A Gchat with Tao Lin About His Second Life Movie, Social Anxiety and Gchat

Like his previous work, Tao Lin’s next novel, Taipei, Taiwan, is about himself, an autobiographical rendition of life in Brooklyn at the age of 28, which involves the main character visiting his parents in Taipei three times in three years. (His reward, from the publishing house Vintage, is a fifty thousand dollar advance, the first installment of which he will use, he reports, to repay a debt, and then buy “new shoes and pants”.) Tao’s experimentation with narrative, medium and self-promotion (his famous novella Shoplifting From American Apparel, a cover story about himself for Seattle’s The Stranger) doesn’t end on paper: he’s also playing around with film, through a new production house he started with his wife and a movie he’s making in the virtual world Second Life.

The idea began with the digital artists Jon Rafman and SEECOY, who received a Rhizome commission for it, then asked Lin to write the script. Titled Small Crowd Gathers to Watch Me Cry. Rafman and SEECOY will direct the film entirely in Second Life, with Tao providing the voice over.

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Here, Tao’s protagonist is a depressed writer dealing with career and romantic failure who learns of his double. That little trope intersects nicely with the medium, a world in which anyone can create an avatar, albeit one who is smarter, smoother, more attractive, furrier, and other adjectives as desired. I spoke with Tao over gchat (he’s not on Second Life) about the differences between writing screenplays and novels and how the internet is effecting human communication. (Spoiler alert: he thinks there isn’t much difference in either case.) (Though on the latter, after doing this on gchat, we respectfully disagree.)

Kelly: hello this is kelly from motherboard.tv.

Tao: hi, do you want to do the interview now? i’ll be here another hour or so

Kelly: sure. it shouldn’t take very long

Tao: k i’m ready

Kelly: okay great so first can you just get me an overview of your project ascgtwmc? i know you received a rhizome commission

Tao: I’m writing the script, which is currently in its 2nd draft. SEECOY and Jon Rafman are doing everything else. They’re filming the entire thing in Second Life, I think. It’ll be ~15 minutes, but my script also outlines a lot more, and it could potentially be feature-length, if the short generates interest. It’s about a depressed writer who doesn’t make money from his writing except for a copy-editing company he’s trying to make succeed. But so far he’s only garnered a job from a shoe-padding company, to write their website. Currently he’s living off his girlfriend’s money, the relationship is failing, then one day he hears on the radio that they’ve discovered “another” of him. Reporters come to talk to him to ask what he thinks of this, and to say that the “other” of him wants to meet him. Eventually the reporters come to process as fact that the original is actually the “other” one.

me: okay, so that’s the basic plot. and this will all be acted out within second life?

Tao: Yeah. I’m not sure of the specifics, Jon Rafman and SEECOY are doing it, but I think each character will be controlled by a person, and they’ll have a script of what to do within Second Life.

Two early test shots from the film.

me: will the characters you’ve created in the script interact with other, unknowing, characters within second life?

Tao: I’m not sure. Based on how the script is (the main character is sort of “lost” and inattentive all the time due to long-term depression) I feel like it would be funny for all the other characters to interact with unknowing characters, like whenever they aren’t engaged with the main character.

me: the plot and the means of producing the script seem to bring up some interesting questions. the main character learns of a “double” but then finds out that he is, in fact, the double. how do you think this relates to the concept of online personas? the creation of a persona in second life (or through social media) that begins to dominate a person’s personality effectively becoming most “real”

Tao: I don’t think that’s notable to me. I feel like it’s similar to how people act differently around different people and in different situations. In that
sense it’s the same kind of thing that has always happened. In terms of the main character discovering a “double” of himself I view that mostly as a science-fiction-type gimmick, not as a commentary on virtual worlds.

me: you don’t feel the anonymity afforded by the internet and the ability that people have in virtual worlds such as second life to create an idealized depiction of themselves is distinct from humans just naturally acting differently around different peers? i mean maybe it’s not, wholly. I guess maybe it’s just an extreme extension

Tao: I think it’s an extreme extension. I think it’s different and interesting but I feel like I don’t feel like thinking about it beyond that. I used to play a text-based MUD called Gemstone III. You would type “e” and push enter and move “east” then there would be text describing the area you were in.

me: i find programs like second life interesting because they provide, among other things, a space for people with social anxieties to find a social outlet in the trailer for your film the script notes that you read speak a lot to the character’s depression and social anxiety

Tao: I like how Second Life can allow people with social anxiety to communicate with other people more easily also.

me: and gchat

Tao: And just the internet in general, I feel.

me: gchat features prominently in a lot of your works do you think this is a good thing? do you think technology provides us with better tools for connection or erodes real-life interaction?

Tao: I don’t think it’s good or bad. If you define a context and a goal I could say if a specific thing seems to be good or bad. If the goal is to convey information to another person, and both people have crippling social anxiety, then they will be more effective at that on Gmail chat than in real life, so in that situation it would be good. For example. But everyone has different goals, it’ll be good or bad to different people at different times depending on their current goals.

me: i don’t mean to ask such a canned question. it just seems that the content of much of your work revolves around these issues in such an important way

Tao: I don’t think it’s important. If you removed all mentions of computers or technology or the internet and replaced them with swords and horses and letters or verbal dialogue I would not view the book that differently, in terms of what I want from the book. Most of my favorite books were written before the internet existed. I’m interested in humans, and I don’t think that humans change psychologically, as a species, except maybe like over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. A person born today has the same DNA as a person born 2000 years ago, I think, or something like that.

me: that’s an interesting approach. perhaps one that goes against current pop psychology

Tao: I think, generally, the media is focused on time-sensitive things but most writing that people view as “literary” is focused on things that are relevant regardless what century it’s happening. Which makes it difficult to, like, do interviews with writers who are writing contemporary things and not leaving out those contemporary things. I feel like SEECOY and Jon Rafman would have a lot to say about Second Life and internet/technology-related questions. You could email them some questions. I think Jon Rafman is like one of the leading experts on Second Life, or something.

me: hah. yeah i will do that I’m not an expert by any means. I’ve never created a character or played the game

Tao: Neither have I.

me: is this the first script you’ve written?

Tao: Yes.

me: have you found it a very different experience from novels and poetry?

Tao: I think I just wrote it the same as I would a story, but wrote “VOICE OVER” instead of “he thought” and put brackets around actions and no quotation marks around dialogue. So, I think, no, not really.

me: yeah. i guess you didn’t really have to write in scenery because that will all be produced by your collaborators

Tao: yeah I usually don’t describe scenery in my other writing anyway already.

me: you prefer to focus on character interactions? or you prefer the setting to be relatively vague?

Tao: I care more about the characters than the setting.

me: how do you think the main character in this screenplay compares to sam in shoplifting from american apparel? he’s also depressed with a failed relationship and is a struggling writer

Tao: They’re similar. The main character in this script is based on Brandon Scott Gorrell, though, a real person, with his permission. Some of the VOICE OVER parts are his writings. He writes and is an editor for Thought Catalog and I published his first poetry collection two years ago.

me: oh that’s interesting

Tao: He might do some of the voices.

me: so it’s a real person interpreted through fiction then translated into a virtual world. did you just approach him and ask if you could base your character on him? [just cut me off when you need to go]

Tao: We’re friends. We talk probably 3 to 4 times a week on the internet (he lives in Seattle) and have worked on a lot of things before. I had been basing the character on him in the beginning without using his name, then just emailed him asking if he’d like if I just used his actual name as the characters’ name, and he said he would like that.

me: have you ever met him in real life?

Tao: We’ve met something like 6 times in 5 years, I think.