I, Justine: An Analog Memoir Read online

  I left the Yahoo! Talent Show with some bruises. The sting of not winning paled in comparison to the gut punch of reading so many negative comments about myself online. I hadn’t been quite ready for the sheer volume of them; the exposure I’d had via Myspace and other social media sites was nothing compared to the national attention I received via Yahoo. In the old days, I’d just delete the occasional profanity-laced insult; during the Yahoo contest, I could only scroll, in quiet disbelief, through hundreds of comments describing the many ways in which I was worthless, a moron, and a whore. It was my first real taste of how dark things can get when you choose to live part of your life in the public eye.

  But I also left the contest with a renewed sense of hope. For every jerk who said something gross online, I met some really positive and creative people. And the massive boost I’d received to my social media following seemed like a confirmation of what I had always thought to be true: That what I was doing wasn’t crazy. That I just had to keep putting all the pieces together. That I had to have faith that, eventually, it would all lead somewhere.

  So I said good-bye to the friends I had made in New York and boarded the plane back to Pennsylvania, believing in my gut that I would somehow figure it all out. I had to.

  ORBITING MACWORLD

  AFTER PLACING SECOND IN THE Yahoo! Talent Show, I had every intention of continuing my daily routine; my plan when I got back to Pittsburgh was to keep doing exactly what I had been doing. Dez and I continued to make ridiculous videos, including one called “Parkour,” produced under the Mommy Pack My Lunch banner (and inspired, obviously, by my fellow Yahoo! Talent Show finalists, the actually talented group Renzhe Parkour). We headed to downtown Carnegie, the Pittsburgh suburb in which we lived, to film ourselves freerunning and speed vaulting and cat leaping on the street. The joke was that as we bragged, documentary-style, about how long we’d been practicing the art of parkour (at the top of the video I said I was twenty-two years old and had been doing parkour for twenty-five years), how incredibly hard we trained, and how amazing our skills were (Dez looked to the camera to explain that “Justine has been able to jump over buildings . . . yeah, buildings”; I described, with faux modesty, the time I “saved a baby’s life”), the viewer could clearly see our “skills” for what they were: We barely managed to hop over small cracks in the sidewalk. I performed awkward, graceless pirouettes in the street for no apparent reason. At one point, I wrapped my arms around a parking meter while Dez struggled to lift my legs in the air. At another, Dez tried (and failed) to leap over one of the decorative blue bollards lining Carnegie’s picturesque Main Street.

  What I hadn’t planned on, however, were the aftereffects of all that Yahoo! Talent Show exposure. Over the course of the contest, some of my videos had been featured prominently on the Yahoo home page (which had an online readership in the tens of millions); meanwhile, press releases related to the contest results had been distributed to newspapers and media outlets across the country. That national exposure, as it turns out, led to some minor press coverage at home, and by the end of 2006 I was actually starting to get some job offers.

  The first email came from Groovr, a new social networking platform that functioned a little like Myspace meets Foursquare: you could “check in” at different locations via your cell phone, as well as upload photos, videos, and text. Each time you changed location, an alert would be sent out to your Groovr contact list (providing an efficient way to stalk your friends in real time). I was hired to create several promotional videos for the site.

  The second came from Alex Lindsay. True to his word, we had kept in touch following PodCamp Pittsburgh, but I never could have been prepared for his email.

  At the time—late December 2006—we were mere weeks away from the start of Macworld, the annual Apple trade show in San Francisco. The event had been going on since the mid-1980s; by the mid- to late 1990s, however, following Jobs’s return to Apple as interim CEO, it had started to resemble a rock concert more than a tech conference. Thousands of people showed up each year to watch Jobs unveil the newest and most innovative Apple products: the updated Mac operating system, OS X, in 2000; iTunes (2001); the GarageBand app (in 2004, for which musician John Mayer made a surprise appearance onstage); the iPod Shuffle (2005). By the close of 2006, anticipation about what he might reveal next was at a fever pitch.

  In addition to launching new Apple products, Macworld was the place for start-up companies, gadget makers, and Apple accessory vendors to show off their stuff. At Macworld, attendees could interact with brand-new products firsthand. Accordingly, Macworld was a huge draw for reporters, bloggers, and tech experts, who flocked to San Francisco in order to review the latest tech for their viewers and readers. Which is exactly why the folks from MacBreak—a popular podcast dedicated to all things Apple, produced by Leo Laporte’s TWiT.tv and Alex Lindsay’s Pixel Corps—would be attending.

  In fact, that’s why Alex was reaching out: The MacBreak crew was looking for a new host, someone who could roam around the Moscone Center to interview vendors and attendees on camera. He wanted to know, did I want to do it?

  It had been my dream to go to Macworld for as long as I could remember. I’d be at the epicenter of all things Apple. I’d be working on behalf of MacBreak. Better yet, I’d be in the same place, at the same time, as my personal idol, Steve Jobs.

  As far back as seventh grade, when my classmates were writing book reports on U.S. presidents or major-league athletes or actors and entertainers, I was writing about the CEO of Apple Computer. The response from my peers was usually in the ballpark of “What the hell . . . ?” or “Who’s Steve Jobs?” but by then I’d read all about the history of Apple—as well as Jobs’s triumphant return to the company he had founded—and I was obsessed.

  As I got older and learned more about graphic design, photography, and animation, Apple’s products only got sexier and sleeker. The candy-colored iMac G3 gave way to the MacBook’s more sophisticated aluminum shell. The introduction of the first iPod brought with it those now-iconic bright white headphones. The choices Apple made with regard to their products both informed and impacted me as a designer. These days, my preference for simple, modern aesthetics is echoed in just about everything I do, including the way my apartment is decorated. People often ask why my home is wall-to-wall white and stark as an insane asylum; I have to tell them I’m going for the “Apple Store look.”

  By college, my love and respect for Apple and its founder was so well known among my friends that I was given a framed head shot of Steve Jobs for my birthday (incidentally, by a guy who was also named Steve). The photo earned a proud spot on my desk next to my computer; you can see it in a number of the videos I’ve made over the years. Probably a few too many.

  It wasn’t just the cool gadgets or the sleek product design or the brash and charismatic CEO, though; over the years, I had fallen in love with Apple’s culture. I was a huge fan of Apple’s “think different” campaign, the seeds of which had been planted at Macworld 1997, when Jobs said this:

  I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer. The people who buy them do think different. They are the creative spirits in this world, and they’re out to change the world. . . . A lot of people think they’re crazy, but in that craziness we see genius.

  That idea resonated with me. It meant something to me. It felt personal. So, did I want to go to Macworld?

  Uh, yeah. I told Alex I’d be happy to do it.

  • • •

  A few days before my flight, I reached out to several of my online friends who lived on the West Coast, including Karen Nguyen, who’d be attending with the entire Jumpcut crew.

  Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, I met with Alex at his Pixel Corps headquarters. I was introduced to the rest of the MacBreak team, including Leo Laporte, whom I recognized immediately from all those afternoons binge-watching TechTV with my grandmother. I still had my Palm Treo with the trusty stylus, and I hadn’t so mu
ch as put it down since my arrival—it didn’t take Leo very long to ask me what in the world I was doing with it.

  “Oh, I’m tweeting,” I said.

  Leo looked at me quizzically. He hadn’t heard of Twitter yet.

  “It’ll be cool one day. I promise,” I said. And then I pressured him to sign up for an account, just like I’d pressured everyone else in my life, at some point, to sign up for something.

  I was still hanging out in the Pixel Corps offices when Steve Jobs was scheduled to begin his keynote speech. I didn’t have a press pass to get in the actual room with him, so I watched via streaming video as he took the stage, wearing his customary black turtleneck and jeans, and said simply: “Thank you for coming. We’re going to make some history together today.”

  He wasn’t kidding. After talking for twenty minutes about the success of the iPod and Apple’s growing share of the digital music market, after offering up some financial updates and progress reports, he was ready to unveil the biggest thing yet: the launch of the original iPhone.

  I really can’t overstate how exciting this was—rumors about Apple entering the mobile phone market had been swirling for years, but I think the actual end result beat out even the wildest expectations. Every time Jobs demonstrated a new, never-before-seen feature of the phone—visual voicemail; “pinch” technology; something called an accelerometer, which allowed for both portrait and landscape view—the crowd erupted in frenzied applause and whistles and cheering. My favorite part of the whole morning, however, came at the very beginning of the presentation, when he finally gave the audience a glimpse of the phone’s ultra-slim profile and extra-large screen, taking care to point out the complete lack of a physical keyboard.

  “Now, how are we going to communicate [without a keyboard]?” he asked, pacing back and forth across the stage. “We don’t want to carry a mouse around, right? So, what are we going to do? Oh! A stylus! We’re going to use a stylus!”

  He paused for the briefest of moments, just long enough for people in the audience to raise an eyebrow—really, a stylus?—before continuing: “No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Blech. Nobody wants a stylus.”

  I remember looking down at my stupid Palm Treo—the same phone that inspired the “Have You Seen My Stylus?” video—with something like disgust. Suddenly, it was clunky and awkward and ugly in my hand. I didn’t want a stylus anymore, either. Steve was right.

  In total, Jobs spoke for about ninety minutes about the phone, its service provider, its price point, and its features. At any other tech conference, a ninety-minute speech about a cell phone would’ve been mind-numbing; at Macworld, it was fun. To demonstrate the phone’s calling features, he made a prank call to Starbucks and ordered four thousand lattes. To go. To announce new partnerships with other major tech companies, he briefly invited to the stage the CEOs of Google, Cingular, and—in a weird sort of “it’s a small world” moment—Yahoo. (Just two months earlier, I had watched a video of Jerry Yang announcing the first-ever Yahoo! Talent Show, in which I ended up placing second; now here we both were at Macworld in San Francisco. It was surreal.) All morning Jobs, with contagious enthusiasm, punctuated his speech with a simple, charming refrain: “Isn’t that cool?”

  And it was cool! By the time he finished his keynote, Apple stock was up 8.3 percent and everyone at Macworld was itching to get an up-close-and-personal look at the world’s most revolutionary phone. At the time, however, there were only two of them even in existence: Jobs’s personal model, and a display model set to rotate slowly on a turntable inside a tamper-proof glass tube for the duration of the conference. Since the actual iPhone wouldn’t be available for purchase for another six months, people crowded around that display model, pushing their noses up to the glass and snapping pictures and video, like tourists gawking at the Mona Lisa.

  Distracted as I was by the phone (obviously I took a video standing beside the display model, too), I was at Macworld because I had a job to do. The folks from MacBreak set me up with a mic and a camera guy, and I functioned a bit like a field reporter, roaming around the floor of the Moscone Center and interviewing vendors and attendees about the coolest gadgets and tech. Big in 2007: ETCHamac, a service that provided custom laser engraving on personal media devices, allowing you to have an original drawing or design etched right onto the surface of your MacBook or iPod; a product called IntelliScanner, which made it possible to digitally inventory the items in your home (e.g., DVDs, groceries, your wine collection) using existing bar codes; and—my personal favorite, as well as one of Macworld’s Best of Show winners—the Modbook, an after-market modification that turns a MacBook into a state-of-the-art pen tablet.

  Macworld was my first on-camera hosting job, and though I had plenty of experience making weird videos about microwavable oatmeal, interpretive dance, and launching fruit at the heads of my friends, it took me a minute or two to get the hang of it—you can hear my voice wavering ever so slightly during some of the interviews. I loved it, though; even when my job was done, I still spent the duration of Macworld running around meeting and talking to people.

  Karen Nguyen and I, meanwhile, had become fast friends. She would later write on her blog that not only was I the first person she’d gotten to know online and later meet IRL but a unifying trait among all of her friends is that (1) they’re “a bit weird” and (2) “very much okay with it.” Which is probably why we got along so well, since that’s pretty much how I felt about all of my friends, too.

  It was Karen who appeared with me on Nightline and Good Morning America, after I told the roving reporter that I’d been an Apple user “since I came out of my mom.” (It was sort of ironic that I was there functioning as a reporter, but I so catastrophically blew it when the reporter from ABC interviewed me.) I was also with Karen, wandering from booth to booth in the convention hall, when we spotted a guy wearing a webcam strapped to his baseball cap. That guy, it turns out, was Justin Kan.

  Justin, a twenty-three-year-old entrepreneur and Yale graduate, explained that he was live-streaming; that is, broadcasting footage from the camera to the Internet, which viewers could watch in real time. Though streaming technology wasn’t exactly new—the popular website JenniCam, for example, which followed the dorm room exploits of then college student Jennifer Ringley, launched in the mid-1990s; streaming pornography sites have also existed for at least that long—it was Justin and the fellow cofounders of his company who took the technology mobile: they rigged a backpack to carry a laptop (to support their proprietary streaming software), two cellular-data wireless Internet cards (including a backup to prevent the stream from crashing), and an extra battery. It was small, compact, and easy to use. It was also pretty amazing—Justin’s company made it possible for anyone to broadcast live from anywhere. In fact, the company’s original objective was to produce and sell the backpacks on a large scale for just that purpose. (The focus of his company would eventually shift, but not before Justin himself was credited with popularizing the term lifecasting.)

  Justin and I hit it off immediately—the similarity even of our names did not go unnoticed—and I asked him to keep me posted on his company’s evolution and progress. In the days and weeks immediately following Macworld, he would become just another friend I’d made based on our similar interests; with time, however, his friendship would represent another strange example of how someone I met completely at random would wind up having a major effect on the entire course of my life. I got to thinking about that while on the floor of the Moscone Center, in fact, about how all things, even the seemingly bad ones, seem to happen for a reason. If I’d never taken the horrible job with the chiropractor, for example, I might not have uploaded so many videos to the web out of sheer boredom. Had I not uploaded so many videos, I may never have entered the Yahoo! Talent Show or gone to PodCamp. And had I never gone to PodCamp, I almost certainly wouldn’t have ended up at Macworld in San Francisco. I remember looking around and fee
ling grateful: I had made it to the West Coast, to the seat of American technology. And by the time it was all over, I knew I wanted to move there.

  ONE NIGHT ONLY

  NEARLY FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE SHOWED up at Macworld in 2007. It was record-setting attendance, a 19 percent jump over the previous year, and being on the floor of the Moscone Center gave me an appreciation for the massive size and scale of the tech world—from the enormous quantity of companies that were innovating new gadgets and games to the thousands and thousands of people who, like me, identified as “geeks,” and who were just as excited to be at the convention as I was. By late January 2007, however, I was getting a sense for just how small the tech world can be, too. In fact, if I had been playing Six Degrees of Separation with people in the tech community, it felt as though I had dropped, overnight, from six degrees to just one or two. Leo and Alex had given me some incredible access and exposure, and following my debut as a host on MacBreak, I was gaining some traction—some minor blogs and press outlets started calling me a “rising star” in the geek world. (Which sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn’t it?)

  I made my first appearance on net@night, a popular call-in show hosted by Leo and his colleague Amber MacArthur. The show was broadcast live via TalkShoe (the same company Dez and I used for Mommy Pack My Lunch), and the recorded version was later distributed as a podcast available for purchase in stores like iTunes. (In case you were wondering, we chatted mainly about Twitter, Groovr, and Steve Jobs.) Around the same time, I was asked to come on Geek Riot, a Pittsburgh-based podcast created and hosted by Shawn Smith. By sheer coincidence, Geek Riot (which by all accounts had a pretty small listening base) ended up with a time slot on TalkShoe immediately following net@night—this was a bit like finding out The Simpsons is going to be your show’s lead-in; Shawn’s audience began to grow exponentially. I appeared for the first time on his weekly Sunday-night broadcast in late January; by the following week, Shawn had brought me on as an official cohost.