Deleting the iPad DJ

I want to tell my story honestly.

A little bit about me. I am 27 years old. I am an artist and an engineer, a musician and a technologist. I have never done a drug in my life, never smoked a cigarette, and seldom drink. I do what I do for the love of music and computers. To my ears, electronic music is the perfect fusion of man and computer, art and science. It is the soundtrack to the working environments of top programmers and technical talents all around the world. It is the synthesis of art and technology, and it’s a form of expression I find to be emotional and stirring that is created with as much compositional care as any other type of music. Listen to Skrillex’s work arranged for orchestra and you will hear this for yourself. I believe that if Mozart were alive today, he would be using electronics to create music.

The story of how I “became” The iPad DJ has been told many times. In a nutshell, I posted an impromptu YouTube video of myself using an iPad to mix and play music and suddenly received more attention than I ever anticipated, wanted, or could handle.

And yet, in the year after that video, “the iPad DJ” attended the Grammy awards, drank Cristal on stage with Jermaine Dupri, and toured the world playing over 200 shows, for Apple, Google, Microsoft, The White House Correspondents Dinner, TED and more. Without an agent or publicist to guide me, I found myself introduced by the Prime Minister of Lithuania before my keynote address at that country’s National Gallery of Art. I was the basis for a CSI:NY episode, ate lunch with engineers at Apple’s campus at least once a month for nearly a year, and was master of ceremonies for Kia Motors’ press announcement at the New York Auto Show. When Wired magazine asked Steve Wozniak about me, he responded, “I wish I’d had that much talent and energy when I designed computers!” It’s hard to imagine anything more surreal — or higher pressure — than that.

But the real story is this: The first iPad DJ video, nearly one million views later, has become the bane of my existence. No matter what I do or say or create, no matter how much I build and grow and develop my art, every person whose interest I’ve piqued with my work invariably goes home, Googles me, and finds this video. A video, an experiment really, shot off-the-cuff in a friend’s apartment just days after the birth of my idea. A video that represents the tiniest sliver of me, yet does its best to haunt my Internet legacy and overshadow anything else I have done since.

It seems as though this early concept was so intriguing and non-threatening in its delivery that it survived like a cockroach through a nuclear blast, though it was too unfinished to truly represent my art form. This video has become my heaviest anchor and my greatest gift, allowing me to transition from technologist to artist and catapulting me into cultural relevancy, whether I liked it or not. It is my personal Groundhog Day. A gift and a curse. And with every new person who Googles my name, this misconception persists.

I am part of a peer group referred to as Generation Z, but it may be more fitting to name us Generation Me Me Me. We obsess over sharing and oversharing ourselves. We feel obligated to constantly connect. The dopamine fires in our brains, and we’re hooked. Every time we update our status and text our friends, we feed a very real chemical addiction to social media. Me. Me. Me. The microcults of personality, caricatures of one’s true self, tainted expressions of the ego via digital platforms. Children – 10, 11, 12 years old – agonizing over what their social media posts reflect about themselves or could mean to one another.

Why has it become scary to sit alone with one’s thoughts without flicking through some form of digital media? Why are we unable to wait for someone to arrive at a meeting without the companion of the illuminated screen? We are addicted. Fear of Missing Out is an actual phenomenon. And so to cope and feel safe, we cling to our digital habits, distract ourselves with our consumer tech, and program ourselves to be happy with the glow of our monitors.

Each passing day, we post more and more information about ourselves and our feelings online. While we may quickly forget what we’ve posted, the Internet does not. The capacity to forget traumas and unhealthy experiences is inherent to the design of the brain, but it is a survival mechanism the Internet does not need, or want. With just a few clicks, anyone can pull up any story, real or fabricated, legitimized by the Google algorithm’s ranking of the search result. Couple this with the notion that anyone is able to express any thought he or she has instantly on the Internet, and this becomes a very dangerous game. The Internet has the ability to make us become our past. But this is false. We are not our pasts.

We lose ourselves when we cling too closely to digital artifacts. What is the worst that will happen if you decide to blow up your Facebook page? Are your memories gone? Of course they are not. And yet, we have grown so fearful of losing our digital identities that we grip them tightly, nurturing the artificial rather than fostering what really matters in this world.

Cell phones in hands rather than hands in hands.

Please do not misunderstand, I am a believer in these platforms and technologies. I have been on a computer since the age of four, and my love affair with 1s and 0s will last until the day I die. I have been on Facebook since 2004 and on Twitter since 2007. I’ve happily tweeted over 20,000 times and every moment of my life since my freshman year of college has been digitally catalogued. I believe that people like Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Dorsey have created platforms that are crucial to the advancement of humanity, and I mean that sincerely. Think of Libya, Egypt, Ferguson and of particular importance to me personally, Iran. But these are tools, “social utilities,” and like any utility, must be made use of properly.

But I don’t want to live my life through a viewfinder. I don’t want to live my life under a microscope. There is more to us than the number of likes on our Facebook posts.

I want to be in the world and of the world, to meet people and listen intently to their stories. I want to be present in the conversations I’m having with others. I want to revel in the beautiful moments that occur every single day, beginning with the vision of the sun that rises each morning and ending with the evening’s sweet symphony of sounds, and I want to feel everything that lies in between.

After 2 years and hundreds of performances, feeling equal parts a success and a failure, fighting tooth and nail to change the perception of me, I’d had enough of the iPad DJ. I retreated to one of the only remaining places in America that I’d not yet visited, New Orleans.

New Orleans, a pearl hidden within a mollusk’s tough shell, a fabled land of powdered sugar and jazz, of vampires and hurricanes. But there was more to the city I discovered when I arrived, broken as a woman and a person, disillusioned by humanity. This is a sultry, seductive city where people express themselves, find themselves, and lose themselves. A living, breathing, resilient city, with expressive people who listen, and learn, and love. New Orleans is a place that has been torn down and built back up countless times, and each time, she becomes stronger. Every single person living in New Orleans has explicitly chosen to be here even though they’ve had so many opportunities to leave. They send a powerful message to the world through their undying loyalty to their home. Nourished by this city’s love, I drank in her beauty and her spirit and I healed.

Our always-on, hyper-connected Internet culture can learn so much from the people of New Orleans. We can certainly take things at face value on the Internet because that’s the easy path, and that’s what most people do. New Orleans is not overt about what makes it special. Bourbon Street is merely the façade. The heart of the city is at Domilise’s, having a fried oyster po boy and listening to Jaime, the neighborhood fire chief, tell stories at the bar, without sending a single Tweet. Digital media encourages us to become focused on celebrating or mitigating our pasts rather than creating the future, creating our futures. New Orleans is not about the past, it is about what lies ahead. How easy would it be for the citizens here to wallow in terrible memories, rehashing the tragedies that have befallen them? That is the easy path, the shortcut. But when you are here, all you feel is hope and possibility.

Herein lies the lesson. Ego-driven expressions of self on the Internet are the shiniest yet simplest one-dimensional parts of who we are as people. We ravage our souls, bit by bit, by exposing every facet of who we are online just because we think it will help us win a popularity contest. Privacy is not a relic of a time gone by. But we don’t have to give everything about ourselves away on the surface. We have a chance to reclaim it every day with every post we make. If we fail to understand this, we feed on each other’s reposts until we’re caught in a collective trap of our own making.

New Orleans showed me a way out, and a way in; I would delete the iPad DJ that had nearly cost me myself, and I would find Rana June, a human ready to live a life filled with possibility in a city filled with grace.

But, this is not just about me. This is about disconnecting online and reconnecting offline. This is about opening our eyes to this new dynamic and making us better able to support others and understand and process the feelings when it happens to us personally. When we take a moment to blink away from the warped lens of social media, the echo chamber, the nuances of human emotion come through in our interactions with one another. We realize that being a good person is more important than being a popular person. The subtlety of human expressions become clear. We reconnect with one another and reunite with our spirits.

Fear is a powerful force. It is crippling when its spotlight shines on the individual and it warps the mind when it consumes a group of people. The crowd will collectively yell for you to jump off the bridge, whereas the individual will connect with you on a human level and try to talk you off the ledge.

I’ve experienced this first-hand. My journey took me to an even darker place than just anonymous commenters. One can somewhat easily make a decision not to read comments or criticisms online. But in my case, the hatred that I believed was contained to computer screens bled into my real world. I have been physically beaten, verbally and emotionally abused and publicly humiliated over my decision to use iPads and other technology to create electronic music. Really? With so much happening in the world, this notion that this concept would ruffle so many feathers becomes even more absurd.

Add to all that the matter of gender. It appears as though whenever a woman does anything on the Internet – good, bad or indifferent – the hive mind’s first reaction is to call her a slut and a bitch and a whore. I don’t see this happening to men. The vicious cycle of these comments and artificial pressures fuel the inherent fears and doubts of the psyche. Does everyone in the world hate me? Am I going to be alone forever? Am I unlovable? Are these commenters right about me? How many female artists and singers and creators who received even a modicum of Internet hate made a decision not to continue to pursue their art? That is the true tragedy of all of this.

For me, the point of my art was, is, and always will be to grant permission for people to create. There is no excuse not to create. All of the tools are available to do so, and for the first time, this ability has become democratized and accessible. People said that the iPad was just a consumption device, and so many incredible artists have worked for the past four years to demonstrate that this is just not the case. Advancements in human-computer interaction and mobility are creating the perfect storm for a generation of artists, musicians, creators and dreamers, enabled by devices.

Technology-enabled artists are the future.

Music and mathematics are the only truly universal languages, and my dream is for everyone in the world to speak them fluently. This is why I create, this is why I leap out of the bed in the morning and can’t wait to get to work, now more than ever. This is why I will continue to create no matter what anybody says or writes about me. As Nietzsche once said, “without music, life would be a mistake.”

No one has the right to tell you who or what you are. Only you can define yourself. I’ve decided to write this piece from a place of love rather than a place of fear. Maybe this love can counteract the negativity. I’ll always believe that people are inherently good, no matter how much of the dark side of humanity I’ve experienced. You, and you alone, make the choice to let negative experiences harden you, change you, hurt you or to let them inspire you and push you further than you ever believed was possible. Your wounds can, in fact, become wisdom, if you let them. It just takes time and introspection.

I am now ready to be back in the world. This year has given me perspective and purpose. I now understand what I am here to do. This time, I’m doing it on my own terms.

So I leave you with a challenge: when you see something beautiful or amazing or inspiring or lovely on the Internet, take the seconds that you would spend sending a tweet about what you ate for breakfast and spend it telling that person that you enjoyed what they have created. Collectively, these tiny shifts in behavior have the power and potential to change the world.

We can build a fortress of love around creators and protect them from the inevitability of hateful comments. It has been said that 90% of YouTube comments are negative. Perhaps, together, we can invert that ratio.