Ezarik Justine - I, Justine: an analog memoir

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Copyright 2015 by Justine Ezarik

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First Keywords Press/ hardcover edition June 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-9151-7

ISBN 978-1-4767-9152-4 (ebook)

To the Internet <3

SO, YOU COULD SAY IT all started with a visit from the mailman.

It was a Saturday in August, uneventful except that I had received a package in the post: a white box with perforated sides, roughly the size of a legal pad and an inch or so thick. The package was clearly postmarked from AT&T; based on the bright blue Priority Mail sticker, it had cost the company more than seven dollars to ship.

I was new to AT&T, but the box threw me. As I unglued the flap, I contemplated briefly that this might be a warranty for my brand-new iPhone? Or maybe some kind of complimentary Apple accessory? Inside, however, was a thick set of pages. I thumbed through them quickly, not really understanding why I was suddenly holding in my hand a detailed record of every text message, data transfer, and file download Id made since switching service providers. Why in the world would they send me this? I wondered. And then it hit me: This wasnt some welcome-to-the-family paperwork or a summary of AT&T member benefits. This was a phone bill.

It was three hundred double-sided pages.

It actually weighed a couple of pounds.

After the initial shock wore offI mean, really, since when does a phone bill come in a box?!I did what I had done nearly every day for the previous six months: I drove to my local coffee shop, Crazy Mocha, which had become my unofficial office (and virtually my only contact with people in the outside world). Then I set up my camera and filmed myself flipping through the billincredulouslypage by page. I downloaded Perfect Timing (This Morning) by Orba Squara, the cheery acoustic-guitar-and-toy-piano melody made famous by its use in the first-ever iPhone ad campaign, and gave my minute-long video the (rather obvious) title IPHONE BILL. Finally, I uploaded the finished product to several sites: my personal blog, the now-defunct video-sharing site Revver, YouTube, Myspace, and Yahoo. It wasnt the first video Id ever posted online, and it certainly wouldnt be the last. I just didnt know then that this video would be the one to change the entire course of my life.

These days, going from obscurity to celebrity via the Internet isnt exactly unheard of, nor is it a particularly slow process. Justin Halpern of Sh*t My Dad Says fame snagged himself a book deal just two months after signing up for Twitter. #AlexfromTarget became a guest on Ellen inside of forty-eight hours. But the summer of 2007 was a different world, technologically (and culturally) speaking. Myspace was still the dominant social media site. (Facebook wouldnt surpass it for another twenty-one months; Instagram wouldnt launch for another three years.) Viral videos were still a relatively new, little-understood phenomenon. And the iPhone, now the most iconic smartphone in the world, had been on the market for only forty-three days. Id had mine, purchased for me by a company called Technology Evangelist (because I had only two hundred dollars in my checking account and couldnt actually afford onemore on that later), for a little over a month.

Of course, the iPhone was immediately hailed as revolutionary. What became clear rather quickly, however, was that AT&Tthe exclusive carrier of the newest, most advanced mobile device on the planetwas not: these guys had some seriously outdated billing policies. By early August, Id heard about one or two unusually large statements; AT&Ts decision to make (painstaking) itemization their default billing option was already getting play on some minor blogs and in the tech press. But I hadnt seen anything even approaching the colossal size of my bill, whichspread out on the little Formica table at the coffee shoplooked less like a phone bill and more like a Russian novel.

In the tech world, Ive always been what you would call an early adopter , someone who signs up for new services and social media platforms as soon as they become available, long before theyre actually popular. Such was the case with Twitter, which in those days was still very much a fledgling company. (Depending on which source you cite, there were only something like fifty thousand active users back then, compared to nearly 300 million today.) Since my account was linked to my phone, every tweet I sent (and received) was recorded by AT&T as a text messagein one month, with Twitter factored in, Id racked up a log of texts in excess of thirty-five thousand.

So the length of the bill really wasnt surprisingwhat was surprising was that they printed the whole thing out and mailed it to me. I was upset about the obvious environmental implications. Which is why, at the end of the iPhone bill video, over a black screen, I had typed the words : Use e-billing. Save a forest.

To say it struck a nerve is perhaps a bit of an understatement.

Within twenty-four hours, the video had more than a hundred thousand views and Id been interviewed for an article in USA Today : How Many Trees Did Your iPhone Bill Kill? Within two days, I was at two hundred thousand views and granting interviews to a handful of local Pittsburgh news stations. (I was such a n00b that I insisted on meeting this batch of reporters at Starbucks; I didnt want anyone to know where I actually lived. Also, during one on-camera interview, a bug flew directly into my eye. Take two .)