By Helaina Hovitz

Photo by Stephanie Mei-Ling

Last Thursday, April 4, an Internet Week New York preview party was held at Design Within Reach’s newly renovated Soho Studio at 110 Greene Street.

Eventually, 400 guests mingled easily as they sipped on ginger-flavored cocktails and Saporo beer, but those who arrived painfully on time at 7 p.m. were faced with an awkward, half hour free-for-all in the enormous space, not sure where to go or what to do, likely appearing, to those looking in, to be shopping for furniture.

“I didn’t know what to expect or what to do when I got here. It feels really insider-y,” said Lisa Niedermeyer, whose nonprofit, Fractured Atlas, hopes to host a panel called Revenge of the Art Geek. “I think they kind of assume you were here last year.”

Though it was never explained to the crowd trickling in, the main aim of the party was to get people to vote for the festival’s panel entrants, 228 in all (voting will remain open through April 10th at InternetWeekNY.com). Promising contenders include “Will The Internet Save the Publishing Industry?” “I’m Tired of Being So White” and “Combating Device Schizophrenia: Get Your Message Heard Across Screens.”

Photo by Stephanie Mei-Ling

A DJ spinning trippy futuristic songs eventually abandoned his post and joined the crowd shortly before 8:30 p.m., when a preview panel called Sex, Drugs, Drones, and Codes was set to begin. The panel was kicked off by Daniel Pinchback, editorial director of website Reality Sandwich and author of Breaking Open the Head. Pinchback briefly talked about the resurgence of the Internet in psychedelics, highlighting the ways in which the Internet is “fostering a psychedelic renaissance.”

Next up was Matt Stinchcomb, former employee of Soho’s Rockstar Games and currently Etsy’s VP of Brand & Social Responsibility, who preferred to keep his Internet Week panel a secret but did his best to garner interest, saying, “I’m not gonna tell you what it’s about, but you guys are really gonna like it.”

Brian Anderson, an editor for Motherboard, proceeded to give a speech on drones that honed in on the lack of attention given to the topic. “More people are losing sleep and commenting on articles about chocolate milk than non-consensual surveillance,” he said.

“It’s compelling to see him so passionate about it, but at the end you’re like, what exactly is a drone?” said one baffled audience member to her date.

A drone is, by simplest definition, an unmanned aircraft or other floating device used for surveillance and bomb/missile launching, but can also be something like “that stupid little vacuum robot,” Anderson explained.

Ears perked up during columnist Kelly Bourdet’s panel run-down, which will be, essentially, on pornography. “Everyone — well, many people –  watch porn, and yet it’s not part of our every day conversation. The panel will discuss how the Internet proliferates porn and how it affects us,” she said, adding that the first picture to ever be uploaded to the Internet was a Playboy centerfold. “Iceland wants to make porn illegal. What do we want to do about this medium, as children, teens, and adults?” she posed rhetorically to the audience.

Her panel will also discuss how technology affects our modern day relationships.

Co-presented by Made in New York, the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and Crain Communications, Internet Week is a weeklong event headquartered at the Metropolitan Pavilion (125 West 18th Street). There will also be Meetups, exhibits, screenings, parties, and more taking place at venues across the city. Vice Media will curate an expanded panel and classroom series exploring hot-button topics like sex, drugs, drones, pirating, and social media reporting from conflict zones. Flagship events like the 17th Annual Webby Awards, The Webutante Ball, and Time Inc.’s 10 NYC Startups to Watch will be joined by a roster of new partners participating in the festival for the first time.

Big name speakers will include WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, Executive Vice President of NBC Universal Lauren Zalaznick, and, for some reason, Joan Rivers.

The event is expected to draw 45,000 people to 400 panels and will, hopefully, impress one of the panelists’ more critical members.

“I think it’s silly to have a week where we talk about the Internet,” said Anderson after closing out the panel preview. “It’s what we do every day.”

A new age of equality is upon us, “losers,” and it’s time to start winning.

The Internet has for a long time been a great place for people to vent their literary frustrations, along with any other complaint they might have about anything. There’s perhaps no better platform for this than Tumblr. The English Grad Student Shaming Tumblr—tagline: “Because We Are The Worst”—recently cropped up on my radar as a place for people who look eerily similar to confide they find Shakespeare boring or haven’t actually read a single classic or still don’t know MLA style despite their PhD status.

When I came across SlushPile Hell—tagline: “One grumpy literary agent, a sea of query fails, and other publishing nonsense”—my mind jumped to a man with whom I formerly interned, one particularly curmudgeonly literary agent who bestowed upon me the responsibility of helping him avoid his clients, before he stopped showing up to his office altogether.

This agent devotes his Tumblr to query letters from amateur “authors” who have zero clue how to break into the game, and seemingly no self-awareness of which to speak.

On SlushPile Hell, the agent recounts particularly absurd, inane query notes that look like this: Dear agent, how are you? The Lord spoke to me again and instructed me to give you a continuation of the last manuscript I sent you. He then follows them up with his own commentary about how clueless these folks are.

A friend of mine who works closely with authors confirms this agent’s frustrations and those of my former “boss.” Authors—like anyone, though perhaps slightly more intensely, as creative types are wont to be—are crazy. There’s no comprehensive guide on how to be a successful author and those who wish to make it in the field are tossed around mercilessly by many brutal forces. Often these individuals get their preposterous ideas about publishing from the media, from films or television, even from books themselves and, sadly, probably just as often live their lives never hearing a peep from an agent, let alone a publisher, or, maybe worse, succumbing to the schemes of a vanity press (forking over loads of money to self-publish with no guarantee of returns or readership). They reach out an unsolicited hand for help and are met with public ridicule and disillusionment (depending on their level of self-delusion).

But they’re crazy, right?

I can’t help but empathize. Who but the most savvy of individuals hasn’t at some point reached out with a glimmer of hope only to be knowingly shot down as pathetic or never acknowledged at all? What hope is there for these fledgling artists (besides reading my past column on how to get published) when, frankly, even the most well-intentioned advice might not help them in this callous world?

I think the answer lies in the 21st century’s great equalizer. Yes, debates about Internet access equality and free networks aside, this is the time for losers to take their lives back.

Take to the Internet and get revenge, “losers.” The losing game is over. Start your own Tumblr. Garner a likeminded following. Your following is out there and it won’t be located in the office of an uppity, narrow-minded literary agent who sees only dollar signs. When you get big enough, wait for the opportunities to start rolling in. This isn’t the age of get up, get out and make it happen, it’s the age of reconsidering—and updating—your strategy.

Perhaps “the Lord,” or whomever, never intended you to be published by, say, Simon & Schuster. Perhaps his plan was different, but no worse. Maybe you don’t know about the Internet beyond email. In fact, chances are you don’t. But a new age of equality is upon us, “losers,” and it’s time to start winning. For all the losers past who never got a chance to leave their mark, for all the non-Shakespeares history churned out for every Shakespeare, it’s time to fill cyberspace with your respective virtual marks.

Mark Baumer’s resolution was 50 shades of absurd…or was it?

Mark Baumer, of Providence, RI, is a literary inspiration of sorts. Baumer wrote 50 books this past year, which is an impressive feat if only for his steadfast dedication to the task. It didn’t start out so straightforward though. Indeed, it started out with a humiliating dose of failure.

In January of last year, Baumer, who has in the past walked across America and blogged about the experience, launched a Kickstarter campaign asking for $50,000 to fund his 50-books-in-a-year endeavor. He had never previously written or published a book. His funding campaign ultimately crashed and burned; he raised less than four percent of his total goal.

After his ultimately unsuccessful attempt at a foray into the world of book publishing, Baumer had all but given up on the project. Baumer’s friends weren’t going to let him off so easy though; they kept asking what had happened to his books.

“I got tired of people asking me if I was ever going to write fifty books in a year,” Baumer wrote on his website, fiftynovels.com. Saddled with an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and a sizable ego, he couldn’t handle the feeling that he had failed.

“My goal/mindset was basically to write every book in the world,” he explained. Baumer said he didn’t want to die being the guy who always talked about writing 50 books but never actually did it.

Beginning in June, Baumer started writing. By the year’s end he was finished.

Baumer decided to release all the books, with titles like Someone Who Did Something  and  A Milk That Drank an Infant, incrementally online and free of charge to his readers.

When it comes to setting — and accomplishing — goals, Baumer occupies an extreme end of the spectrum.

In the day and age of increasingly egalitarian Internet art, which favors the shocking and absurd, and in which every nook and cranny of cyberspace houses a minor celebrity on the verge of fading back into insignificance, Baumer is not exactly unusual.

In most cases though, it’s probably not wise to treat your endeavors as though you’re going to die at any moment. (The Protagonist by no means endorses writing as though you’re swiftly going to die, especially for the casual writer.)

However, there’s nothing earth-shattering about the advice to set practical goals for the new year either. I could regurgitate a couple: Set aside some time for writing everyday. Balance “trashy books” with highbrow ones. Read a book before you see its cinematographic rendering. Read something from a Top 10 list. Join a book club. Join a writers’ workshop. Finish everything you start. Read from a genre you’re not accustomed to. Pick something you’re not sure you’ll like or an author with whom you’re unfamiliar. Pick something you know you’ll hate; it’s good for you.

This is all solid advice, I suppose, but it’s nothing new and it doesn’t set the bar very high. Frankly, doing something you think is “good for you” literarily-speaking, while not necessarily enjoying it, is a waste of time in my book. Perhaps Baumer’s anecdote is not new either, but buried somewhere within the tale of his remarkable 180 degree shift, there is an important reminder.

Yes, we can learn a lesson from the Baumers of the world, even those of us with no interest in fame — something can come of even the greatest, most public personal failure. If this is the case, surely something can come from all the small failures along the way as well. Let yourself think big; if your dream isn’t turning out the way you wanted, you can reroute and try again. The result may surprise you. If we can learn anything from Baumer, it’s to not be daunted by the task that seems too large, that by all accounts is too large. Let your friends hold you accountable for your craziest of ambitions. And, perhaps most importantly of all, almost anything is possible these days if you just keep digging into the furthest, darkest reaches of the Internet (Baumer garners a great deal of support from online literary communities.)

Be mindful of the dangers though. In a fast-paced world speckled with Baumers, we see the flip side of this democratic kind of fame. We see renowned public figures like the young and snappy Jonah Lehrer, who was publicly disgraced this year after his plagiarism and literary fabrications came to light, founder amid the demand for the next better, more ingenious thought. We want it faster than ever before. Those who cannot keep up are quickly eclipsed.

Goals should be feasible to some degree, but not at the risk of resolutions being more about limits than what is possible, about not setting ourselves up for failure; failure is inevitable. Resolutions should be about learning to recover and run with it. And when you inevitably just can’t get past some failures, when you want to scrap it all and start over, be equally comforted in knowing the world will soon forget.

He may be a law firm secretary by day, but there’s far more to the New York-based polymath who is Tony Wolf than his day job. What his law firm colleagues may not know is Wolf has a rapidly expanding page on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

Wolf is a bit of a closet internet sensation. He’s a comedic short film and voiceover actor, on the perpetually evolving brink of internet fame. While Wolf pushes paper by day, by night he dons eclectic costumes, explores the full potential of his voice’s pitch and tone and even partakes in the occasional, radical body modification.

Recently, he buzzed his head and dyed the stubble grey, even giving himself a fake bald spot and receding hairline, for a role as the late Steve Jobs, never knowing if the video would go anywhere. Known in part in his niche community for his voluminous locks, Wolf foreshadowed this move in a song he improvised and recorded in 2007 called “The Faux Hawk Song.” The 41-year-old, occasionally curmudgeonly, Greenpoint resident lets it be known he has ambivalent feelings toward hipsters, to whom he attributes the hairstyle’s popularity.

In fact, the first thing that landed Long Island-born Wolf on IMDB was his role as “Naked Abe Lincoln” for a comedic short called “Hipster Job” set in Williamsburg. This followed 12 years of stage acting after leaving college with a degree in English literature.

Now, Wolf spends nights and weekends in the “studio,” wherever that happens to be, never more than a text message away from his “producer,” Mike Turney, known fondly as “Producer Mike.” With over 40 videos under their belts, they collectively refer to themselves as “The Action Room.” Wolf has worked with other producers as well, and landed parts ranging from a commercial for the Sci-Fi channel to voiceover work hawking DVDs on VH1.

Wolf is a man wholeheartedly devoted to his art and potential for upward mobility. When it comes to self-promotion, however, he vacillates between waxing on grandiose dreams of Hollywood, Broadway and hosting the Oscars, and humbly conceding he’s “not even internet famous” yet. In the world of YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and similar platforms, however, “fame” as we’ve known it is being redefined — those 15 minutes expedited and more widely distributed, like a kind of celebrity socialism.

In the fast-paced world of comedic internet videos, Wolf says you can never be too quick with a brilliant notion. If you don’t immediately project your brainchild into cyberspace, upload it to sites like “College Humor” or “Funny or Die,” where Wolf’s videos have performed quite well and even become “featured selections,” your joke can get snatched up by the likes of comedic actor Jerry O’Connell. This happened to Wolf.

Wolf notes: O’Connell’s Tom Cruise Scientology spoof may have gotten more of the limelight than his, but comedian Patton Oswalt personally sent Wolf’s producer two separate emails, saying Wolf’s version was “way funnier.”

It’s not just about speed, though speed is imperative — Wolf says the most successful videos never go on too long — it’s also about nailing the jokes. Describing a particular shoot, Wolf says: “We did about 10 takes and you would think the last would be the best, but it was in fact the penultimate take we used.”

Like the Tom Cruise video released several years ago, Wolf’s roles are almost always relevant to popular culture and current affairs. Most recently he acted in a short parodying Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s famously colorless addresses to New Yorkers during Hurricane Sandy’s rampage. In Wolf’s artistic rendition, Bloomberg’s ASL interpreter — who gained an internet following of her own for being animated and “hot” — gets frisky with the Mayor.

The chameleonic Wolf has also taken on Donald Trump, Daniel Day-Lewis and even Hitler. Wolf derives some of the greatest joy from reactions by strangers and friends alike to his imitations and likenesses, but this internet “celebrity” is not too proud to glitter a bit when his parents — including a father known around his hometown for his striking good looks — fawn over his parodic performances as well.

Wolf often even gets double-takes on the street from people who think he’s Matt Lauer, Will Arnett or, perhaps, a mysteriously young Bob Saget.

“My agent tried to get me seen for Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” says Wolf. “Okay, manager who functions as an agent.” For an internet actor like Wolf, the promotion and production process are often fairly makeshift.

Wolf does a lot of his own promotion via, naturally, the internet. He’s snatched up all the domains he can, but unfortunately, “TonyWolf.com is taken already by a Christian, fundamental-seeming inspirational speaker, singer and comedy guy,” explains Wolf.

He adds: “He’s also an illustrator. He’s like 60 and bald and midwestern. It’s very weird that he and I have a lot of the same talents.”

“Maybe when I become super-famous I can buy TonyWolf.com away from Other Christian Tony Wolf,” he says, with an edge of hope.

Check out more Tony Wolf at tonywolfactor.com.