media because the public broadcast nature of social media always rallies others to the cause. The first John Wick film proceeds from there as a series of attacks and counterattacks until Wick emerges, alive, bloodied, with a new dog, a pit bull he frees from an animal clinic. Viggo, Iosef, and what seems like a hundred or so henchmen are dead. The new dog symbolizes a brief moment of peace for Wick, just as we sometimes emerge from our skirmishes online feeling as if we have the moral high ground, our honor once again intact.

John Wick 2 begins with him retrieving his car from a chop shop owned by Viggo's brother, which requires Wick to kill not only Viggo’s brother but his fellow goons. The car takes serious damage in the firefight, much like the beating we take defending ourselves online, but Wick eventually emerges with his car and new dog and then returns home to bury his weapons cache. He thinks he is out of the game once again.

As anyone who has participated in culture wars knows, any victory is temporary and pyrrhic.

Out of the blue, Santino D’Antonio visits Wick at his home and calls in a marker, represented in the films by a medallion with a drop of blood from the debtor. Santino needs Wick to become an assassin again, just as various friends online call on us to take their side in various online battles.

John refuses. He wants out. The marker is the marker, though. If you won’t defend your values, then can you say you really have any? Santino reminds John of this in a not-so-subtle way: he blows up Wick’s house with a grenade launcher.

This brings us to The Continental, the unique hotel chain at the heart of the John Wick universe. Their Manhattan branch is run by Winston (Ian McShane) and staffed by the always courteous and professional concierge Charon (Lance Reddick). Now homeless, Wick retreats to the Continental for refuge. The entire Continental hotel chain lives under the aegis of the High Table, like one of the W Hotels in the former Starwood and now Marriott network.

The Continental hotel chain stands in for our social media platforms. Like them, The Continental claims neutrality—no killing is allowed on Continental grounds—yet they happily arm assassins with all manners of weapons, like Twitter arming people with the quote tweet, the AK-47 of social media. They even employ a weapons sommelier.

The Continental sets all sorts of very specific policies that seem to be in conflict with each other; do they want civility or violence? Visitors to the Continental, like Wick, vacillate between wanting them to enforce rules and wondering who put them in charge in the first place. In other words, a mirror of the tension between users and the social networks that dominate the modern internet.

At any rate, Winston reminds Wick he must honor the marker from Santino, because them’s the rules. These markers are like metaphors for engagement, the debt we pay social networks for the privilege of their services and distribution. Social media platforms do not want violence on their grounds, yet they live through user engagement. The only way to not have any markers on your ledger is to never accrue a debt in the first place, but Wick was raised in the golden age of social networks, where it was near impossible to avoid being active on them. Bowing to the marker, Wick accedes to Santino’s request to assassinate his sister so Santino can assume her spot on the High Table council.

Wick carries out the mission, with great reluctance, only to have Santino turn around and put a $7 million contract on Wick for murdering his sister. This is akin to battling your enemies on social media platforms, creating the engagement that platforms thrive off of, only to have them turn around and lock your account for having done so. Many a person I know has complained about just such a betrayal. Pour one out for David Simon and his periodic bans on Twitter for eviscerating his opponents in a blaze of profanity.

Wick, as is his style, comes after Santino, who retreats to the safety of the Continental, where no violence is allowed. But Wick has been betrayed, and personal values now take precedence over the platform rules of The Continental. He pursues Santino onto hotel grounds and guns him down in front of Winston.

As penalty for conducting assassin business on Continental grounds, the High Table doubles the bounty on Wick to $14 million and broadcasts it globally. As the second film ends, Winston informs Wick of the bounty and gives him an hour head start to run. He sets off with his pit bull through Central Park as cell phones start ringing throughout the park. Wick has been true to his beliefs, as symbolized by the dog by his side, but the outrage mob is about to be set loose on him.

John Wick 3: Parabellum picks up from there. Wick is on the run through the rain of Manhattan, glancing at his watch as the seconds tick down to the global bounty becoming official.

In the Wick universe, official High Table business is processed through a central office by dozens of men and women dressed like old school phone switch operators, all of whom go about their jobs with an almost cheerful professionalism. Anyone who has ever received an impassive automatic reply from a social media customer service department after reporting some vicious attack can empathize with the almost comical formality of the Kafkaesque institution in the face of what feels like emotional terrorism.

That the bounty is put out by the High Table feels appropriate. It’s because of the algorithmic distribution of social media platforms that the asymmetric attack of the bloodthirsty mob achieves modern levels of scale and precision. The High Table seems elusive, at times arbitrary, just like the moderation policies of social networks. Winston at time seems friendly to John, yet he also stands by as the mob prepares to set upon Wick. Many users of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and so on can relate to this love-hate relationship with those platforms.

As soon as Wick’s bounty goes global, seemingly every next person on the street comes sets upon him with the nearest weapon at hand. Anyone who has been attacked by an online mob, or even mildly harassed, is familiar with this uniquely modern sensation of being set upon by complete strangers. The Wick films give online mobs physical form. These random assassins are the Twitter eggs with usernames like pepe298174.

Even more perfect, strangers attack John Wick only after glancing at their phones and receiving word of the bounty. How do outrage mobs coalesce in the online world? From people staring at social media on their phones and locating the next target to be cancelled. The High Table’s bounty system, with its mobile notifications, is nothing less than a formalization of the mechanisms by which social networks enable cancel culture.

Wick dispatches one attacker after the other with every weapon at hand, whether axe or handgun or, in the first case, a hardcover book (when you absolutely, positively, have to snap a man’s neck using a book lodged in his jaw, a flimsy paperback or e-book just will not do).

I’ve talked to liberals who’ve been set upon by the alt-right. Women who’ve been attacked by gamers. Creatives who are set upon by outraged fans. Conservatives who feel swarmed by SJW’s. Everyone feels unjustly attacked by faceless mobs, everyone is aggrieved. Everyone feels they are standing up for their truth and their principles, like John Wick, while mindless strangers attack from all sides. John Wick is the avatar of the modern social media user, the "righteous man beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men."

Just before the bounty goes live, Wick stops by one of those doctors in the movies that caters to assassins and mobsters, the ones with fantastic service, always willing to provide bullet removal surgery on demand to walk-ins. Wick is bleeding from a shoulder wound inflicted by an overzealous assassin who tried to take John out before the bounty went official. Wick begs the doctor to patch him up, and he does, even pointing John to some medicine for the pain. But before Wick leaves, the doctor asks John to shoot him twice, to make it seem as if Wick coerced him into helping him. The doctor knows it is near impossible to stay neutral in the culture wars; if you’re not on one side you’re on the other. Ask Maggie Haberman.

John calls in a marker from a woman known as the Director (Anjelica Huston). She runs a ballet theater called the Ruska Roma that doubles as some sort of training ground for assassins; it’s implied that Wick learned his trade there. Once again, the blind loyalty to this marker system perpetuates a cycle of violence. Huston would rather not be involved, admonishing Wick, “You honor me by bringing death to my front door.”

Wick retorts in Russian, “I am a child of the Belarus. An orphan of your tribe. You are bound to help me.” He explicitly evokes the tribalism inherent in humans, the us vs. them impulse that social media amplifies. And then, in English, “You are bound, and I am owed.” The particular power of tribalism is the near impossibility of being neutral; to not pick any side is to be against everyone. The Director succumbs.

The face you make when your friend tags you into his or her online battle and you just want to watch YouTube

As she walks him through the backstage training area of the theater, where other young assassins are in training, she says, “You know when my pupils first come here, they wish for one thing. A life free of suffering. I try to dissuade them from these childish notions but as you know, art is pain. Life is suffering.” As she says this, a ballerina pulls a toenail off. Social media is suffering, she is saying, but Wick is already in too deep.

She walks him past a bunch of men wrestling on the ground, future John Wicks in training.

She continues, “Somehow, you managed to get out. But here you are, back where you began. All of this, for what? For a dog?”

“It wasn’t just a dog,” he replies.

“The High Table wants your life. How can you fight the wind? How can you smash the mountains? How can you bury the ocean? How can you escape from the light? Of course you can go to the dark. But they’re in the dark, too.”

Huston is saying that the only way to avoid the darkness of social media is to avoid it, but, as he says, it wasn’t just a dog. She points him to the path out of the outrage cycle, nothing that it’s not a game you can win (How can you fight the wind? That is, there’s always another faceless troll.), but for Wick it’s a matter of honor.

She cashes in his marker, acceding to his request for safe passage to Casablanca.

Enter Taylor Mason. Err, sorry, the Adjudicator, played by Asia Kate Dillon. Employed by the High Table, she informs both Winston of the NY Continental and another character nicknamed the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) that they must abdicate their positions in seven days for having aided Wick in killing Santino (in John Wick 2).

If you’re a liberal, the Adjudicator is like the conservative government officials who’ve continually accused social media platforms of an anti-conservative bias, or the both-sides-ism of the media. If you’re a conservative, the Adjudicator is some metaphor for the liberal media, punishing social media platforms for anything other than absolute conformity to liberal narratives. Sometimes, when Twitter works itself into a rage at another NYTimes headline that isn’t tough enough on Trump, I think of the Adjudicator as the public, holding the newspaper to account for its failure to answer to the collective public High Table.

In Casablanca, Wick calls on another friend, Sofia (the ageless Halle Berry making a nice pair with the ageless Keanu), with whom he cashes in yet another marker. She, like The Director earlier, is not happy to be pulled into Wick’s personal battles. Sofia runs another branch of the Continental, so essentially Wick has fled one tech platform for another that feels obligated to shelter him. He may be excommunicado from the NY Continental, but he once came to Sofia’s aid, and she owes him.

“You do realize that I’m management now, right? I’m not service anymore, John, so I don’t go around shooting people in the head,” Sofia notes. She’s essentially a tech platform executive now, trying to avoid getting pulled into social media battles.

“Look, I made a deal when I agreed to run this hotel, and that deal said I had to follow the rules of the High Table,” she says. “If I make one mistake, one enemy, maybe somebody goes looking for my daughter.”

Sofia faces the risk of being doxxed and having some nutjobs go after her children. Years ago, John helped get Sofia’s daughter out of this dangerous world, and Sofia doesn’t know where she’s been shepherded. She doesn’t want to know because she knows it would put her daughter back in harm’s way.

“Because sometimes you have to kill what you love.” Sofia speaks for all those who keep their opinions to themselves online because the cost of being cancelled just isn’t worth the cost of being attacked by the mob. If she stays in the game, she will be pulled into vicious battles she wishes no part of. But in removing herself from social media, she loses out on some of the benefits they offer, like the chance to communicate with family and friends, in her case her daughter. Long ago she chose exit.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, the Adjudicator visits a sushi stand and calls on the chef and his crew to help enforce penalties against Wick and all who aided him. The chef, named Zero, agrees. He is, like seemingly everyone in this world, an assassin, just as social media turned all of us into soldiers in the culture wars. Zero and his team seem willing to serve the High Table no matter what they demand; like most people, the lure of participating in an online mob is a form of universal human bloodlust. They can also stand in for platform moderators, trying to implement social network speech policies as best as they can.

First they visit the Director at the Ruska Roma. The Adjudicator confronts her over helping Wick despite his excommunication.

Huston defends herself. “He had a ticket.”

The Adjudicator will hear nothing of it. “But a ticket does not stand above the Table.”

Zero runs a blade through the Director's clasped hands as penalty.

Time and again, the John Wick mythology points to the seeming futility of the defending one’s values on social media. The price of picking a side is always to suffer egregious violence from the other side with seemingly no real winners, or to be have one's hands slapped by the platforms (or in this case, pierced with a sword).

Sofia takes Wick to meet her former boss Berrada, as he requests. Berrada runs a mint to manufacture the gold coins and markers that the assassin world operate on.

“Now this coin, of course, it does not represent monetary value. It represents the commerce of relationships, a social contract in which you agree to partake. Order and rules. You have broken the rules. The High Table has marked you for death.” Berrada describes both the way in which platforms turned our relationships into business arrangements (“commerce” and “contract”), the artificiality of their power—the order and rules are ones the platforms made up—and their power to deplatform or ban anyone who sign the user agreements.

Berrada asks Wick if he knows the etymology of the word assassin.

Berrada explains: “But others contend it comes from asasiyyun. Meaning ‘men who are faithful and who abide by their beliefs.’” The Wick Universe, populated with assassins murdering each other in an endless cycle of retribution, is a proxy for the users on social media who cannot stand by idly while others infringe upon their beliefs.

Wick asks Berrada how to find the Elder, the one who sits above the High Table. Berrada directs him to wander into the desert and hope that the Elder finds him.

Before Sofia and John can leave, however, Berrada demands something from Sofia in exchange for the favor. In face, he says he will keep one of Sofia’s two dogs, who accompany her everywhere. Again, the dog symbolizes a person’s most sacred values. On social media, we are always being forced by tribal battles to give up some of our values in order to stay out of harm’s way. This time, Sofia refuses.

Berrada shoots one of the dogs, but it is wearing a bulletproof vest (hey yo social media wars are vicious you can never be too cautious). Sofia huddles over her dog, then draws a handgun hidden under its vest.

John sees what she is doing and urges her, “No.”

But it’s too late. The thing about social media is that it takes just one savage troll to put us on tilt. Sofia shoots Berrada in the leg, and just like that she’s back in the culture wars.

After she and her dogs and John kill off Berrada’s nearby henchmen, she walks over to Berrada and considers shooting him in the head.

“Sofia, don’t,” urges John.

She shoots him in the knee instead. “He shot my dog.”

“I get it,” he replies, in the funniest line in the film. Anyone who has dealt with an online mob empathizes with friends when they fall under attack and go berserk in response.

When you know you should just mute and block and walk away, but damn, that SOB shot your dog

Sofia, John, and the dogs fight their way out of the facility, killing several dozen men along the way in the most elaborately violent ways possible, evoking the almost casual cruelty of online warfare. They steal a car and drive out to the desert where Sofia abandons John to his search for the Elder. He wanders through the desert in his suit, without any water, a user de-platformed.

Damn, I got booted off Twitter and Facebook

In Manhattan, the Adjudicator and her sushi chef moderators visit the Bowery King and make him pay penance for the seven bullets he gave John Wick with seven knife cuts to the chest.

In the desert, John collapses from exhaustion but is saved and brought to the Elder. John asks him for a chance to reverse his excommunication. The Elder offers him a deal: Wick must assassinate Winston, head of the Manhattan Continental hotel, and then serve the rest of his days under the High Table doing what he does best, assassinating people.

This is the Faustian bargain for being on these social media platforms. Drive engagement for them and play by their rules, whatever those are, or be excommunicated from them. John either stays an assassin, suffering a lifetime of fighting other people on social media, or he can remove himself from the platforms entirely.

“I will serve. I will be of service,” John says. To prove his fealty, he cuts off his wedding ring finger. We’ve all seen people lash back at trolls only to be banned themselves. The loss of Wick’s ring finger represents those values we compromise when playing by social media platform’s arbitrary moderation rules. Who among us hasn’t emerged from some online tussle feeling like we lost a finger ourselves, gave up some part of our humanity?

Back in Manhattan, John has to fight his way past Zero and his henchmen to reach the Continental. Just as Zero is about to kill him, John puts his hand on the front steps of the Continental. Charon appears and tells Zero to lower his weapon. Again, the platform rules are the rules: no assassination on hotel grounds.

Inside, John and Zero sit in the lobby together and have a chat. Zero fanboys over having met the legendary John Wick, even while noting he’s more of a cat person. Nothing epitomizes the often arbitrary tribal battles online better than the fight between cat and dog people.

You like dogs? I guess we have to kill each other.

Many people have described the feeling of meeting someone in real life who they despise online and finding they get along better than they would’ve imagined. While it’s not always the case, the disembodied world of social media tends to amplify divisions. The John Wick films portray this multiple times; in every film, John has a moment where he and someone trying to assassinate him stop to share a cordial drink on Continental grounds before resuming their fight to the death a short while later.

If only we’d met offline rather than on Twitter, we might be friends!

Isn’t screaming at each other online productive?

Wick gets his meeting with Winston, who tells John that killing him will not honor his wife’s memory but simply return him to a state of subservience to the High Table. The Adjudicator joins them and asks if Winston will step down (reminiscent of the calls for CEOs like Zuckerberg and Dorsey to step down from their posts) and whether John will kill Winston. Both of them refuse, so the Adjudicator calls the home office and has the Manhattan branch of the Continental deconsecrated.

Blame me all you want for running this platform, but it’s just human nature John. I can’t fix that!

Of course, this now means that assassination can be carried out on hotel grounds, but also that John can now partake in hotel services, namely a visit to the gun sommelier.

“Let’s see, I’m going to need the ability to tag some mofos, and also to quote tweet their asses”

What ensues is what film critics love to refer to as an “orgy of violence,” (has there every been an “orgy of peace”?) though in this case, as the carnage is accompanied by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, perhaps a symphony of violence is more fitting (again, why never a “concerto of violence”?). Charon, hotel staff, and John move about the hotel fighting off an army of High Table forces clad in such heavy armor that they seem impervious to bullets, almost like an army of online bots swarming their target.

The whole time, Winston hides in a secure vault, sipping a martini, emblematic, in many people's minds, of social media execs working from their cushy offices while users rip each other to shreds on their platforms.

Wow, Trump just declared war on Twitter!

John survives, as usual, dispatching everyone who comes after him. The Adjudicator calls Winston and asks for a parley on the rooftop of the Continental, where John eventually arrives. Winston asks the Adjudicator for forgiveness and offers his ongoing loyalty to the High Table. The Adjudicator agrees to reconsecrate the Continental and restore Winston as manager, but then she turns to John and asks Winston what is to be done of the titular assassin. Winston replies by shooting Wick repeatedly in the chest and knocking him off the roof of the Continental, where he falls several stories to the alley below, bouncing off a few fire escape railings and awnings in the process. Ah, those platforms, they're always liable to turn on you.

Wick is not dead, as you’d expect. The Adjudicator, on the way out of the hotel, peeks in the alley, where Wick’s body is nowhere to be found. He has, we discover, been brought to the Bowery King, now maimed by all those knife wounds ordered by the Adjudicator.

What outlook does John Wick offer us on the state of the online discourse moving forward? Is there any hope for relief? The end of the film isn’t optimistic.

Laurence Fishburne says to Wick, lying there in a bloody heap on the ground: “So, let me ask you John, how do you feel? Because I am really pissed off. You pissed, John? Hmm? Are you?”

John Wick strains to lift his bloodied head off the ground to look Fishburne in the eyes. “Yeah.”

The Uncanny Valley of Interactivity

January 07, 2020 by Eugene Wei

I believe mass entertainment suffers from a bit of format rigidity due to the natural inertia from structural ossification in the music, film, and publishing businesses, to name the most prominent.

One of the ways this manifests is in the one-way broadcast nature of much of our entertainment despite the fact that several billion people own internet-connected smartphones now, and even though they consume an increasingly large share of that entertainment on such devices equipped with all sorts of input options and sensors.

Whenever I say this, however, people seem to want to leap to choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, and the most cited example is Netflix’s Bandersnatch. In its earnings report for 2018, Netflix famously declared “We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.” I happen to agree with them that the threat of gaming looms larger than any other in the future, and it’s not surprising to me that they’ve spun up a group to experiment with interactive stories like Bandersnatch and Bear Grylls’ You vs. Wild.

However, stories like Bandersnatch fall into an uncanny valley of interactivity. That is, compared to regular movies, they repeatedly force you to do a bit of annoying work that breaks the suspension of disbelief and the flow of the story: the first choice you’re offered in Bandersnatch is to choose which cereal to eat for breakfast. If you’re in the mindset for lean-back entertainment, you can let the story choose an answer for you on its own after some amount of time, but the distracting question prompt is still displayed on the screen.

On the other hand, if you want real interactivity, something like Bandersnatch feels like a busted low-res knockoff of the continuous interactivity of video games, a step function compared to the smooth curves of video game calculus. Why play a game with such crude branching when so many great games, many of them multiplayer and synchronous, offer a truly unpredictable and immersive form of user controllable storytelling?

This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy branching stories in concept. One of my favorite movie and television genres is what I refer to as the recursive escape room genre.

You’re likely familiar with it from its most famous examples. Groundhog Day (in fact TVTropes refers to this genre as the Groundhog Day Loop). Edge of Tomorrow. Russian Doll. A Christmas Carol.

“Phil, maybe we should just Google a playthrough video on YouTube.”

In these stories, the protagonist keeps reliving the same set of events in what feels like an endless loop in time. As they realize their conundrum, they start to experiment and iterate until they eventually come to an epiphany as to why they’re trapped. Then, and only then, can they break out of the loop.

In a way, these are the film version of a really popular form of YouTube video: the video game playthrough.

Watching these films reminds me of how I’d read Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child. Every time I came to a choice in the story, I’d dog-ear that page, then eventually revisit it to take the other path, until I’d read every possible branch of the story. However, works like Groundhog Day reduce the effort required of the viewer by simply playing all the branches in a linear fashion, offering both a lean-back viewing experience and the sensation of narrative progression as the protagonist moves closer and closer to breaking out of the loop. Bandersnatch offers the ability to jump back to any decision you made previously and change it through a sort of decision history carousel, but that still requires work on the part of the viewer.

I feel like the author of “You Are A Shark” didn’t really have his heart in it

The appeal of recursive escape room movies and TV shows, I theorize, lies in its echo of something many people feel, that they are trapped in some runaway routine in their lives. Wake up, go to work, come home, scrounge up dinner, unwind a bit, then back at it the next day. These recursive escape room stories offer up the possibility that we can puzzle our way out of these Moebius prisons which keep depositing us back to the same starting point. Maybe if I stop eating carbs. Or meditate in the morning instead of checking social media. Or start working out before the morning commute. Maybe if I’m more assertive and ask for a raise, or a promotion, which I richly deserve. With every test, I close off one branch but converge a little more on a solution.

I’d guess that the easiest way to predict how any person’s day will go is to look at the previous day. It’s quite plausible that most lived days on Earth feel like a barely modified replay of the previous day. We all run, for the most part, a standard script of life routines.

The appeal of self-help gurus and podcasts about the habits of successful people is that they resemble those escape room chaperones who offer occasional hints to groups who get stuck on one particular puzzle. These secrets to success from modern gurus feel like video game tips for specific levels, except for real life. Sleep more. Eat keto. Lift weights. Delete social media apps. Walk 10,000 steps a day.

That sense of progressive mastery is a hell of a drug. That’s why, while I’m bearish on choose-your-own-adventure films like Bandersnatch, I’m bullish on the right types of light interactivity when it makes sense. If you were designing a game show today, for example, it would likely look much more like HQTrivia (RIP) than, say, Wheel of Fortune.

Gamification Someone, I can't remember who, recently described golf as the gamification of walking, and I'll never be able to shake that from my mind.has gotten a bit of a bad rap in recent years, and some of the implementations out of Silicon Valley can feel scammy, to be sure. Still, when I look at the progressive mastery tactics of something like Candy Crush, I can’t help but find them more fun and effective, in some ways, than the Suzuki method of teaching violin playing, or Mr. Miyagi’s “wax on, wax off” school of teaching Daniel Larusso karate.

The more I read about the power of habit in human behavior, the more I think of self-help genre as a series of macros one downloads to try to upgrade one's day-to-day regimen. Pair that with the educational power of failure and I've come think of recursive escape room stories as a way to accelerate the improvement of our life productivity.

Narrative debt

December 12, 2019 by Eugene Wei

HBO’s Watchmen is fantastic, as many have noted. It may be one of the most polished first drafts of fan fiction to ever appear on the silver, errr, OLED screen.

DC may lag behind the Marvel Universe in box office and audience acclaim, but it feels like DC is starting to find its footing with a different approach. Rather than having its directors conform to the ultimate vision of Kevin Feige, as Marvel does, DC seems to be allowing its directors a bit more creative freedom to put their own spin on various characters and franchises. Whether you liked The Joker or not, it was a very Todd Phillips-esque take, and it’s not even meant to be part of the rest of the DC Universe. It’s a stand-alone vision of The Joker.

The trailer for Birds of Prey, for example, feels like an attempt to take Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and create a new franchise around that character. The Joker in Suicide Squad, and thus the one that’s implied to be in that branch of the DC Universe, isn’t the same one as in the Phillips’ Joker film. But Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan has stated that they removed the Jared Leto Joker character from their film so they could distance (read: quarantine) themselves from that failed film, creating yet another distinct franchise within the DC universe. Not for nothing is the parenthetical in the title "The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn."After Birds of Prey came out, I saw it. Sad to say I didn't love it, but the critical and fan reception in my network was reasonably positive. Whereas all the Marvel films exist in a single comic universe, DC seems to be sprouting all sorts of independent branches. Perhaps we should think of the DC Universe as the MCU but with social distancing.

Watchmen capitalizes on this creative freedom. Alan Moore, the writer of the original Watchmen graphic novel, isn’t involved. I’m not sure if he would have given his blessing to Lindelof’s revisions to Watchmen loreHahahahaha let's be real he would've never given his blessing., but it wouldn’t have mattered. HBO and Warner Bros. and the DC folks gave Lindelof free rein to fork the Watchmen mythology for this new series.

Lindelof’s public breakthrough was as co-creator of Lost. To this day, it remains one of my favorite examples of what I call narrative debt. That is, when you’re building out a story, you tease plot lines and characters and conflicts that you have to resolve at a later point in the script.

You accumulate narrative debt. The implicit promise to the audience, the debt holders, is that you’ll pay out the disbelief they've suspended on your behalf.

For a whole variety of reasons, Lost was saddled with so much narrative debt that at some point it was effectively insolvent. Pair that with an obsessive fan base poring over every frame for clues like auditors examining the narrative balance sheet and you had a recipe for a write-down of WeWork proportions. The showrunners couldn’t declare narrative bankruptcy as the show’s ratings were still solid, but they tried to prepare the fans for disappointment via public statements. Ultimately, they whipsawed fans through a series of dramatic story pivots until they were forced to crash land the story in the finale in a way that took the story full circle. The viewers at the end were like Jack and the other survivors on that beach in the series premiere, dazed and bloodied, wondering what the hell had happened.

Chekhov’s gun is the most famous instantiation of the principle of conservation of narrative. Some people want the ledger of stories to balance perfectly. Every first act gun must go off in act three. All non-essential plot elements should be dropped. Not surprisingly, Chekhov was a master of the short story, a form which demands concision.

I’m less of a stickler for obsessively manicured stories than some, though I can nitpick plot structure with the worst of those YouTube critics. I tend to do so only if a film or show is marketed as having been assembled with the delicacy of an expensive wristwatch (Watchmen reference!). There is a certain elegance to a plot in which every last element connects, but as the years go by I find that type of clinical precision can leave a show or film feeling a bit stifled and lifeless.In the original Watchmen, Adrian Veidt can be thought of as a director trying to pull off a massive fork of the global narrative. A la Fincher's The Game, he does it in the real world. Of course, his is a Shyamalan-like effort that hinges entirely on a last minute plot twist, and as we've seen from Shyamalan's later works, often the narrative debt load is too heavy to recover from.

Lindelof seems to be at his best riffing off of something less open-ended. The confines of an existing piece of intellectual property seem to provide guardrails within which his creative forks seem to flourish. The Leftovers had Tom Perrotta’s novel to establish the inciting incident, and he and Lindelof expanded that into one of my favorite television shows, a moving meditation on how humans grapple with loss and grief and faith.

Watchmen from HBO has Moore’s classic graphic novel as a narrative precedent, but Lindelof has remixed it as a story about white supremacy and the racial sin at the heart of America’s origin.

I often think of TikTok as a logical modern outgrowth of remix and sampling culture, but the television world conjuring a remix of Watchmen is one of the most pleasant surprises of 2019.

As large media conglomerates focus more and more on franchises, I’d love to see some of the more progressive leaders at those companies contemplate whether a limited open source strategy on their premium intellectual properties might not be the most defensible, modern approach.

Over a decade ago, Marc Andreessen defined a platform as “a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.”

Even longer ago, in 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons released a twelve-issue comic book series titled Watchmen. Decades later, an outside writer named Damon Lindelof read a piece titled “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic and learned about the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921, remixed it with Moore and Gibbon’s original creation Watchmen, and produced an unexpected new take on the franchise which I don’t think anyone saw coming when the series was first announced.

Watchmen is a platform.

Catch up

March 19, 2018 by Eugene Wei

It has been some time since I posted here. Outside of lots of meetings around the country and some trips with family and friends, a few creative projects have stolen the lion's share of my free time.

While I won't publish some Medium screed on how spending less time on social media transformed my life, it is an unavoidable truth that one's free time is a zero sum game. For infovores, Twitter is a bit like heroin, and for all the other gaps in one's time, other social media apps are like some Cerebro-like viscous membrane that gives off a mild contact high from the vibrations of ambient social intimacy.

As presently constructed, though, all these apps are certainly well into the point of diminishing returns for me, and so less time spent there, redirected offline, has been good for my general productivity and well-being. I'm not certain, but it seems that's it not a question of mix as it is of finding the optimal frequency for all the various activities in my life. To take one example, almost certainly I see huge returns to shifting conversations with folks on Twitter offline.

Some of that time has been spent continuing to wend my way through Emily Wilson's brilliant new translation of The Odyssey. What's fascinating is how it remains resonant with modern times, speaking to its universality. Ironically, what it reminded me of, perhaps because the topic was still top of mind, was social media.

Take the famous episode in which Odysseus and his men sail past the Sirens and then between Scylla and Charybdis. What surprised me was how short the entire episode is, only occupying a few pages in Book 12, titled "Difficult Choices."

The goddess Circe gives Odysseus a preview of what he and his men are about to encounter.

First you will reach the Sirens, who bewitch
all passersby. If anyone goes near them
in ignorance, and listens to their voices,
that man will never travel to his home,
and never make his wife and children happy
to have him back with them again.

"If anyone goes near them in ignorance, and listens to their voices..." But this is what happens on social media all the time! Never have we dilettantes in just about every subject had such a forum to lord our "expertise" over others. Circe warned us long ago what would happen, how insufferable we'd all be to our loved ones.

The song of the Sirens is irresistible, and Circe knows it, so she advises Odysseus thus:

...Around about them lie
great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones,
their skin all shriveled up. Use wax to plug
your sailors’ ears as you row past, so they
are deaf to them. But if you wish to hear them,
your men must fasten you to your ship’s mast
by hand and foot, straight upright, with tight ropes.
So bound, you can enjoy the Sirens’ song.

It's as if Circe is speaking to my irresistible urge to open and read Twitter at the slightest hint of boredom, warning me of the great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones, who'd done so before me. As for her firm guidance that Odysseus be bound to a mast? That's just the antecedent to today's "Never tweet."

Thus, in my moments of weakness, I open Twitter but bind myself to a metaphoric ship's mast so I cannot reply to the trolls, as tempting as it is to join the chorus of people letting their outrage loose. Some days it feels to me that half my timeline is just people posting witty and savage rejoinders to Tomi Lahren or Trump or Dana Loesch and so on. Twitter should just move all of that to a separate tab, it has become a sort of performance art.

Alexis Madrigal wrote of how he turned off retweets in his Twitter timeline and it improved for him.

Retweets make up more than a quarter of all tweets. When they disappeared, my feed had less punch-the-button outrage. Fewer mean screenshots of somebody saying precisely the wrong thing. Less repetition of big, big news. Fewer memes I’d already seen a hundred times. Less breathlessness. And more of what the people I follow were actually thinking about, reading, and doing. It’s still not perfect, but it’s much better.

Farhad Manjoo wrote that for two months he got his news only from print.

It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

Is this much different than Circe urging Odysseus to plug his mens' ears with wax? Homer got there first. I am weak so I have not gone full cold turkey on social media. Instead, I am still occasionally there, tied to the mast, flailing against self-administered bonds, listening to the Siren song. May the gods help me.

[Wilson herself recently posted a series of tweets observing something else intriguing about the Sirens, the idea that they were some sexy seductresses. Reading Wilson's translation, you realize there is no mention of the Sirens' appearances. The seduction is all in their song, and that makes them an even more appropriate metaphor for social media.]

After the Sirens, Odysseus and his men meet even more formidable adversaries. Circe foretells of an inescapable passage between Scylla and Charybdis, the original rock and a hard place. There, she says, it's best to pick the lesser of two evils and to sail closer to Scylla, a twelve-legged six-headed monster who will eat six of his men. It sounds terrible, but the alternative is allowing Charybdis to swallow his entire ship. For my money, it's the most famous leadership parable about minimizing one's losses.

Odysseus, upon hearing this, pleads to no avail.

I answered, ‘Goddess, please,
tell me the truth: is there no other way?
Or can I somehow circumvent Charybdis
and stop that Scylla when she tries to kill
my men?’

The goddess answered, ‘No, you fool!
Your mind is still obsessed with deeds of war.
But now you must surrender to the gods.
She is not mortal. She is deathless evil,
terrible, wild and cruel. You cannot fight her.
The best solution and the only way
is flight.

Is Circe the best life coach, or the best life coach? She's the original Tony Robbins.

Can you read social media and emerge with your senses and emotional well-being intact? "No you fool!" We may not be able to avoid it, but at least we can heed Circe's words. "The best solution and the only way is flight."

Odysseus and his men proceed as Circe warns, and, tied to the mast, our titular hero hears the song of the Sirens.

‘Odysseus! Come here! You are well-known
from many stories! Glory of the Greeks!
Now stop your ship and listen to our voices.
All those who pass this way hear honeyed song,
poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy,
and they go on their way with greater knowledge,
since we know everything the Greeks and Trojans
suffered in Troy, by gods’ will; and we know
whatever happens anywhere on earth.’

Their song was so melodious, I longed
to listen more. I told my men to free me.
I scowled at them, but they kept rowing on.

What is this but the siren song of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all the other addictive apps on our phones, luring us with the comforting and self-affirming dopamine hits of likes and followers and readers. "...they go on their way with great knowledge since we know everything...and we know whatever happens anywhere on earth" is nothing if not the tagline for Twitter written in another age (copyright Homer).

"Their song was so melodious, I longed to listen more." My Siren is my iPhone, always within arms reach, always with the promise of "greater knowledge." Have I been disciplined and avoided its call? Not always. And like Odysseus, who does end up losing six men to Scylla, I've lost a few chunks of flesh along the way.

I do have a few long posts incubating, however, which I hope to finish soon. In the meantime, a bit of catch up.

***

I was lucky enough to be invited onto two podcasts, both of which were recorded in person during my recent trip to New York City for meetings and to visit family. The first was Khe Hy's Rad Awakenings podcast. The second was the Internet History Podcast hosted by Brian McCullough. I didn't have a book or anything to promote, so they're both a bit free-ranging, as I am here. Check them out if you're interested and let me know what you think.

It's fascinating to watch the explosion in podcasts, and it's somewhat apparent when you see how easy it is to record one with just a computer and two small microphones. Given the economics of text are so lousy, and given how challenging it is to produce compelling video, the most lucrative vector for media companies is not a pivot to video but a pivot to podcasting. Every day it seems a media company is releasing a new daily news podcast recap.

In time, the marginal return will decline, but perhaps not before we see a second wave of growth in podcasting's total addressable market (TAM) from improved discovery (the first explosion in podcasting TAM was, of course, the rise of the smartphone, which opened up a ton of podcast surface area in one's daily schedule, most notably in commutes).

***

I kid not, one of the most fascinating videos I've watched since I last posted here was this episode of Trashcast discussing Logan Paul. For some reason the original version of this video was pulled by YouTube so as of right now, this newly uploaded version has all of...63 views. It taught me more about the Logan Paul phenomenon than anything else I've read or watched, and its presentation is of a style that is extremely meta, like a young person's Vox explainer.

The temptation, when something like the Logan Paul scandal drops, is to post "Who the f*** is [Logan Paul]?" on Twitter or Facebook. I saw probably a dozen or more such posts, and while I resisted the urge, I myself had no idea who Logan Paul was until he was the latest person to take his turn in the public pillory.

I'm less interested in Logan Paul than I am in all the superstar vloggers who can turn out audiences of tens of thousands young kids everywhere they go. Their particular pull to children of that age, the visual grammar of their content, the syntax of their speech, their distribution frequency, it's all quite instructive.

One can read near-future sci-fi, or one can just spend some time with some of today's youth, who already live in the near-future. The latter is much more vivid. I spent several hours watching my nephews play Fortnite and message on Snapchat and surf on Instagram while in NYC recently, and it was as if I'd crossed over through some alien border into a cultural Shimmer. As with Natalie Portman, every one of my visits there leaves me altered in some inexorable ways.

***

One of my recent (okay, not so recent) posts was on the shift in entertainment from the shift to infinite content supply. I opened with a brief discussion of Will Smith.

A few readers sent me a link to this excerpt from Ben Fritz's new book The Big Picture: The Fight For the Future of Movies. The excerpt is about the rise and fall of the A-List movie stars Will Smith and Adam Sandler during Sony's motion picture heyday in the 2000's.

Of Sony's top 50 movies from 2000 to 2016, more than two-thirds were "star vehicles," in which the talent involved was as big as or bigger than the movie title or the franchise. More than one-third came from just two people: Will Smith and Adam Sandler. Movies they starred in or produced grossed $3.7 billion from 2000 to 2015, generating 20 percent of Sony Pictures' domestic gross and 23 percent of its profits. No other studio was as reliant on just two actors. Their rise and fall illustrate what has happened to movie stars in Hollywood.

...

Sony paid both stars handsomely for their consistent success: $20 million against 20 percent of the gross receipts, whichever was higher, was their standard. They also received as much as $5 million against 5 percent for their production companies, where they employed family and friends. Sony also provided Overbrook and Sandler's Happy Madison with a generous overhead to cover expenses — worth about $4 million per year. To top it off, Sandler and Smith enjoyed the perks of the luxe studio life. Flights on a corporate jet were common. On occasion, Smith's entourage necessitated the use of two jets for travel to premieres. Knowing that Sandler was a huge sports fan, Sony regularly sent him and his pals to the Super Bowl to do publicity. Back at the Sony lot, the basketball court was renamed Happy Madison Square Garden in the star's honor. When anybody questioned the endless indulgence given to Sandler and Smith, Sony executives had a standard answer: "Will and Adam bought our houses."

I wrote:

I'm wary of all conclusions drawn about media in the scarcity age, including the idea that people went to see movies because of movie stars. It's not that Will Smith isn't charismatic. He is. But I suspect Will Smith was in a lot of hits in the age of scarcity in large part because there weren't a lot of other entertainment options vying for people's attention when Independence Day or something of its ilk came out, like clockwork, to launch the summer blockbuster season.

The same goes for the general idea that any one star was ever the chief engine for a film's box office. If the idea that people go see a movie just to see any one star was never actually true, we can stop holding the modern generation of movie stars to an impossible standard.

Of course, this is a counterfactual, so hard to establish conclusively. Perhaps, in the age of scarcity, A-List stars really did exist. Regardless, that age has passed, and banking on its continued viability is a shaky proposition at best.

A further thought, which I first made in a presentation at a Greylock Product Summit a few years back, is that the rising supply of content means that exceeding the noise floor favors a different type of film or television property. In the heyday of the three and eventually four major networks, the golden age of broadcast television, the dream show was one with broad appeal. The economics of television were heavily dependent on advertising revenue, and the larger the audience, the larger the revenue. A show like The Cosby Show or The Beverly Hillbillies, that attracted a broad audience through a sort of non-offensive if somewhat bland sensibility was the dream.

Again, though, it's important to recall how scarce entertainment options were in that age relative to today's cornucopia. It isn't just the economics of carriage fees and pay TV that helped drive the rise of much more distinctive and niche appeal shows like Mad Men; it's what you'd expect when the overall information noise floor rises. The risk of trying to make a broad appeal show is that it is mildly appealing to many people but not strongly appealing to any audience segment, and that is a losing strategy if the noise floor is so high that only high appeal shows can poke their head above it.

Is it any surprise that two of the most successful showrunners in recent history are Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy? Watch any of their programs and, whether you like them or not, you won't fault them for pulling their punches. Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, American Horror Story, Nip/Tuck, Glee, The People Vs. O.J. Simpson, these are programs that are engineered to mash people's buttons.

Two of the bigger hits of recent memory that aren't from either of those two showrunners are Empire and This is Us. The former was, like many of Rhimes and Murphy's shows, crazy. Double crosses, murders, affairs, all of it. Cray cray. As for This is Us, I watched two episodes with my sister-in-law while in NYC, and while it might seem to fit the template of a more classic, broad appeal broadcast network show, it is bonkers in its own way. Its genre is melodrama, and the episode design is a tear-jerker in every episode. Every one. No exceptions. If you are a writer on that show and your episode doesn't the audience cry they fire you and then everyone has a good cry over it.

In a world of infinite content, the ideal bundle, then, isn't a basket of broadly appealing programs, something that may be impossible to engineer anymore. Instead, it's a bundle of shows with very strong niche appeal to particular but different audience segments. This, as many of you will note, is not some new concept. The conditions have just made it a more critical one.

In the Hollywood Reporter, Marc Bernardin observes the success of films like Wonder Woman, Get Out, Black Panther, and Coco, and notes:

No, the reason we're in the midst of a halcyon age of representational storytelling that's resonating on a historic scale is that a far more diverse pool of storytellers — black filmmakers, female filmmakers, Asian filmmakers — are getting empowered to tell their stories their way with all the resources usually reserved for white, male creatives. Black Panther isn't just the story of a handsome prince taking the throne of a fictional, advanced African nation, it's also the story of a filmmaker reckoning with the disconnect that lives in the hyphen between "African" and "American." It's about a man who grew up around women of strength and grace and power who didn't think twice about populating both his art and his set with those same kinds of women. It's about a kid from Oakland dreaming dreams that the world told him he couldn't.

Similarly, Thor: Ragnarok would never have been both a balls-out buddy comedy with a perfectly timed anus joke and a trenchant examination of the paved-over sins of colonial expansion without the half-Maori New Zealander Taika Waititi at the helm. And we have proof positive of how Jenkins' centering of Diana in Wonder Woman is different from Zack Snyder's treatment of the same character in Justice League: More openness, innocence and resolve … fewer gratuitous shots of Gal Gadot's ass.

And there's no one who could've conceived of Get Out but Peele, who spent years exploring the ways race and genre collide on TV's Key & Peele, is a student of horror and has definitely found himself navigating the frothy waters of meeting a white girlfriend's parents for the first time.

The way forward isn't simply to decide to greenlight stories about diverse people. It's to cultivate a generation of writers, directors and producers who see the world through their own unique lens and then bring that perspective to bear. If Marvel didn't have someone like Nate Moore in its producer ranks, someone who knew who T'Challa was and what he could mean, you'd never get a Black Panther. If Pixar didn't elevate story artist Adrian Molina to co-director and co-writer, Coco might've seemed more like a Day of the Dead theme park ride than a haunting, heartbreaking exaltation of Dia de los Muertos.

What audiences are responding to, in every movie that's popped in the past year, is a sense of truth. Just as we can tell, somehow, when CG is spackled on a little too heavily, we can sense when something feels inauthentic. We can tell the difference between 12 Years a Slave and Amistad, between The Joy Luck Club and The Last Samurai, between Selma and Mississippi Burning. One of them feels true — and truth, ultimately, is what makes something universal.

I believe in the power of film as a medium, and so it's no surprise that I believe in the underrated power of representation. It's not underrated by those of us who've never seen ourselves on screen, but I recall talking to some white men about Wonder Woman, and they remarked how they didn't see what the fuss was about. I couldn't help but think of the group of women I saw Wonder Woman with; half of them left the theater in tears, the experience of watching a woman on screen was so viscerally moving. I think of the Mexican family seated next to me at a screening of Coco, who spent half the film sobbing audibly.

The only Asian men, let alone Chinese men, I saw on screen growing up were Mickey Rooney's bucktoothed caricature of a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles. If you've ever wondered why Bruce Lee is a near deity to Chinese men, it's simply that he was the only powerful representation of themselves they ever saw in American entertainment.

The archetype of almost every hero and leader I saw growing up was a white man, and it continues today, where the leadership team of almost every company in Silicon Valley is dominated by white men. Someone asked me once whether I could name a single Chinese CEO of a tech company who had been promoted into the role, rather than having founded the company. I couldn't think of one.

It's a blessing to me, then, that the age of infinite content has made culturally specific and truthful representation good business practice for Hollywood. I'd prefer we arrived by some more progressive route, but, as Russian writer Viktor Pelevin has noted, the chief protagonist of pop culture today is a briefcase of money. We've seen many a film with a whitewashed cast bomb recently, and it doesn't strike me as a coincidence. When we have an near infinite supply of content at our disposal, no one needs to settle for the bland, the milquetoast, the emotionally false.

***

In that same post about the shifting dynamics of entertainment in the age of abundance, I wrote about the Instagram account House of Highlights. Fast Company cited it in an article about House of Highlights.

The past week, I've been watching carefully to see which outlet picks up March Madness buzzer-beaters the quickest, and it is, more often than not, House of Highlights on which I see the first video replay.

Social networks go through several phases of evolution on their path to maturity. First, they need to get people to use it even when the graph is sparse. This is the single-player value problem. If they solve that, then the next efficient evolution is some sort of feed, usually populated by all content from people you follow. It's the easiest way to increase the surface area for each user, and it's the easiest way to amplify your service's network effects. The only way to increase a user's frequency of usage is to increase the volume of content to serve them, and aggregating content from all the people you follow is a simple way to personalize the feed, to create value for the lurkers who want to watch but not post, and to send addictive feedback signals to the creators of that content. It's the tried and true social network positive feedback loop.

Then, at some point, if the network is successful enough, the problem becomes one of too much content. This is typically when networks move from a chronological, exhaustive feed to an algorithmic feed on some relevance dimension. It's typically when some segment of early adopters complains about the loss of said chronological feed.

The algorithmic feed is social networks' counterpart to Inbox Zero. Social networks realized that an "inbox zero" solution to social network overload would never work; too few people would do the necessary work. Arguably, Inbox Zero has about the same adoption issue with regards to email.

GMail has a version of the algorithmic email inbox, it's the Important email box, and various other programs have tried to filter out unimportant emails from the inbox using a variety of strategies, but I'd be interested to see software go even a step further and prescribe more drastic measures for solving the signal-to-noise problem of that medium. If you're rich and powerful that solution is a stern administrative assistant but we've yet to scale that with AI. The closest I've come is my GMail's spam filter. I went in there recently and found a bunch of email I had actually subscribed to, but while the false positives were mildly annoying, I couldn't argue my life was harmed in any meaningful way. If you're waiting to hear from me, you're probably in my GMail spam folder, for some reason it's become increasingly aggressive.

Content services tend to try their own filtering solutions, tailored to their medium. Video streaming services use some mix of personalized and generic categorical recommendations to populate their interfaces, while news sites lean towards some matrix of chronology and importance overlaid with light categorization. Common to all of these is an acknowledgment that users don't tend to browse sideways through interfaces when exploring through the limited screen real estate of the smartphone screen, so maximizing relevance on a single infinitely scrolling interface window is the most profitable vector. Is it any surprise every video service seems to have autoplay turned on by default now?

This is all a roundabout way to say that House of Highlights will someday soon hit bump against the the limitations of the single news feed, despite all of that interface's advantages in aggregating eyeballs for content consumption and advertising on a smartphone screen. Like all providers, House of Highlights depends on the algorithm to push its content to people at the right time, and for those users to pull the content. I suspect that the next frontier for all these large and mature social networks is additional levels of in-feed structure.

We've already seen glimpses. The idea of stories, which made its first appearance in Instagram, solve the supply-side problem of social media. That is, in an exhaustive chronological feed, many users are shy about flooding the feed. This caps content supply.

Stories, by putting the onus on the viewer to pull the story, unlocks a flood of content. Post frequently, guilt-free! I'd guess that the demand on that content is limited, but paired with the regular algorithmic or chronological feed, you essentially create two marketplaces of content in one interface.

Instagram now allows multiple photos per post, another example of added structure. But for now, the algorithms largely restrict themselves to either choosing to display a piece of content or not. It's all candidate selection.

I suspect the next breakthrough for all our most used mobile apps, all of whom have achieved massive scale, from Facebook to Instagram to Twitter to YouTube to Snapchat and so on, will be an evolution of the algorithm beyond pure content selection, and an evolution of the presentation of said content from into a broader array of templates.

It's a topic for another post.

***

Justin Fox of Bloomberg posted a piece related to my post and its discussion of brittle narratives. He notes that some folks have tried to address the problem of brittle narratives when it comes to sports. As an example, he links a video from Ben Falk's Cleaning the Glass, a popular new subscription service for basketball junkies from a former NBA front office staffer.

Writes Fox:

As with my experience in reading about and then watching UVA's Pack Line, it is also a reminder that there are narratives to sports events that go deeper than what can be plausibly condensed into standard highlight reels, and that casual viewers can be taught to appreciate them. I really am not much of a basketball fan, but Falk's explainer makes me want to observe James in action over extended periods to see if I can detect other such episodes of quiet brilliance. I probably won't; I've got way too many other things going on to add regular watching of the Cleveland Cavaliers to my schedule. But I am at least thinking about it.

In soccer, the sport I watch most on TV except in years when the Oakland A's are good, the highlight moments are so rare that you really can't appreciate the games unless you have some understanding (mine is admittedly pretty rudimentary and inarticulate) of the dramas playing out on the field between the scores and near-misses. In other sports, there have always been a few announcers who capably weave these background narratives into their work. I know Tim McCarver was driving most viewers crazy by the time he retired from calling baseball games in 2013, but I can remember him adding layer after layer to the game-watching experience in earlier years. From what I hear (I really don't watch much football), former Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo did that in his first go-round as an NFL analyst for CBS last season.

Right now, basketball seems to be generating the most such explanation, though. Maybe that's just because it's basketball season! But I also think there's a happy convergence of the sport's usually-in-motion nature; the emergence of a group of expert, articulate superfans that probably began with the rise of Bill Simmons; the NBA's willingness to accommodate superfans who know how to splice video; and the presence of stars who are not only very smart about the game (I imagine most basketball stars have always been that) but also willing and able to explain how it's played with startling clarity (a friend pointed me to Simmons's series of interviews with the Warriors' Kevin Durant, and what I've heard so far is pretty amazing). 1 If sports are in fact in a battle with narrative brittleness, this is how you fight it.

He hits on something important. All the sports leagues have to deal with an onboarding problem with their televised content, and that is the learning curve of appreciation. If you haven't grown up watching and/or playing a sport, it's difficult to appreciate a lot of the moment to moment skill on display in any sporting event.

I did not grow up playing soccer, so I find so much of it boring to watch outside of the occasional spectacular goal. The ability of a team to keep possession, the skill of a single player like Messi to evade a gauntlet of defenders, so much of that skill is lost on me. The same goes for hockey, or cricket, or so many sports I didn't grow up with.

On the other hand, while many find baseball unbelievably boring, I played growing up, and so even a pitch that isn't swung is seen, by me, as one in a fascinating game theory exchange between pitcher and batter. One of the most exciting plays of the 2016 World Series to me was when Kyle Schwarber laid off a tantalizing slider from Andrew Miller because I knew what a great pitch it was and how much skill it took to not offer at it. For most viewers, it was just another ball, another twenty seconds of inconsequential activity.

The Olympics face this problem in spades because they include so many niche sports, but luckily for them, many of the events are short in nature, and the nature of the contest easily explained. When it isn't, the networks lean heavily on personal narrative, something that almost all viewers understand. We can debate until eternity whether Alina Zagitova or Evgenia Medvedeva deserved the gold medal in the women's figure skating final, but it didn't take an expert on figure skating to feel the tension backstage as each skater tried to get in each other's heads.

More forward-thinking sports leagues should consider, in the future, making it easier for analysts of all sorts to provide alternative broadcast commentary for their broadcasts. I'd be shocked if it didn't happen in my lifetime. Viewing your sports as broadcast platform with API's allowing for such diversity of integrated analysis would broaden the appeal to different audiences. As it is, some audiences cobble together such alternate peanut gallery chatter from Twitter, Periscope, Facebook, and other social media. I predict leagues will start integrating this content; it makes much more sense than Twitter licensing those video rights to try to facilitate such water coolers. The water cooler is heavy, it's plugged into the wall, and it's expensive; easier to go walk over there to chat than to try to carry the water cooler over to the discussion.

Exceeding this learning curve of appreciation isn't sufficient, however. Beyond that, there still exists the problem of rendering your content more culturally relevant, at this moment, than anything else on a person's phone. Anyone who's sat across from someone, only to see that their companion turn their attention to a smartphone, understands this modern conundrum.

This isn't just a problem for sports. In an age where Netflix is producing some 700 original series next year, not to mention all the ones from HBO and Amazon and Hulu and FX and on and on, every content provider has to become more thoughtful and creative about how to manufacture desire on the part of the viewer. The temptation, in tech, is to use some recommendations and machine learning to pick content to present to any one viewer, but that is going to be wholly insufficient.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, they say. When what you possess is lots of software engineers gifted at crunching large data sets, everything can look like an ML problem. That leaves huge swaths of human psychology on the table. There are still so many opportunities for so many services to render their content more relevant to a larger audience, a scary proposition to those who already find so many of their apps addictive.

Again, different categories of content tend to resort to the same narrow band of strategies as their competitors, but when we live in an age where almost all content across all mediums act as substitute goods for each other, companies and creatives should be widening their net to learn from outside their category. The competition won't wrestle on your terms, the battle is asymmetric.

A full list of such strategies is a topic for another day, but I'd argue every company should be looking at everything from House of Highlights to infomercials to Buzzfeed to Disneyland theme parks to high fashion to Costco to Beyonce and Rihanna to the fine art world to YouTube vloggers like Logan Paul to the design of Fortnite to just about everything about Las Vegas to pop-up restaurants to limited edition sneaker drops to folks like Tyler Cowen and Ben Thompson.

If we, as consumers, are fighting to resist the Siren song, then on the flip side is a pitched battle to spin the Siren song that will rise above the din.

Now stop your ship and listen to our voices.
All those who pass this way hear honeyed song,
poured from our mouths.

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