I, Justine: An Analog Memoir Read online

  Before long I received a call from the folks at xTrain, an online learning website that offered classes in the digital arts (graphic and web design, photography, etc.). They wanted to hire me to host something called 60 Second Guru, which was pretty much what it sounds like—a sixty-second tutorial hosted by an “expert” in the field—so they flew me to Dallas, where the company is headquartered. I was happy to discover that xTrain is partnered with Splash Media, one of the most technologically advanced television studios in the world. Let me tell you, the place is amazing—all the cameras are completely computer guided from the control room; the studio itself is basically one giant blue screen.

  I ended up shooting several episodes of 60 Second Guru, including one called “How to Create Viral Videos” (which is sort of ironic, since I had never technically made one before). Instead of the serious, straightforward manner in which the spots were usually filmed, however, I used all that state-of-the-art equipment to make some more absurdist, tongue-in-cheek comedy. At the top of the video, I vaulted over the anchor’s desk. Then I proceeded to have a strange, nonsensical conversation with Chris, the show’s technical director, about parkour. I explained what the word viral meant (because back then most people didn’t actually know, if you can believe it), and then I suggested that capturing a “happy accident” on film would likely lead to viral success—cue shots of me tripping and falling all over Dallas, just like I’d done in the aisles of Walmart back in Pittsburgh. I couldn’t tell you why, but the folks at xTrain must have been pleased with the results, because I ended up returning to Dallas three or four times that year.

  Not long after my trip to Dallas, I headed to Los Angeles to meet with the team behind Groovr. It was perhaps the most bizarre introduction to L.A. possible—we ended up at a string of nightclubs and private parties, including one where Stephen Baldwin asked me for a stick of gum, and another at billionaire Paul Allen’s house. (As in the cofounder of Microsoft, Paul Allen.) For some reason, Axl Rose was performing there. I remember looking around and thinking, What the hell? Is this what L.A. is really like? (As I would learn years later, however, that is not what L.A. is really like. At least, that’s not what L.A. is like for me. I prefer spending my free time at home, in my sweatpants, playing video games.)

  None of these jobs, by the way, were resulting in huge paydays—in fact, all of the companies I was working for were start-ups. Whereas in the old days, I’d been “hired” as a photographer by local bands in Pittsburgh (and paid in CDs and concert tickets), now I was being hired by companies that didn’t have a lot of cash flow and being paid, essentially, in plane tickets and travel accommodations. As the amount of traveling I was doing increased, I’d basically try to leapfrog my way across the country by patchworking flights together—Groovr might cover a Pacific-bound flight, while xTrain might get me to Dallas and back home again. I was more than happy to work with the companies to make all this happen, but I was broke.

  I had a chance to change that when another start-up—a blog about emerging tech, this one with a lot of money behind it—suddenly offered me a full-time job. I flew to Philadelphia to meet with a member of the team; for some reason, the guy was obviously trying to impress me, because he showed up at the airport in a stretch limousine (which was both awkward and unnecessary). He also offered me a huge starting salary.

  It would have been easy to cash in—it certainly would have alleviated most of my financial concerns, of which I had plenty—but I knew there was no way I could take the job (or any of the others I would be offered over the next few years). I had been through hell working for the chiropractor, and I was not going to go back to that; I was never going to sign up for another full-time job where I’d be stuck taking orders from someone else. Besides, most of the companies I met with during that time wanted exclusivity, anyway. (Meaning I wouldn’t even be able to post content on my own website or YouTube channel, which was not something I was prepared to give up.) I was going to keep working for myself, broke or not.

  In between various graphic design projects and consulting and hosting gigs, I continued creating my own original content and posting it online. I also refocused on Mommy Pack My Lunch, which had slowly morphed from a fake-news show into a kind of absurdist, two-woman sketch comedy troupe. When Dez and I scheduled a last-minute vacation to Florida, I got the idea to launch MPML TV. The plan was to broadcast (and by “broadcast,” I mean post videos online; I don’t think we ever actually attempted to live-stream) from various locations around the country.

  Unfortunately, MPML TV lasted all of two episodes. In episode one I employed a hideously bad fake British accent and held up a pink snapper I had found on sale at a fish market. Episode two featured Dez and me taking turns holding a seven-foot yellow python named Merlin (for no reason other than that we saw Merlin’s owner walking down the street while we were sitting at an outdoor restaurant, waiting for our food). I can’t imagine why this show didn’t become an immediate hit.

  Back home in Pittsburgh, we returned to doing what we did “best”: we filmed a more traditional MPML video, wherein we went tanning—in shorts and sunglasses—on a snowdrift. Despite the failure of MPML TV, I assumed we were doing something right: within a few days, “Tanning in the Snow” became a Revver Editor’s Pick; separately, I was named a “featured content creator.” At the same time, the clip of Dez throwing an apple at my head became a “featured video” on Yahoo. I also hit my ten thousandth Myspace friend.

  Me: It’s positively balmy out here! Dez: I hate you for making me do this.

  • • •

  While all of this was going on, Justin Kan had been busy with the official launch of his company. He called it Justin.tv, and the concept was simple: wearing the baseball cap fitted with his webcam—the same one he’d worn at Macworld—he would film himself twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and broadcast the content online. Viewers could interact with him, as well as with each other, in the Justin.tv chat room. Part of the draw was that, for Justin, nothing was off-limits: the camera followed him everywhere, on dates, to bed at night, even into the bathroom.

  The amount of press coverage centered around the launch was pretty major: the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front-page story; Justin was interviewed on the Today show by Ann Curry. According to sources at the company, the website hit a million page views within just two weeks.

  I had been watching, too, of course, not only because Justin was my new Internet friend but because Justin.tv was fascinating. Unlike some other early lifecasting sites, this wasn’t a static camera positioned somewhere in Justin’s room—viewers went wherever he went. It was near unprecedented, as well as addictive. In fact, the only downsides that I saw (at least, from a viewer’s perspective) were that Justin didn’t often interact with people in the chat room—since he was busy launching a start-up, a large portion of his day was spent sitting around, working. The camera was also positioned outward, documenting not so much Justin (as if he was the star of the show) but rather his point of view. (In the early days, Justin once appeared to fall asleep at his desk, so viewers were stuck looking at an awkwardly up-close shot of his arm for about an hour.)

  By April things were going well enough that Justin needed to attend some private investor meetings (during which he obviously wouldn’t be able to wear the camera). Rather than go off-line, however, he wanted someone else to take over for the day. And that’s when he reached out to me. He wanted to know, did I want to do it?

  Of course I wanted to do it! On one condition: Dez had to come with me.

  Revver ended up sponsoring my trip, in part because Justin’s investor meetings—and, accordingly, my debut on Justin.tv—happened to be taking place at the same time as the first-ever Web 2.0 Expo (they were virtually guaranteed to get some press out of it). So, I headed back to San Francisco and the Moscone Center. All of a sudden, I was right back where I had started.

  What I hadn’t expected was just how, uh, festive this trip would turn out to be.
It was April 2007—more than five years after the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, but still several months shy of the first waves of the impending global recession—and tech start-ups, with major infusions of cash from venture capitalists, were booming. As a result, Web 2.0 Expo had turned into a giant party—and I mean that pretty much literally; parties lined the streets of San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. (That’s short for “South of Market” Street, by the way; the SoMa district also happens to be home to CNET, Twitter, BitTorrent, Yelp, and a host of other tech company headquarters.) The night Dez and I arrived in town (the night before I would don the Justin.tv camera), we tagged along with Justin to a party for the Snap Shots launch, and then to a nightclub called 111 Minna for a Netvibes event. The place was packed. A line of people stretched down the block. The bar was open. Wired magazine would later call it “the hottest shindig on the Web 2.0 Expo calendar.”

  Getting the hang of this live-streaming thing, with Dez and Karen.

  There was a lot going on that week. Dez and I landing in the middle of it all was another right-place-right-time kind of coincidence.

  The next morning, I put on the hat and the backpack, and we were off. Dez and I headed to a local Starbucks and took a cable car to Union Square. I ran into a panhandler singing and dancing on the street. Since he was dressed in a spectacular purple suit—with a matching fedora—I decided to dance with him, naturally. Then we talked about George Benson for a while. He encouraged me to google him.

  We swung by an Apple Store, where I told an employee that I was visually impaired, that the camera I was wearing was “hardwired to my brain” to help me see. (I think he bought it.) We had snacks with the cofounder of Hot or Not, James Hong. Since I didn’t know the streets of San Francisco well, Karen, my Jumpcut friend, spent most of the day watching the feed and sending me directions via text message. After lunch we headed to the expo. That night we met up with Justin and his friends for dinner.

  The experience, all in all, was fun. I wasn’t particularly concerned with the viewers’ reaction—there just wasn’t much pressure to be funny or entertaining since it was only a one-day commitment. In fact, I barely paid any mind to the chat room. The only time I really pulled the laptop out of the backpack was to occasionally confirm that our battery hadn’t died on us or that the stream wasn’t down.

  But it must have gone well, because a few weeks later, Justin called back. He asked if I wanted to try it again. Only this time, he wanted to know: Did I want to take over indefinitely?

  Courtesy of Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

  iJUSTINE.TV

  I MAYBE SHOULD HAVE PAID more attention to the fact that lifecasting, at least for Justin, didn’t come without complications. Within two weeks of launching his site, he’d already gone through four different phone numbers in an attempt to halt the avalanche of prank calls he was suddenly getting at all hours of the day and night. One afternoon, a delivery guy showed up at his door with sixty-three dollars’ worth of pizza. Though perhaps a happy side effect, Justin started fielding a lot of random requests for blind dates—he even went on a few, and was sometimes stood up on camera. But the most dramatic Internet prank happened just three or four days after going live: Justin was typing away at his laptop one night, hip-hop music blaring, when a handful of San Francisco Police Department officers burst into his apartment, guns drawn. “Did somebody get stabbed in the chest here?” one of them shouted.

  I was watching Justin.tv when it happened—I held my breath as Justin, still wearing the camera on his head, threw his hands up into the air. I watched in disbelief as the officers cased his apartment, shining flashlights in corners of rooms, brusquely questioning Justin and his friends. I listened as he tried to explain his “job” to the cops—“Uh, tech company,” he said, obviously still startled—as well as the reason someone might have called in such an outrageous allegation: “Uh, it’s probably someone . . . spoofing our phone number . . . as a prank,” he said. It was scary and it was serious; you got the immediate, unmistakable sense that when it came to the Internet, anything could—and probably would—happen. (If you weren’t watching Justin.tv in those days, by the way, you can still see the whole thing on YouTube.)

  Still, when Justin explained that he was ready to begin expanding his site—the fact that our names were so similar perhaps made me a shoo-in to host the second Justin.tv channel—I couldn’t help but feel excited. From the first silly videos I’d posted online to the madness of competing in the Yahoo! Talent Show to attending Macworld, I’d seen some of the possibilities and opportunities available on the Internet. Even though I was aware of the effect it already had on Justin’s life, live-streaming seemed like an almost appropriate next step. I didn’t put much thought into what the potential consequences of broadcasting every minute of my life would be; I wasn’t worried about any kind of fallout or blowback. In fact, I actually believed, though it’s ridiculous thinking about it now, that live-streaming my life would be easier—instead of filming and editing and uploading videos, I’d just turn a camera on and be done.

  Oh, how incredibly naive I was. What an idiot.

  The folks from Justin.tv sent me a box of equipment: a laptop with an extra battery, a webcam, a ball cap (which I would eventually replace with something, well, cuter), and an integrated Sprint EVDO card. We set the date for the premiere of my new channel as May 29, 2007. And then there was only one thing left to do before going live: tell my friends.

  I called Anthony (whom I had met years earlier through Steve, the guy who’d given me the framed picture of Steve Jobs for my birthday) and asked if he wanted to hang out. We had had a casual friendship for years, but we’d grown considerably closer in the previous month or two, not long after he started working in the casting office for a Spike TV miniseries called The Kill Point. Anthony had put out a call to his friends, looking for extras to fill out a bank robbery scene in Market Square (in downtown Pittsburgh), and Dez and I immediately volunteered, largely because the show starred John Leguizamo and I have been obsessed with him since 1993, when he played Luigi in the Super Mario Bros. movie. The shoot was six long days and there was a ton of downtime—there always is on major film and television sets—which gave Anthony and me just long enough to discover that we had a naturally antagonistic, brother-sister kind of relationship (read: we made fun of each other a lot). He was hilarious and silly and usually up for anything. When I sat down to tell him about my plans, though, I couldn’t help feeling a little nervous.

  “So, do you remember when I went to San Francisco and did the one-day experiment with Justin.tv?” I asked him. “I wore the camera on my head and streamed the entire thing to the Internet?”

  “Yeah . . . ?” he said.

  “Well . . . they want me to do it again. Indefinitely.”

  Anthony lifted his eyebrows and thought for a moment. “So, what you’re telling me is,” he said after a beat, “the next time we hang out, the Internet will be watching?”

  “Yeah.”

  He laughed. “Okay,” he said, smiling. And this is why I love Anthony—he was totally on board (although he did tell me he thought I was crazy).

  I told CJ, too—you remember him, the one who wanted to be a cop when we were kids?—and his reaction was something along the lines of “Wait. You’re doing what?” It turned out to be a common response. Most people I spoke with were surprised and/or confused, if not rendered entirely speechless. Virtually everyone, however, was supportive. Not one single person said that I shouldn’t do it, or even intimated that it might be a bad idea.

  Except, maybe, for Dez, who was skeptical from the very beginning. And really, who could blame her? After all, we weren’t just friends and coworkers—we lived together. Whether she liked it or not, being my best friend and roommate would mean a significant amount of time on camera for her, too. Virtually nothing between us would be private. Everything would be broadcast online.

  In a lot of ways, I had kind of dragged Dez kicking and screaming in
to my crazy Internet world. She’d been game for almost all of it—we’d had tons of fun making silly videos, and MPML was something we were pursuing not just for fun but as a kind of job—but she wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as me. She wasn’t obsessed with tech and computers like I was. In fact, I’m pretty sure she was often horrified by the effect that emerging tech had on my life. She resisted signing up for Twitter, for example, largely because she saw firsthand that my phone beeped and buzzed and chimed and rang all day long. She had no interest in that.

  I think she was also more affected by Internet “haters” than I was. Months earlier, we had received an email to our Myspace account from someone at another comedy site. It was weird: he’d been following us since the Yahoo! Talent Show, but then one day, out of the blue, he just decided to email us to explain all the reasons why we weren’t funny and to implore us to just “give up.” She was able to keep a sense of humor about it, but for Dez, I don’t think the positives ever outweighed the negatives. She was all about graphic design, photography, local Pittsburgh indie bands, the stuff we had originally bonded over—she hadn’t signed up for any of this. She was (and is!) such a good friend, however, that she went along with the live-stream anyway, for no reason other than that it was important to me. Have I told you yet how amazing Desirée is? Seriously. I am so lucky to have her in my life.

  As the launch date grew closer, I started to set some ground rules for myself. For one thing, I certainly wasn’t going to be taking the camera into the bathroom. Ever. I wasn’t dating anyone at the time, so I knew that wouldn’t be a problem, either. (In fact, I had recently broken up with someone who used to get insanely jealous about the random Myspace comments I sometimes received from strangers, which is especially ironic seeing as how we broke up because I accidentally came across a chat from his ex that read, in part, “Thanks for last night.”) Security was also a major concern. I knew I would take pains to hide my actual location from the Internet, in particular my and Dez’s address. I’d come a long way from filming the Ninja Turtles video in my backyard—I realized I’d have to hide the camera in my purse whenever I left the house, in order to obscure my apartment and the streets immediately surrounding it. After seeing what had happened to Justin, I didn’t want anyone to know where we lived.