By mid-2007, Lyons’s true identity had been revealed, but he kept the site going. It was around that time that—still posing as Jobs—he started writing about me. In a post called “This Chick Is Getting Out of Hand,” a response to a video I’d made in which I pretended to get the Apple logo tattooed on my back, he suggested that I had turned from fan to stalker. In response to another (albeit superweird) video created by a different female Apple fan, he wrote, “This Chick Scares Me Almost as Much as iJustine.”
Fake Steve Jobs officially “hated” me. And it was great.
We sort of fell into a fun, playfully antagonistic relationship after that. In a blog post titled “My God I’m a Sexy Bitch,” he posted a picture of “himself” and wrote several paragraphs about how good-looking he was and about the fact that women the world over couldn’t help but be drawn to him. He ended the post with the truly wonderful line: “And hey, iJustine? You’re welcome.”
When Lyons eventually published a book version of the blog (with some additional info thrown in about the stock-options backdating scandal), called Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs: A Parody, I knew I’d make it a point to show up and get my autographed copy. Fake Steve Jobs was lovely and gracious and it was so much fun to finally meet him. We had a good laugh.
My first (and only) interaction with the real Steve Jobs did not go quite so well.
I was having lunch with a friend on the Apple campus in Cupertino. We were sitting in the cafeteria when I suddenly looked up to see that Steve Jobs—the real Steve Jobs—had just taken a seat at a table diagonal to me. I froze. I held my breath and sat stock-still and watched as he unloaded various Tupperware containers from his little brown paper bag, spread them out on the table, and prepared to eat.
I should point out here that my “obsession” with Steve Jobs had been pretty well documented by that point, and not just via the Fake Steve Jobs blog. Aside from talking about him on the Internet ad nauseam, aside from proudly displaying a framed photo of him on my desk, I’d also filmed a parody of the infamous “Leave Britney Alone” video by Chris Crocker—when the guy screamed and cried and wailed over the media’s horrible treatment of Britney Spears after her failed “comeback” performance at the MTV Video Music Awards—called “Leave Steve Jobs Alone.” With mascara streaking down my face, I screamed and cried and wailed, too. To the uninitiated, I no doubt looked like a complete and total crazy person.
Anyway, I’m sitting in the cafeteria in Cupertino, and I’m looking at Steve, and he’s looking at me, and I realize he seems kind of panicked. Visions of all the silly photos, videos, tweets, and Steve-related content I’d posted over the years flashed before my eyes. Had he seen any of it? Was I on some kind of official watch list at Apple? Suddenly, he started shoving all of his little plastic containers back in his brown paper bag. I couldn’t believe it. Steve Jobs was practically running away from me.
• • •
Back home in Pittsburgh, I was still going strong with the live-stream. Sometimes it was actually fun, like the time I was hanging out in my room, listening to music, when someone from the chat room decided to call in to my local radio station and surprise me by requesting a song.
There were moments, too, when it was just weird: Like this one particular time I went home to visit my parents. I walked in the house and saw my father sitting at the kitchen table, watching television. Except he wasn’t watching a TV show—he was watching a live feed of my backyard. Security cameras, you ask? Nope. He was deer-casting.
That would be me, running back and forth in front of my dad’s infrared motion sensors, just making sure everything’s functioning properly. You’re welcome, Dad.
My father had taken several infrared cameras with motion sensors, hidden them in these little wooden structures that looked a bit like birdhouses, and mounted them in the woods behind our home—whenever a deer walked within range, the camera would automatically turn itself on and begin transmitting a signal to a receiver, which would in turn power on both the television and the VCR (in order to record the footage). And people think lifecasting is weird. I swear he had a more elaborate setup than I did.I
And then there were times when it was just plain hard. As people realized the influence they could have over my life—by prank calling, by having free drinks sent over to me and my friends in bars and restaurants (admittedly not the worst thing), by figuring out my location and spreading that info across the web—they started to grow ever more bold and aggressive.
Anthony, whom I was now calling “Skippy” because someone in the chat room had nicknamed him that and it stuck, was still appearing with some regularity on the feed, until one night when the viewers decided to “vote him off” my “show” like it was an episode of Survivor. There was really just one problem with that: the people on my live-stream weren’t actors, they were my friends, and this wasn’t actually a show, this was my life.
The more aggressive and unkind people on the Internet were toward those around me, the more I began to isolate myself. Of course, there were plenty of aggressive and unkind comments aimed at me, too. And let me tell you, constantly being judged for what you’re doing, for what you’re wearing, for how you speak or what you look like, will eventually take a toll. If my shorts were “too short,” someone was sure to say something crass—without even realizing it, I had started wearing pants and long sleeves (rather than shorts and tank tops) when I was on camera. The pressure to entertain was enormous, and I was miserable.
I was starting to have “technical difficulties”—I’d turn the camera off and the immediate sense of relief was so cathartic, I’d suddenly be crying. Sleeping, too, became a kind of refuge, a chance for some peace and quiet. I started sleeping in longer and later—I just didn’t see the point of waking up early, only to have to come up with some new way to entertain.
And then I experienced what was by far the scariest side effect of living my life online. I don’t remember where I had been that evening, but I returned to my empty apartment to find the windows in my living room wide open. I didn’t leave the windows in my house open, ever. I couldn’t tell immediately if anything was missing—it’s not like I had walked into an obvious crime scene—but I knew that someone had been inside. I was on the phone with Brian at the time, my friend from San Francisco who’d sat up with me in that all-night Starbucks.
“Oh my God, I think maybe I’ve been robbed?” I said, trembling. “I think someone broke into my apartment.”
“What are you doing on the phone with me, then?” he yelled. “Hang up and call the cops!”
Which I did—and I locked myself in the bathroom, just in case someone had broken in and was still there. It was terrifying, and all at once I felt so incredibly powerless.
When the cops showed up, I explained about the windows being open, about some strange sounds I thought I had heard, about the fact that I had been scared and barricaded myself in the bathroom. They searched the apartment, but they didn’t find anyone. They took notes, walked the perimeter of the building, radioed back to dispatch, until suddenly one of them turned and looked at me. “Wait a minute, are you the girl that’s been live-streaming all the time?” he asked. “And you had that really big iPhone bill?”
“Yeah, that was me,” I said.
And here is an example of one of the rare perks of live-streaming: the cops said they would do some extra patrolling in my neighborhood, just to make sure I was okay.
I didn’t know which was worse: having the cops barge in unexpectedly because of a prank call, or calling them myself. What I did know was that I needed an indefinite break. I couldn’t keep filming myself twenty-four hours a day. It just wasn’t fun anymore. And as the year began drawing to a close, I realized I was done.
You wouldn’t be crazy for saying, Why do this at all? Why not just turn the camera off? No one was making you live-stream, so why are you whining? You brought this all on yourself. On the surface, I can even understand that sentiment. But consider this:
When Justin Kan went on the Today show to publicize the launch of Justin.tv, Ann Curry was notably skeptical. In fact, some people in the tech world have labeled the interview “cringe-worthy.” She warned him (some would say sanctimoniously) about the “high price of fame.” She referenced a critic who had publicly suggested that Justin might one day be embarrassed by what he had done. At one point she flat out admonished him: Why would a Yale graduate want to expose himself in this way?
But Justin wasn’t trying to get famous. He wasn’t trying to “expose” himself or get attention. He was trying to build something. And though it took a few years—Justin.tv would have to “pivot” several times (to use a tech industry start-up term)—he eventually found a sustainable market: Justin.tv became Twitch.tv, a live-streaming video game platform, which was acquired by Amazon in August 2014 for $970 million.
Not everyone will have that kind of success, of course (and I don’t just mean financially), but when you’re trying to build something you believe in, you don’t stop when it gets tough. You don’t give up. You don’t just turn the camera off. You keep trying.
And I did keep trying—it’s not like I never live-streamed again. I just knew I couldn’t keep doing it every day, all day. It wasn’t sustainable for me. I had to pivot. I had to keep going until I found something that worked.
* * *
I. He still fashions trail cameras to this day, in case you’re wondering, sometimes using my old equipment—he’ll take apart an old camera and add the infrared and motion sensors himself. You see, my dad is very handy. Also, if anyone out there wonders where my desire to lifecast came from, I would like to suggest that it is his fault.
iJUSTINE GOES WEST
SOMETIME AROUND THE END OF 2007, I was finally ready to make the move to the West Coast. The transition to California, however, was a rough one.
I set my sights on San Francisco, rather than Los Angeles, for two main reasons: (1) L.A. might have been the center of the entertainment industry, but the Bay Area was home to the tech world; I figured that’s where I’d be most comfortable, and where I’d most likely fit in. And (2) I actually knew some people in San Francisco, and by “some people” I mean Karen, my buddy from Jumpcut, and Brian, my all-night Starbucks friend. By chance, I’d met a group of guys in Pittsburgh who were getting ready to make the move, too, and they more or less offered to let me tag along. When the house they’d been eyeing fell through at the last minute, though, we ended up in a smaller apartment in Haight-Ashbury, the hipster section of the city—the birthplace, in fact, of hippie subculture.
I went out to California with a hideous pink suitcase, a pillow, and a lighting kit I’d stolen from the chiropractor’s office. (Okay, I didn’t steal it so much as not return it after finding it in the trunk of my car several days after I’d quit my job; seeing as how Dr. Rolex had called me worthless, I figured it was adequate severance pay.) That was pretty much it, though. I didn’t have the money to take anything inconsequential. I just packed up what I could and headed out.
For the first few months, I slept on a cruddy old mattress—no box spring, no bed frame—shoved into the corner of the room. I had two whole blankets in my possession, so I usually wrapped one around the mattress to avoid infecting myself with Ebola or scabies or whatever might have been lurking deep within that old, stained-up fabric. When the huge clouds of marijuana smoke started wafting under my bedroom door, though, I realized I had a bigger problem. I had never even smoked a cigarette before, let alone weed, and these guys weren’t just having an occasional joint to unwind in the evenings—I had unwittingly moved in with a group of hard-core stoners. Living in that apartment was like living inside a dry-ice machine. The constant stink of billowing weed smoke was making me physically ill—I slept with all the windows open and a blanket shoved underneath the door to my room. So now I was down to one blanket, and I was freezing. I only lasted a few months before moving out.
In the meantime, I’d been in contact with a couple of guys who had recently left their jobs at one of the video-sharing sites I had worked with to start an artist management company, specializing in YouTube and online talent. I was still resistant to the idea of signing with anyone, but I’d known these guys for a while. Besides, the fact that they both came from the digital world made me feel like I could trust them. Surely these two would be better able to understand my career than agents at a traditional Hollywood firm? So I agreed to give it a shot, but things didn’t get much better. In fact, in terms of my living situation, they got worse.
Since I didn’t have anywhere else to go, I relocated to L.A. to move in temporarily with one of my brand-new managers. At the time, it actually seemed like a perfectly fine arrangement—he was constantly on the road, almost never home, so I would have the house more or less to myself. I quickly started to feel trapped, though—I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know the city very well. It was just me, by myself, in a big house, sitting around without a whole lot to do. The situation just didn’t feel right, and it was slowly dawning on me that perhaps I had made a mistake.
When my manager finally took a break from traveling, I relocated again—this time to stay with the other manager . . . at his mom’s house. Yes, you read that right. I moved in with my manager’s mother and lived for a couple of months in her spare bedroom. She was incredibly sweet. She’d get up and putter around the kitchen in the mornings, making me breakfast. But the whole thing was obviously strange—stranger still because no one on my “team” seemed to think there was anything weird about this arrangement.
After a couple months of this nonsense, I realized I had to get out of there or else I was going to go crazy. By early autumn, I had a trip scheduled, a vacation I’d been looking forward to for weeks, and I figured it was now or never. I told my manager (and his mom) that I’d be out of town for a few days, but I packed up everything I had—about five suitcases’ worth of stuff at the time—and never came back.
It would take a few years before I felt comfortable signing with another management firm. In the meantime, I went back to doing what had always seemed to work in the past—figuring things out by myself. I eventually found an apartment in Santa Monica. I was lucky in that I had made a few friends in the business, people who didn’t mind helping me look over contracts and negotiate deals, people I trusted, who didn’t ask for or take anything from me in return. And I learned a little something about trusting my gut and choosing my business partners wisely.
It’s important for me to say that I don’t think those first two managers were bad guys, by the way. It was still early days in terms of representing Internet talent, and back then, none of us really had any idea what we were doing, myself included. And like all seemingly negative experiences, some good things actually came out of it: my first two managers were instrumental in getting me to L.A. in the first place. They also introduced me to Brooke Brodack, aka Brookers, a rising Internet star they briefly represented, too.
• • •
I think it’s pretty fair to say that I was a YouTube early adopter. After all, I was posting absurdist clips way back in 2006, months before I’d even heard of the Yahoo! Talent Show or met Alex Lindsay at PodCamp or been to Macworld for the first time. Brooke Brodack, however, was super early to the platform; by the time I’d uploaded six or seven videos, the New Yorker had already dubbed her “the first real YouTube star.” She was twenty at the time, and YouTube had been around for only ten months. When we met, she had recently moved to L.A. from her home state of Massachusetts and signed a development deal with Carson Daly.
I figured hanging out with Brooke would be refreshing, that it would be wonderful to be around someone who truly understood what I’d been trying to build, who had been out there shooting and uploading videos to the web, just to see what could happen—just like me. And it was refreshing; mostly, though, it was fun. I think we were both pleasantly surprised to discover that we were just two weird chicks who happened to like the same things. Sometimes we made vide
os together. But more often than not, we’d sit around our manager’s big, empty house in L.A. (where I was still crashing at the time) looking for something to do.
One night, bored as usual, we started watching Tom Green’s show—Tom Green’s House Tonight—the one he filmed from his very own living room and streamed live on the web. We watched his show with some regularity, actually, but when we realized that evening’s guest was Carson Daly, we figured we might as well try to call in.
Obviously, I’d met Tom before, back in the Yahoo! Talent Show days, and Brooke, as I mentioned, had a deal going with Carson’s production company. The number of mainstream stars trying to branch out into web-based entertainment was so small at the time, though, that I’d recently had a chance to work with Carson, too. He was an investor in a social networking start-up called ChannelMe.tv, for which I’d been hired as a kind of spokesperson. Over the course of several months, I filmed a number of videos for the site, including one in which Carson sent me on a “secret mission” to “build an online community” set to a kind of Mission: Impossible–style tune.
Anyway, since this was a web series, Brooke and I had called in via Skype—Tom had a computer sitting on the side of his desk, and our faces were now prominently filling the screen. Not everyone really understood what was going on, though. Andrew Dice Clay was Tom’s other guest that night, and he didn’t just not know who Brooke and I were, he seemed baffled by the entire concept of the Internet.
“Who is this girl that’s waving?” he said finally, gesturing to the computer.
“That’s iJustine. I know that girl,” Carson said by way of explanation. “And Brookers.”
There’s a brief moment when everyone sort of starts talking over each other, trying to explain who Brooke and I are and why we’re suddenly on Tom Green’s show, but it takes Clay a few minutes to grasp that we aren’t just heads in a box, that Brooke and I are actually listening to the live broadcast via the web.
I, Justine: An Analog Memoir Page 11
