Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy, and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York. I first had the idea to make an immersive text back in the twentieth century. (I thought of it as a hypertext then, but we’ve since decided to call it an immersive text, to distinguish it from 1990s hypertext, about which see below.) I was working as a Web designer in San Francisco, which in those days was a job you could just kind of fall into. The skills you needed to make Web pages were arcane enough that most people didn’t want to learn them, but not so arcane that they were actually difficult, so I and some friends from Stanford (literature people: I’d just dropped out of their PhD program in Comp Lit) taught ourselves HTML and went into business. We rented an office in South Park, which was the epicenter of the tech industry in San Francisco. Everyone had a business plan. You couldn’t eat lunch in the park without overhearing someone’s scheme to monetize something by putting it on the Web. Once I went out to dinner with a friend, and the head of a software company offered us jobs, just because we were eating dinner in South Park and we looked kind of gangly. (Later the same guy ran off with his company’s money, so it’s just as well we turned him down.)