Liz Ryerson is a multi-disciplinary artist, critic, game designer, and electronic musician, based in New York City. Vicky Osterweil is a writer whose forthcoming book, The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World, will be published by Haymarket in early 2026.

LR  There are many places we could start when discussing art in the digital media age, but do you want to begin by talking about your new book?

VO  The book is called The Extended Universe: How Disney Destroyed the Movies and Took Over the World (2026), and it tries to answer two questions: why do all superhero movies feel the same, and why did Disney send lawyers to stop the Biden administration from sharing the Covid-19 vaccine with the developing world. It argues that both questions have the same answer: intellectual property protection. I’m trying to think through the way that IP and copyright have been formative to, but ultimately destructive of current mass culture. This has intersecting aesthetic, social, political, fandom-based and corporate legal effects. I tell that story while also giving a history of the Disney corporation, with each chapter linked to a reading of a different Disney movie through the lens of IP and the company’s history at that moment. This allows me to talk about things like soft power, cultural imperialism, and the invention of authorship and ownership. You can see from the very beginning that Disney is extremely obsessed with IP management. The reason Walt formed his own company in the first place is that he had an extremely popular character before Mickey Mouse called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which his producer took from him when they fired him from the project. 

Left, a Zelda village; right, a contemporary rural Japanese village

LR There’s a Simpsons episode about that dispute. I’m in the video game space, so my comparison point is Nintendo, which is the Disney analogue in so many ways. They do similar, very controlled IP management, and have much in common aesthetically. Zelda, in particular, has so many similarities, with the pastoral, idealised, lost world it captures. I read an interview with a Nintendo spokesperson where he talks about how the design of Zelda was inspired by rural Japan and a way of life that doesn’t exist anymore due to industrialisation. He said, “Well, now you can experience it with Zelda.”

VO Both Disney and Nintendo achieve a certain cultural dominance by being slightly better than the competition and really aestheticising it, making it cute and touching on nostalgia. One of the arguments of the book is that this nostalgic IP management now has a total monopoly on culture, and it’s had disastrous effects. All competitors now play by the Disney rulebook. The week after Barbie had its huge opening, Mattel announced they were opening an amusement park in Arizona. 

LR Are Disney still pushing their movies in China? 

VO It’s not just Disney. China is the most important single market to Hollywood, maybe more than the US, because the Chinese market is still expanding. In China, there has been a push for its domestic film industry to overtake the US, especially since Covid-19. They’ve been making better movies, and the US is making worse movies, partly because in a monopoly, the product gets worse and worse. But Hollywood still dominates in China and still makes a huge percentage of its box office take there. These dynamics will only get weirder as the Trump administration attempts to put tariffs on foreign films.

LR I was watching a clip of a right-wing figure admitting that Zohran Mamdani’s policies are actually far more “America First” than the right-wing political establishment is. You have a traditionally nationalist rhetoric, but there’s no interest in building up industries or even soft power, cultural media, which are by far our biggest and most effective export. I think the term “End times fascism,” which Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor use, works well because it’s a billionaire-driven phenomenon by the niche groups in power. It’s designed to fall apart. We’re at a point where our awareness of what culture is, how it is made, and our curiosity towards it have so completely dissolved into capital.

VO The right-wing movement and billionaires in general have unified around a certain political position as their monopolies’ growth has become less sustainable. I think their political imaginary is from the 1870s, that Gilded Age imaginary of total political power over the workplace and the family. Culturally, people saw how in 2016, Trump was incredibly entertaining and effective at using culture and social media to come to power. He was, objectively, the best poster in history: he literally rode posting to the White House. He’s washed now; he’s lost the juice. He no longer understands the basis of his appeal. The regime has been taken over by social media personalities and people with absolutely bananas economic theories. They don’t understand any longer how culture supports their project. 

LR They grew up with American hegemony but didn’t understand why it was the way it was. They’ve lost any sense of connection because hegemonic American culture is mostly stuff they’re resentful towards. Most of the right wing doesn’t make culture; they make punditry. Even right-wing country music is so degraded. It’s not just them – so many institutions, like the New York Times, don’t see the interest in fomenting culture much either because they have become so interested in protecting their status and class position as cultural authorities.

VO The New York Times makes money from Wordle and cooking subscriptions. Culture has become a loss leader for them. It’s the same way Amazon worked. The entire philosophy of the tech industry is that you light money on fire until you have so much market share that you become profitable. It’s a Ponzi scheme. Of course, it’s a myth that capitalism was ever built on supply and demand; that it was ever built on anything other than extractive violence and scams to move money around. We know it’s all about profit on some level. But even so, we’re in this period of real capitalist decadence. 

LR It reminds me of “vice signalling”. Think of a 2010s music video where Justin Bieber is walking around a mansion with DJ Khaled. You’re watching to see how rich they are. Even great musicians like Beyoncé, most of the interest is about her outfits or Jay-Z. 

VO I think about blockbuster movies and AAA video games as cathedrals – the only way regular people get to see what millions and millions of dollars look like. Much like Gothic cathedrals demonstrated the emerging wealth and power of the church, these productions demonstrate corporate power. 

LR Grand Theft Auto III was the first game I think of as being fully what a AAA game is, the equivalent of a blockbuster movie. The promise is that you can go around and do whatever. Of course, in reality, you can only do a handful of things, and you end up running over pedestrians because that’s the most fun thing to do. Growing up with video games, that was part of the fantasy: this endlessly interactive experience. But what is really interesting about games is the specific limitations. The unlimited fantasy has just seeped out into our reality with the internet, but even that has its own limitations. The idea of social media being a “forever future” is funny. It’s part of the fantasy of BlueSky. People want it to be like Twitter in 2014 or 2015.

Top, an interaction menu from The Sims 4. Bottom, TikToker Nicki i Loczek, also known as @loczniki, who has accumulated over three million followers on the platform through her uncanny impersonations of video game characters.

VO But Twitter fucking sucked then! The fantasy is that if we could un-enshittify it, we would go back, but people had such bad analysis in 2011. During the Arab Spring, Occupy, the London riots, the coverage was, “Social media made this happen.” Social media was a new technology that gave people a venue for sharing information that was relatively opaque to power for about 12 months. These cultural spaces get misunderstood as having been the cause.

LR This is a problem I have with that YouTube channel, Meditations for the Anxious Mind. I used to be like that when I was younger, very much “everybody’s a chump but me.” The thing I have a problem with is, are you cutting through the bullshit with your analysis, or are you part of the bullshit that needs to be cut through? How much are you reinforcing this structure in which there is no possible future? In the 1960s counter-culture, some people thought that if they all got together and read a really good poem, the US state would collapse. Obviously, that was magical thinking, but the lesson that people took away from its failure was that art can’t be part of a meaningful political movement. That had a toxic effect on people’s ability to take art seriously, and further diminished art.

VO Our conception of counterculture derives from the 1960s, in the same way our conception of fascism is built on the Nazis. The 1960s was a moment when counterculture merged with global resistance, and at the same time the US had become the cultural hegemon. Stuart Hall has a great line, “Yesterday’s revolutionary anthem is today’s greatest hit.” I agree that some people on the left didn’t understand the power of a cultural movement that was sustaining, but if we look at the Iraq War protests, a lot of that energy came from the remnants of an alter-globalisation movement spread by punks on tour, puppet theatre, and anarchists. It’s not irrelevant. I like to remember that Adbusters – a magazine that emerged from that movement, but which was kind of an anachronism by 2011 – called for Occupy Wall Street. Their “culture jamming” style was outdated, even embarrassing, but they started the struggle that kicked off a wave of leftist organising in America.

LR Many people have decided that culture is not relevant, that it can’t change anything. The video game space has been the most interesting space politically and culturally in the last decade, but the medium itself is still struggling with basic things. There’s this feeling of, “We’re the vanguard, but we’re also behind everyone else.” Many of us who grew up with Gen X culture expected that if you worked in a culture industry, you’d get to a point of mainstream recognition. Radiohead’s Kid A (2000) was originally going to be named “No Logo”, after the book by Naomi Klein. That phenomenon, where an idea had permeated into mainstream culture to the point that one of the biggest bands in the world was going to name an album after it, just doesn’t exist anymore.

VO I think video games have been a crucial site of subject formation for the last 30 years. And I mean all of them – phone games as much as AAA or indie games. They have made us ready to be workers in a world where we have to constantly switch jobs, learn new systems quickly, and find it pleasurable to interact with them, whether it’s an Amazon warehouse scanner or an elaborate touchscreen menu. Artistically and culturally, there has been a successful revanchist, nostalgic movement with video games at large over the last few decades, but popular discussions about video games have remained limited. The role of GamerGate was the role of culture generally for a movement: the place where people met, developed the tactics they’d built on 4chan, and turned them into reproducible, scalable, memetic strategies. They continued that with campaigns against Star Wars and Ghostbusters: culture was a unifying space for organising across physical boundaries. QAnon, too, is a fundamentally cultural movement: the full realisation of an alternative reality game. 

LR Many people are disconnected from the broader cultural landscape, but when social media came around, it gave them the promise of connection. You could start a YouTube channel in your house and be part of a larger cultural space you couldn’t before. Community has become an excuse to hollow out everything else that constitutes culture. I talk to kids, and the only indie games they know are Undertale and Celeste because some big YouTuber covered them. The idea that these games are part of a larger scene does not exist for them. We’ve created a choose-your-own-reality situation, where what exists culturally is just what floats to the top through the arbitrary machinations of an algorithm. Everything is just something to be gawked at.

VO Gawking produces engagement. It drives metrics that are completely arbitrary, invented by the companies that then used them to define their own value. It’s a bizarre, closed loop. That YouTuber you mentioned, Meditations for the Anxious Mind, is capturing that, but he’s capturing it through the absolute despair of believing in political struggle while living in Britain, and I can’t really blame him. It reminds me of Slavoj Žižek or Mark Fisher, a critique emerging from a space of low movement energy and possibility.

Meditations for the Anxious Mind

LR This is also my issue with Gen X culture, because it’s very, “We’re not like the Boomers, and we’re sad about that. We can’t be part of a revolutionary movement because the world is a hyper-individualised shopping mall, and we don’t know what to do about it.” There’s a shame and an unwillingness to embrace the things that came out of your own time.

VO Looming over all of this is the constant, unspoken background noise of climate collapse. The apocalypse is always there. It’s gotten worse since Gaza, since the second wave of fascist election victories. “End times fascism” is a good framework to start from, because this current moment reminds me a lot of the apocalyptic cults of the post-Reformation period – these neo-protestant movements, some of which were revolutionary and anarchic, but most of which were very millenarian, and looking forward to the end of the world and Christ’s imminent return. 

LR Whenever I suggest the idea of a new counter-culture, people say, “Well, people don’t have the money,” or “Rent is too high.” That’s the conversation-terminating cliché. But it doesn’t look like things are going to get better; they’re probably going to get worse, so some kind of new cultural infrastructure is going to have to be built regardless. People have to actively work towards making it happen, and not wait for an institution to approve of it. 

VO To be a little more optimistic, I think it already is happening. I’ve experienced it here in Philly, where the re-emergence of rave culture and party culture has intersected with political organising and mutual aid. That’s an actual counter-cultural space. It isn’t going to take over the world, and no one’s going to get rich. But people are organising by making parties and bands, and then building the threads and groups to promote shows, which then becomes a generalised public communications infrastructure. You can watch it happen out of the Discord servers or Signal threads, where people spin out new servers and channels to start doing mutual aid. It’s already happening. It’s just never going to be visible in the same way.

LR It’s certainly not going to be visible to the cultural mainstream arbiters.

VO We don’t want that! Let our culture make a different mistake this time.

LR I think art is the primary venue for envisioning a different future. The alternative is everyone just being a pundit and reacting to what’s happening in the moment. There’s no possibility of proposing a future if all you’re doing is just reacting and commenting on things that are happening in that exact moment, all the time.

VO We need to kill the pundits inside our heads. .