The Paid Interrupt

Asian Andy became an Uber driver and livestreamed the rides. People watching online could pay to send messages that a text-to-speech voice would read inside the car, right there in front of his passengers who had no idea any of this was happening. I don’t know how long he thought about this before doing it—it feels like one of those ideas that arrives fully formed, obvious in retrospect, impossible before the fact.

The setup was straightforward. Camera in the car. Livestream running. A donation link. Every few minutes, some guy’s two-dollar message would interrupt as a robot voice: Your mother is a horse, or Eat my ass, or whatever else was being crowdsourced in real time. His passengers would jump. He’d look in the mirror and keep driving like it was part of the job.

What made it work was that he’d removed the most exhausting part of internet performance—the pressure to be interesting. He didn’t have to do anything. He just had to exist in his car while strangers paid to interrupt him. The passengers were the content. He was the straight man. The internet was just sitting in the backseat.