Technology has driven many industries to change the standard definition of work, and while “freelance” as a term has been used since the 19th century​, the ability to work “freelance” today is changing, and more available than ever, thanks to collaborative, accessible technology. 

John Provencher, a graphic designer and developer remarks that ​“websites are the design of our time.”​ Provencher views websites as not just a URL that lives online, but a generative system that can live independently and compound upon itself. ​His work involves simplicity and variables, not all websites surround themselves around code, some only need images or typography to be interesting.

In college, the web wasn’t John’s main focus, in fact, he wasn’t very good at coding either. Javascript took a long time for him to learn, as it does for anyone. Fast-forward: he now teaches students how to build websites part-time at The New School. He first started two years ago just as he was leaving his full-time job ​at a branding agency​. Teaching felt like the perfect, stable gig to bridge the transition to freelance. He also saw it as a way to workshop his own ideas. In essence, it was a way for him to be a student again. 

“You can be really risky in college and in my professional career I just always wanted to take huge risks.”

At the beginning of this year, John alongside friend and co-teacher Laurel Schwulst hosted their first workshop for their independent learning initiative, Fruitful School. Hosted for six weeks at Pioneer Works, they worked with eleven students of all different ages and backgrounds. The students at Fruitful applied with “seeds”, ideas for what they wanted to achieve in the workshop. The applicants weren’t judged on quality but instead on if John and Laurel, as teachers, had the references and resources to support their ideas.

When asked if teaching had become a crux of his practice, he readily agreed. It’s almost a breath of fresh air, being around a group of people who are curious and truthful in their willingness to learn, as opposed to getting stuck in the finite details of the industry. And the industry can be finite. 

Ritu Ghiya describes it as “an intense vacuum of a certain kind of person... Privilege is a word that’s tossed around a lot, criticality [isn’t] welcomed there as much.” 

An artist and designer, Ritu blurs the lines between artmaking and technology. Her interest lies in transforming physical objects into special, digital experiences.

Studying media theory in school, the path to web and technology was unexpected. 

“What I’m doing still feels super new to me, and every project I’m taking on now still feels like I’m taking it on to learn something new... I feel like my whole career has been informed by chasing what I’m interested in.”			

After graduating, Ritu worked in artbook publishing. But while she was surrounded by art, her role wasn’t creative. She left her full-time job on a “whim” to teach herself how to code. She spent her time introducing herself to others who weren’t inside the corporate world, leading her to the DIY tech community full “of people who don’t want to be complicit with what big tech is doing.”		

Through researching, she was introduced to the School for Poetic Computation, a Black Mountain-esque school focused around care, technology, and theoretical learning. She began doing one-off design gigs for them and was then introduced to The New York Tech Zine Fair, a new project of the owners. Ritu soon jumped on as program manager.		

The fair has provided Ritu with a backbone for her practice, while she “navigates the minutiae of having to be a worker in technology and art.” It brings together a community of artists that are “interrogating power, hegemony, and technology and producing independent publishing. I kind of call it a celebration of publishing about technology outside of technology.”		

“There are just a lot of people who are tired,” Ritu admits. And for her and many others, this community is a way to ease the frustration of big corporatism. 

“For me personally, things have started making sense with my career as a designer and developer within the last few months. I think the recipe in all these things has brought me the work I do... If I reflect, I think I have created these paths for myself because I didn’t see one that made sense to me.”			

Jo Shaffer, a visual effects artist, and bassist, also created their own course. Unlike John and Ritu, Jo’s practice lies in the software that technology has created over time. Visual effects programs like Houdini and Maya were only introduced to the market in the late 90s. On Jo’s end, it has taken years of trial and error to climb multiple, steep learning curves. 

“At first you’re just struggling with technology and it’s hard to, even if you can execute something, really imbue it with your voice or have a take on it.”

Jo cites ​Everything is Cinema​ by Richard Brody. "The New Wave people were really interested in the idea of a filmmaker, that as tech improved, being able to lock themselves in a room and make a film in the same way an author just needs to go into a room and make their art.” 

Now after taking the time, Jo has noticed themselves paying closer attention to detail, light in particular. How does it scatter? How does it diffuse? 

“Stone buildings at sunset, that’s my perfect light.”		

Jo found themself in a freelance position by way of music. They currently play bass in an indie rock band, The Ophelias. In order to financially support life on the road, when they’re in New York, Jo is devoted to VFX, making sure all projects are finished before touring for consecutive weeks. But it’s not something they mind, comparing it to getting lost in a video game.			

In terms of the overlap between their two mediums, music and tech, Jo finds the intersection in their practice. “It sounds dumb to say out loud cause it’s so intrinsic to how you go about making... I just haven’t found that learning how to procedurally model a flower is that much different from learning how to play a bass part. You just study something, practice it.” 

The Changing Work of Freelancing, in Photos

Copyright and AI will make a twisted pair. 

We’re a long way from seeing C3-PO improvise his way through a poetry slam, but it’s not too soon to wonder how we’re supposed to treat the creative work of non-human intelligence. Because while today, machine-learning models remain extensions of human brains, they may not stay there forever. And in the meantime, money stands to be gained or lost depending on how intellectual-property laws govern the output—and input—of AI.

“This is largely a theoretical debate at this point,” said Meredith Rose, policy counsel with the Washington-based advocacy group Public Knowledge. 

Her advice: Look past what she called “pop-culture driven ideas of an AI being sentient and inherently creative.” Instead, focus on the current reality of AI as more of a post-processing tool that requires extensive care and feeding by creative humans. 

“When I write up neural net experiments, I'm choosing which neural net to train on what data, how it should be sampled, and then curating the results into something that's fun to read,” emailed Janelle Shane, a researcher and author of “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You,” a book breaking down advances in AI.  

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You | Janelle Shane | Talks at Google

Shane regularly treats readers of her AI Weirdness blog to such treats as a set of neural-net-composed Christmas carols that led off with these grisly verses:

“The All-gracious King of all the earth,

“In no cases does it make sense to say the copyright should belong to the AI,” Shane said. “The AI is the tool, and human creativity determines how it's used.”

The developers of an AI-powered soundtrack composition service have taken that approach to drive additional revenue: If you use the free or standard plans at Aiva Technologies, that Luxembourg-based firm retains copyright to the output of its tools, while paying for its Pro plan lets you keep those rights. 

"They know what makes your heart beat faster,” summed up Gary Arlen, a longtime tech-industry analyst of advances in using AI to craft such movie ingredients as scores and even movie trailers. 

How fine do you draw the line between the output of one non-human intelligence and another? 

Rose’s suggestion for this level of AI development was to apply a common clause in freelance contracts to the product of AI systems. “Expand the work for hire doctrine,” she said. “Let’s treat it like it’s an employee.”

What if, however, an AI could create entertaining works without humans first carefully feeding it a corpus of samples? Then, Rose suggested, take a look at the stated purpose of copyright in the constitution—to “promote the progress” of art. "The machine doesn’t need to get paid, the machine doesn’t need to eat,” she said. "Would this mechanism work to create more work?" 

History lends a recent parallel: the monkey-selfie case, in which People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claimed that a Celebes crested macaque named Naruto owned the copyright to a selfie he’d taken after photographer David Slater left cameras nearby. Slater, meanwhile, contended that he owned the copyright, citing the days he’d spent gaining the trust of the monkeys and the care spent positioning the camera so that the simians would be tempted to try a selfie. Rose rejected that, saying, “things that occur in nature are not copyrightable.” But how fine do you draw the line between the output of one non-human intelligence and another? 

In the nearer term, the more likely parallel for AI’s conversation with copyright is the Google Books case

That’s the long-running suit the Authors Guild filed against Google to stop it from scanning and indexing millions of books, many out of print, and making them searchable. That legal battle ended with Google’s claims being upheld even as a proposed settlement with the Guild collapsed, leaving the copyrighted part of Google’s book archive offline. The 2020 version of that dispute involves a different sort of mass ingestion of copyrighted work: feeding existing creative works into a machine-learning model so it can learn how to make new works along those lines. 

“Needless to say, the unauthorized (unlicensed) ingestion of copyrighted works to generate new competitive creative works will ultimately cause market harm to the value of human-created copyrighted works that the AI machines essentially mimic in style and essence,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, in comments submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. 

“If we want to preserve a sustainable economy for human authorship in the U.S., we need to create a way for human authors whose works are ingested by AI algorithms and processes to receive remuneration for such use,” Rasenberger said. “As noted above, this will eventually require a sophisticated, automated licensing system.”

The humans directing AIs can work around copyright complaints by training these algorithms on exclusively public-domain works.

“Many of the AI-generated art projects we've seen so far—like The Next Rembrandt—rely on public domain works, possibly to sidestep copyright issues with training data,” noted Amanda Levendowski, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s law school and founding director of its Intellectual Property and Information Policy.

As Rose noted, restricting an AI to a diet of only public-domain works will reflect a much less diverse authorship. As in: “That is white western males who wrote before 1923.” Plus, you need to feed so many works into an AI to train it properly (as in: create something more artful than the AI Christmas carols Shane ushered into the world), so the contribution of any one artist will be trivial. 

"Even Prince, who was wildly prolific, is not going to have nearly enough material to train an AI,” Rose said. "There’s such a huge sea, it’s like trying to pick a single drop of seafoam out of the ocean.” 

But rightsholders with deep pockets will still want to explore this. Said Arlen: “That’s where the copyright lawyers will get interested.”

Who Wrote That Hit Song? It Depends on How Human They Are. 

No matter where you are, you are probably (somewhat or greatly) affected by COVID19. I’m an American in Berlin, and navigating around COVID19 has entirely changed my life, including my social life. Social distancing physically has pushed people back into the digital and onto the internet. 

I’ve been invited to live Instagram streams, Zoom karaoke, Zoom dance parties, Zoom drinking parties, Zoom brunches, to numerous Facetime video calls, Google Hangouts, Skype digital coffees, Netflix Party video streams, the list goes on. Video conferencing and seeing the reactions of my friends and loved ones makes this time slightly easier. 

This has brought me, and many others, to a new reliance and shift to video conferencing during the time of quarantining in COVID19. This reliance and shift to video conferencing makes sense—schools are doing it to make sure classes go online, and video conferencing has been a staple of remote work environments. But what’s new here is how video conference tools are being used out of business and school environments to fill in the gap of social intimacy and events created in social distancing. Zoom was never intended to be used for multi-person dance parties, and while I’m sure Zoom loves how popular it’s become, this does raise some concerns. Does Zoom actually have the right tools to let people communicate in these new ways? Does any video conferencing tool have that? 

Video conferencing tools are not without their problems 

Zoom has had a slew of reported privacy and security issues, such as VICE uncovering that Zoom’s iOS app was sending information to Facebook about when users logged in, or earlier in 2020, Zoom reported having a security flaw that could allow hackers to take over users’ microphones, and with human rights and technology advocacy group, Access Now, requesting transparency reports from Zoom (which Zoom hasn’t delivered yet). 

These are just some of the issues with Zoom; the other big problem is video-conferencing harassment. Zoom has a specific form of harassment occurring, called Zoombombing. Zoombombing is when a troll takes control of the Zoom room by sharing a video or their screen, and disrupting the Zoom hangouts with inappropriate and offensive content, and generally causing havoc. NBC News reported Princeton professor and noted author, Ruja Benjamin, and her husband getting Zoombombed when reading books to children. Their harasser was a white man in a thong and kept repeating the n-word. Benjamin and her husband eventually ended the Zoom call and canceled the reading. Casey Newton, a technology journalist, had his work from home happy hour Zoombombed. 

What’s important to note here is that relatively technology-savvy people are getting Zoombombed, and it’s not a few people: it’s becoming a more common occurrence. Researcher and disinformation expert Joan Donovan has tweeted out ways to mitigate Zoombombing, but it still doesn’t completely stop it. Product designer Amélie Lamont summarizes the sentiment best: it seems clear big technology companies are not designing with harassment in mind. This is especially true of enterprise technology like most video conferencing software and technology that insists that it’s only enterprise, such as Slack. Right now, Zoom is so similar to Slack in that it’s a product that seems to be or insists that it’s just enterprise software but it’s used like a social network or social messaging platform. Slack is used for friends groups, neighborhood blocks, alumni associations, conferences, and just for general hangouts, as well as for workplaces. Does this sound familiar? Zoom is being used in the exact same way. And there is harassment happening on both platforms. 

When a tool or platform allows for multiple people to interact with each other, there will be harassment. 

So, why is this happening? These tools were built for conferencing, not for general socializing, and they don’t have enough blocking capabilities or moderation tools to support the kinds of new social interactions that are happening. Slack, for example, has repeatedly said publicly it’s just a workplace tool, and thus doesn't need blocking or moderation. Their stance is that ‘disagreements’ can be worked out in an office place. But that’s not how harassment unfolds in the world—work isn’t harassment free, just like harassment can come from friend groups, loved ones, and complete strangers. When a tool or platform allows for multiple people to interact with each other, there will be harassment. Case in point with the prolific harassment that occurs across Wikipedia. 

In a sense, Zoom does a better job than most conferencing tools in allowing for more nuanced kinds of interactions, such as allowing for a moderator to create breakout groups

Breakout groups are smaller, private groups inside of the larger Zoom meeting room. And this kind of design allows for a specific kind of intimacy in Zoom, which makes it a great and useful tool right now. This intimacy means users need more granular moderation tools per person: easier-to-find, intuitive moderation tools for the organizer, such as the ability to immediately block or cut someone’s video who is sharing. Imagine the ability to click on the main screen and have tools right at your fingertips, right at the right-click. 

Eleanor Wynn, a former Principal Engineer at Intel and current scholar with the Ronin Institute, wrote over a messaging app about her work exploring team meetings and virtual meetings at Intel: “The mistake that I see in the videoconferencing tools is that seeing isn't primary... nobody has the patience to sit all day in video conferences. We judged that the maximum time for an effective video conference, which we also did, was 4 hours. After that, you might as well get people on a plane.” 

What conference tools focus on is work and facilitating work conversations but not necessarily how people see large groups of people and interact. It’s about presenting slideshows and facilitating work conversations, not hosting dinner parties. And now video conferencing tools are being used for multiple hours per day, in our work hours and out of work hours. 

With people running dance parties on Zoom, workout classes on Vimeo; people are yearning for connection right now since we can’t have real, physical human touch. Intimacy is being craved. But for tools to be used for pure socializing like karaoke, or digital brunches, conferencing tools and hangouts need to be redesigned. Imagine an online web browser tool that is just dedicated to karaoke. Imagine what that could look like. More importantly, imagine what it would need to mitigate harassment. If a tool allows for video conferencing or video interaction in real-time, people will use it, regardless of how the tool is intended to be used. Users change and reinterpret meaning to technology constantly, we see this Facebook which started out just for college students and now is larger than any nation-state. 

Technology can adapt and shift, and it should especially to meet the needs of their users. Now, in the age of COVID19, it’s time for enterprise software that’s being used for all different kinds of new users, to better protect their users from harassment. And Zoom agrees. On April 1st, the CEO published a statement promising to spend the next 90 days on improvements: better encryption, and better tools. Zoom, we’ll be waiting and watching. 

Caroline Sinders is a design researcher and artist analyzing technology and its impacts through a social justice lens.  

Conference Tools Weren't Designed to Be Social Networks

It looks like a familiar and timeless sight: in a pristine kitchen, two hands stretch out towards a tray of freshly made bread rolls, ready for the oven. In the background, the word ‘Piekarnia’ – Polish for ‘bakery’ – is lit up, besides which a cheery ladybug smiles: the logo for Polish supermarket giant, Biedronka. But this isn’t just any kitchen.

With a turn to the digital in almost every walk of life, even the way workers are trained to make bread is becoming high-tech. Biedronka—Poland’s largest retail chain—has rolled out a new method of training for baking, which solely uses virtual reality. 

The VR baking system, which has so far been launched in eight stores around the country, is fully interactive and guides trainee workers through the process of making bread in a virtual store, from fulfilling health and safety practices to loading up the oven and distributing products. Biedronka explained in a press release that the VR sets covered “all those activities that the employees of the shops do on a daily basis ‘in real life.’”

The move to virtual reality has been cooking up for a while

Biedronka is one of many stores in Poland facing an acute shortage of workers—an issue that has been attributed to difficulties in securing long-term work contracts for immigrants to the country. The VR headsets were introduced to streamline training, helping Biedronka teach new employees quickly and conveniently. Milena Bałon, junior e-learning manager at Jeronimo Martins Polska, the group which owns Biedronka, said that VR meant the company could “quickly and fully safely teach our employees skills that are difficult to be taught in real life.”

And one of the most demanding tasks workers must learn is how to make bread, a staple of Biedronka stores. The chain launched in-store bakeries in 2012, stacking shelves with bread, golden stacks of baguettes, tumbling rolls, glistening cakes, and croissants, all under the slogan: ‘fresh baked goods at any time’. Now, they need enough workers to meet demands from hungry Polish shoppers—baking is a Polish institution.

“Additionally,” says Bałon, “VR technology in baking training helps us to reduce food waste—while learning in a traditional form, the bread used for baking would not go on sale, which means it would be a waste.”

Jan Jaszczyński, who runs PureVR, a virtual reality entertainment salon in the central Polish town of Płock, sees an “immense growth of VR technology” in recent years. He thinks the technology is “an inevitable solution to many innovative applications,” including in technical and engineering – but also in more traditional areas like baking. “We will for sure see more of that in the future,” he explains. “VR as a means in training and AR as a means of live service advice is gaining ground every day in new fields.” 

“And most of all the learning outcomes are as good or even better than in traditional ways.”

However, Jaszczyński adds that life is on hold at the moment. After the coronavirus outbreak hit Poland, the company initially took extra precautions, including regularly using anti-bacterial cleaners. But on March 11, the Polish government ordered the closure of all schools, museums and cultural institutions. Jaszczyński says some of his employees—who are mainly students—have been forced to move out of their student accommodation, and have returned to their family homes.

With VR sets, workers have time to learn hygiene standards, how to safely operate the chiller, oven, and complete logistical tasks like bakery paperwork. 

In response to the government’s order, Biedronka has also shortened its working hours and is limiting the number of customers in stores. Employees have been split into teams that work in rotation, with any workers over 60 allowed to be exempt from shifts. 

But that’s not to say VR development has also been interrupted. Jaszczyński believes the technology could “theoretically” step into the breach for companies during the coronavirus outbreak, as “it’s becoming more and more affordable.”

“Big companies could buy and send their employees cardboard VR headsets and an application,” he explains. But he emphasizes that the quality of content available on cardboard or plastic headsets would be limited compared to the technology available on more advanced models.

Coronavirus aside, Poland has been developing its virtual reality technology fast – in business and in culture 

Away from the workplace, VR headsets have also been adopted by museums to launch innovative, immersive exhibitions. In 2018, a film entitled ‘Kartka z Powstania’ (‘Postcard from the Uprising’) was produced, a 15-minute account of experiences during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the largest military operation by resistance forces in German-occupied Europe. ‘Kartka z Powstania’ was the first-ever fictionalized historical VR show in Poland. There are also VR games covering Soviet repression in the pipeline.

And VR is also making headway in Polish society: PureVR is just one of many virtual reality studios set up across the country, helping to introduce the technology to a wider audience. And another Polish VR company is Immersion.pl, which implements AR and VR in business and entertainment.

Bartosz Rosłoński, from Immersion, also thinks that the use of VR is becoming more widespread in Poland. “With the development of VR headsets and with all the upgrades and easiness of usage, I can see that companies are starting to use VR more as a day to day tool to increase effectiveness and to decrease costs,” he says.

And he agrees that this particularly applies to the workplace. “VR in training is one of the top promising directions of this technology.”

"People in VR are learning more efficiently and companies can reduce costs of complicated training all over the world.”

Similar concerns also inspired Biedronka’s decision for VR training: Kozyra explains that “the advantage of VR goggles is that they allow multiple exercises, but also to make mistakes in a safe environment.”

With the sets, workers have the time to learn hygiene standards, as well as how to safely operate the chiller, oven, and even complete any logistics tasks, like essential paperwork for the bakery. Employees using the Biedronka VR sets are trained three times to ensure the techniques are fully developed: first, they participate in a step-by-step baking process; then they bake independently, with running feedback from the device; and finally, they complete a skill check.

The final stage, however, is in real life—a test observed by a store supervisor.

Aleksandra Kamińska, a deputy store manager in Warsaw, explained in a press release that the goggles were first “a real novelty, but after the first moment of uncertainty and getting used to operating the joysticks I entered the virtual world of the shop quite quickly.”

To help employees adapt to the world of the supermarket, Biedronka has also developed an internal chatbot, available 24/7, which provides answers to any questions they may have. According to Rosłoński, VR is at the forefront of a global technology boom, and recent successes prove Poland is leading the way.

“Poland has a great pool of talented developers who are able to create very complex applications for VR headsets. Poland is also growing really fast which is reflected in new technologies and investments.”

Jaszczyński however, feels that despite the advancing technology of the headset, the only limitation is in the mindset. “People consider VR as a child’s play,” he explains. “The Polish market will greatly benefit from the widespread use of VR as soon as we in Poland will all recognize it as a useful and handy tool.”

One supermarket is already taking a slice of the action.

In Poland, VR is Teaching People How to Bake Bread

Seldom do we say nice things about fandoms in 2020. The “stan” is now equated to the cultist: detached from larger culture, infatuated with the unimportant, incapable of critical thinking; rowdy, shallow, toxic. 

The prevalence of pop music fandoms on Twitter, particularly K-pop fandoms, has been greeted with disdain by all manner of cultural analysts. The incessant and off-topic usage by some of “fancams”—clips of artists’ performances, often paired with recruitment-minded captions—do little to quell this resistance.

Yet, particularly as we recognize the power of youth-led, female-skewing, LGBT-friendly subcultures as spaces of sociopolitical development and solidarity, we will do well to also acknowledge the power fandom has for good. Because more and more, we see that this power is not always lost on fans. See: One in an ARMY, the charity organization led by fans of Korean music group BTS.

“It’s not in any way an official organization,” says Erika, an American representative I speak to via phone who handles press and social media work. “It is completely volunteer-led. It’s just ARMYs that decided to come together and do it.”

Since 2013, South Korea’s BTS has grown in popularity exponentially, reaching a point of success so great in the past few years that it has left media, fans and detractors alike in a state of utter confusion. Their release of Map of the Soul: Persona became the highest-selling album in South Korean history months after its release despite its seven-track length. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 (their third album to do so) and has remained on the chart, alongside previous release Love Yourself: Answer which became the first K-pop album to ever remain on the chart for longer than a year. Then, they dropped Map of the Soul: 7 in February, which has already broken the record for the highest-selling Korean album of all time, having sold more than 4.1 million copies just nine days after its release.

The BTS fanbase, ARMY, has been the catalyst for this success 

Their Twitter account boasts 24.5 million followers and several tweets with over 1 million retweets. It is ARMY's activity on social media that not only spreads awareness for the group but disseminates information & organizes chart pushes. When it comes to fandoms investing time and money into empowering their favorite artists, one would be hard-pressed to find one of ARMY’s calibur.

“Around March 2018, we were seeing the fandom’s growth was getting so immense,” Erika tells me. “There was a video for Yoongi’s birthday, and he had a little cat rug in front of his studio when they went to knock on his door, and people found the cat rug and sold it out on the site within minutes. A lot of funny things like that were happening that showed how huge and dedicated to everything BTS the fandom was.”

An astute fan from Brazil named Ana came up with an idea. 

“At that time, the news here in Brazil and probably all around the world was about the Syrian civil war,” she tells me via DM. “I didn’t know what I could do since I was just a 15 year-old girl living far away from the conflict. I asked my parents if we could donate and everything but that wasn’t enough.” 

Ana sent out a tweet noting ARMY’s power and calling for it to be manifested into helping refugees in Syria. “A lot of people responded—I did,” says Erika. “We started trying to put together some thoughts, collate our thoughts, put in some rules for ourselves—how do we wanna go about this, how can we do it in a way that’s going to be meaningful or impactful?”

The result became One In An ARMY, an ARMY-led, unofficial charity organization that would make use of the frequent engagement in the ARMY Twitter space to lend attention to important causes. While focused on Twitter, the group has created social media accounts on everything from Facebook to Curious Cat. 

Through a Discord channel, members of One In An ARMY communicate with each other to establish what will be necessary for each initiative. Then, each month, One In An ARMY partners with a charity organization they select through an intensive vetting process, tweeting out a donation link with each post.

BTS’ messages and efforts have long focused on improving the lives of others. 

Erika’s job has become to handle social media and PR; others handle functions from graphic design to charity research. Like many other members—the likes of whom hail from nearly every continent—Erika was not actively involved in charity work prior to taking part in the organization, but had long had a desire to give what she could to those less fortunate. Figuring out how to get the process right without any experience was a scary task for the young assemblage.

Their first project was with Medical Teams International. 

“I spoke to a lovely lady named Tracy Holland,” says Erika. “I called her and said ‘We don’t really know what we’re doing, but we’re trying to do this… thing.’ And she was really, really great. We actually sent her flowers as a team for being with our first organization and helping us through it. She called me one day and said ‘Oh my God, I made the report this week that our engagement online has gone up 7000%, and I got a standing ovation!’ So that worked out really well.”

Since then, One In An ARMY has conducted one successful campaign after another, as visible on their archive. For their October campaign, a collaboration with an Athenian organization that provides shelter for marginalized refugees, they raised over $6000 USD. A month before, they’d raised nearly $8000 for an organization constructing eco-friendly educational spaces in Guatemala.

“We did thirst relief last year and by the end of the campaign, we had provided water filters to 30 families in Tanzania,” says Erika. “The water filters for each household, they can provide water for up to ten people and they last for 25 years. So now, 30 families for 25 years will have clean drinking water, that won’t have any parasites; they can go to school, they can go to work and not lose their jobs because they’re sick from contaminated water, and ARMY did that.”

One In An ARMY is not the first instance of a fandom pulling together to make a difference

Fans of Joss Whedon and his collective works have held conventions for years, of which percentages of proceeds have been donated to charities. Misha Collins, star of the much-stanned TV series Supernatural, has on numerous occasions rallied his supporters to donate to different causes.

Something about One In An ARMY’s story is uniquely harrowing; perhaps it is the group’s starkly visible, tangible positivity within a Twitter landscape (Stan or otherwise) plagued by trauma and discordance. Perhaps it’s the group’s utilization of modern, otherwise derided social media networks to create said tangible change. Perhaps it’s the reality that, without any prompt, fans within a social media environment decided to use their platform for good despite the amount of uncompensated time and energy it would require.

Then again, said ARMYs might argue to you that, in a way, they’d been prompted by their faves after all—if indirectly. Erika, who has never taken part in a fandom before BTS, fell for the group in part for their selfless messages. “Seeing what BTS had said about, ‘if they can improve the life of someone else just a tiny bit, it’s enough,’ that makes it worthwhile,” she says.

Indeed, BTS’ messages and efforts have long been focused on improving the lives of others. Their Love Yourself album series was devoted to showcasing the journey in which a person can love others most powerfully through first loving themselves. Through songs and interviews, they often speak out against oppressive sociopolitical forces. Their partnership with UNICEF, and their leader RM’s speech at the United Nations, showcased their initiative to prevent bullying and engender self-love globally.

“It really boils down to the fact that BTS have inspired so many,” says Erika. “From what people tell us, they tell us they’ve never seen a fandom do this before.”

Perhaps these ARMYs will inspire other fandoms to do the same; to utilize these spaces and platforms for good. And if that chain reaction is set in motion, at some point the general public may rewire how we think of fandoms online. But all of these changes start with an action—something that was not prompted, not even considered necessary—by people with the ability to reach others. 

With the Internet’s capacity for connecting strangers, this ability is easier to come by than ever. With this power at our fingertips, how can each of us, all users, respond in kind?

Fandoms and Fundraising: How BTS Fans Created a Global Charity 

The most important part of a privacy law are the definitions. Get them wrong and the rest of the statute doesn't mean much. Over the last month, a quiet drama with major stakes (and a hopeful ending) unfolded around the definition of "personal information." 

It's a drama worth understanding because it will play out again and again as new privacy laws make their way through local, state, and national legislatures. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on January 1st, giving consumers far more control over the data that companies collect about them. But while CCPA's language hasn't changed since the fall, the regulations implementing CCPA are still in flux. 

Our story begins on February 7th, when CA's Attorney General added to the draft regulations Section 999.302, "Guidance Regarding the Interpretation of CCPA Definitions." The new guidance would have crippled the CCPA. For example, suppose a free adult video site, IPporn, logs every video watched along with the associated IP address. It stores no other session or user information. Under the most obvious reading of Section 999.302, the log would not constitute personal information. IPporn could, for example, tweet out every IP+video record publicly. Any other website could easily learn a user's kinks by simply searching Twitter. Clearly, this is not the intent of CCPA.

CCPA governs the use of "personal information." Let's look at the definition (1798.140(o)(1): "'Personal information' means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.' Under this definition, personal information definitely includes information that "could reasonably be linked" with a particular household, no question about it. The earliest draft regulations didn't elaborate on the meaning of "personal information," but on February 7th, the Attorney General added new "Guidance Regarding the Interpretation of CCPA Definitions": 

999.302(a) Whether information is “personal information,” as that term is defined in Civil Code section 1798.140, subdivision (o), depends on whether the business maintains information in a manner that “identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could be reasonably linked [sic], directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household.” 

For example, if a business collects the IP addresses of visitors to its website but does not link the IP address to any particular consumer or household, and could not reasonably link the IP address with a particular consumer or household, then the IP address would not be “personal information.”

The latest guidance presents serious contradictions to the original intent of CCPA

First, the new guidance distinguishes between what a specific business can do with data and what can be done with data more generally. The original definition demands protection of information if it can be reasonably linked with a particular household by anybody. In contrast, the draft regulation only requires the protection of information if it can be reasonably linked by the business. It suggests that to free personal information from CCPA protection, a business doesn't have to make the information less identifiable, but to handicap its own identification capabilities. 

This is something industry critics of CCPA (who want to weaken the law) have been begging for. Their argument is that you can't expect every mom-and-pop data company that peddles in the personal information of 50,000 people annually to be able to figure out what leet MIT hackers can do with data. That argument makes some sense, and it's clear that a lot is riding on the meaning of "reasonable" in CCPA's definition of personal information.

However, this distinction yields a nonsensical policy. For example, CCPA makes it illegal for a business to publicly tweet its users' personal information. But if the business can't reasonably link it to a household, then it's not personal information. And if it's not personal information, CCPA doesn't apply. Tweet away. Of course, what should matter from a policy perspective is what the recipients of that information—anybody on the internet—can do with it. Maybe I'm reading it wrong. That can't be what they mean, right? Wrong!

When one of CCPA's key senators expresses "deep concern" over your regulation, you listen.

Second, it is, in fact, wrong, because they illustrate their point with the worst possible example: IP addresses. A typical household's IP address (say, on a family desktop) stays the same for months or years at a time. During that period, every webpage they visit sees the IP. If anything "could reasonably be linked to a specific household," it's an IP address. CCPA mentions IP address explicitly twice, but the draft regulation would make it possible for IP addresses to not be personal information. If the business doesn't keep around other information needed to link the IP address to the household (it's hard for me to write that phrase it's so vacuous), then the data is free from CCPA. 

Third, under 999.302, personal information no longer includes all information that could reasonably be linked with a particular household. It only includes information that is "maintained in a manner that could be reasonably linked" with a particular household. Compare with the statute's language. The guidance focuses the definition of personal data on the form of the data: how it's maintained. It sidelines the power of the data: what can be done with it. For a data privacy regulation, this is backwards: the power of data, not its form, is what matters. I've made this point before in a piece on ambiguities in the law's definition of "probabilistic identifiers" and calling for regulatory clarification. 

The latest guidance, if enacted, could enshrine the worst interpretation as the main definition of "personal information"

Let's go back to our adult video site IPporn. If the IP+video log doesn't fall under the new exception established in the draft regulation, I don't know what does. According to the regulation, it's not personal information and IPporn can do whatever they want with it, like tweet, making people's porn habits all but public. Like I said, this is astonishing. Section 999.302 has no place in the final regulations. By distinguishing what a specific business can do with data and what can be done with data more generally, the draft regulation would gut the boldest American privacy statute in a generation.

The Attorney General accepts public comments after every revision of the regulations. About 100 were submitted, only a handful mentioning Section 999.302. Most comments applauded the new language—not because they didn't appreciate its significance but because they appreciate its significance. Undoubtedly the most important comment, however, came from Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee: "One specific area that I find sacrosanct is what is considered 'personal information' for purposes of the CCPA . . . . I believe that Section 999.302 of your modified proposed regulations weakens the very definition we have been fervently protecting." 

When one of CCPA's key senators expresses "deep concern" over your regulation, you listen. On March 11th, the Attorney General published the third draft of the CCPA regulations, striking Section 999.302 altogether and opening a round of public comments. The regulations are still in flux, and you can be sure that the industry groups that applauded Section 999.302 will pressure the Attorney General to re-introduce similar language. Comments can be submitted about this issue through March 27, 2020. 

This is an abridged version of a piece originally published by Protego Press.

The Boldest American Consumer Privacy Statute in a Generation is in Flux

Melody Loveless, a 30-year-old Brooklynite, is on stage. She stands at a table with her hands resting on the keyboard of her MacBook. Digital drones and bleeps begin to sound from the speakers, as a metallic drum beat settles into a downtempo trip-hop rhythm; it has the tone of someone striking a tuning fork against the chassis of a robot. Loveless hums in a high register into a microphone and begins to loop her voice.

As the music builds, a stream of her laptop screen is projected behind her. The text begins to move. Loveless types new lines, chopping and manipulating her vocal sample. The code cascades, changing as musical elements are introduced or discarded—a new drum machine beat, a new phrase from her synth library.

Loveless is a live coder—part of a movement of digital artists who write music and visuals on the fly, with their programming displayed as part of the performance.

Nearly all pop music is now a digital endeavor: recorded, edited, tuned up and mixed using software. 

For livecoders, the computer is more than a tool. It is a collaborator. Artists type lines of code that lay out the structure and boundaries of a song—tempo, tonality, rhythm. Algorithms then leave their mark, drawing melody out of the digital void, or processing vocal lines nearly beyond recognition. Livecoding dance parties, known as Algoraves, were first held in London in 2011 and have since gone global, drawing crowds in cities from Bogota to New York to Mumbai. 

Livecoding also has an ethos, Loveless says. The software is free; the code is open-source; the gatherings where coders trade tips are accessible to newcomers. It is a scene that is proudly unowned.

“Electronic music doesn't have a reputation for being cheap,” Loveless says. “And here we have this huge community that's about sharing free software and showing our code in screens and we're all secretly socialists, probably. It makes me happy to be part of a livecoding scene within all these awful things happening in tech. Cause here we are showing our codes, being super transparent with what we're doing, using free stuff."

count by Melody Loveless -  NY DigiAna Show 1/31/20 @ Babycastles

Loveless grew up all over, she says. She was born in San Diego; her mother, a nurse, was the first in her family to immigrate from the Philippines to the United States. Loveless’ parents split up when she was a toddler, and her mother preferred not to stay in one place for long. Loveless has lived in Hawaii, Florida, a sequence of Las Vegas neighborhoods and New York. The itinerant childhood left Loveless with a love of travel and few long-term friends. 

"I'm still figuring out my relationship to home. There are some people who don't leave their home their whole life, and the idea of even going to Disney World is a big idea—you know what I mean? Something so fucking lame.”

Like countless other teens of her generation, Loveless had her first encounters with computer coding on MySpace—the mid-2000s, lamented social network that launched a thousand emo bands. Users could use HTML, the basic language of web design, to paint their pages with garish colors and autoplay their favorite songs. Loveless was motivated by a loathing for the “top 8,” a notorious Myspace feature that fostered endless high school social dramatics by encouraging users to rank their favorite friends.

"Before they were flexible with the top 8, I went in and made these tiny icons for all of my friends,” Loveless says. “I had like a top 30 that I made with HTML."

She majored in classical percussion performance at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and then moved across the country to earn a master’s in music composition at New York University.  To pay the rent, she took a job handling returns at the newly opened Whole Foods in Gowanus. It did not go well. She played shows when she could, but felt pulled aside from her art, dealing instead with the retail crises of Brooklyn’s stressed-out kale moms and yoga dads. Loveless sought work in tech, but found it difficult to get hired without a degree in computer science. She enrolled in the Integrated Digital Media program at NYU’s engineering school, studying coding, art and where the two meet.

"I would describe it to my friends as future school,” Loveless says. “It's all about emerging technologies."

I ask her to show me how livecoding works—how she takes the syntax and makes it sing. She powers up her Macbook, which is plugged into a small red mixer on her kitchen table, and opens Sonic Pi, a coding environment used frequently by livecoders since its release in 2012. She types strings of text into a terminal—the file names of instrument samples to pull into the track and the commands that speed them up or slow them down, sharpen them or cushion them in reverb.

"Is this working?" she says under her breath. "Fuck yeah it is."

Loveless says she does not often speak to her computer, but she's tired. She has a concert tonight, and she's spent the day writing up a curriculum for a class she will be teaching in the spring.

"Ok, please don't break," she says as the bass sets in. 

Loveless loops her voice into a tonal hum and enters a string of numbers telling her synth which notes it is allowed to play. She sets out a tempo and rhythm, and the program begins playing an algorithmically generated melody that starts simple, then accelerates and changes. A synth rises and flares, like a raygun in a 50s sci-fi serial, as Loveless begins cooing dreamy wordless vocals over the beat. She types hash marks in front of lines of code—what programmers call “commenting out”— and those loops fall silent in real time.

It is a style of composition that suits her, she says. Transparent and honest; improvisational, yet deliberate; concerned more with process and experimentation than personal virtuosity.

"I'm very inaccurate, so I'm not really the best classical performer,” Loveless says. “Being able to play around in an environment where I can have more time to make my decisions and have the tech help me out is far more appealing."

Loveless was introduced to livecoding by Kate Sicchio, one of her professors at NYU. Sicchio, who now teaches livecoding at Virginia Commonwealth University, is a trained choreographer. In 2011, she was living in Sheffield, England, and experimenting with ways to blend her art with her interest in programming. She translated her dances into a “pseudolanguage,” creating choreography scores that functioned like computer code—her steps translated into text, to be executed by dancers like a computer executes a program. A colleague recommended she meet with Alex McLean, a pioneer in the U.K’s nascent livecoding scene who had recently coined the term “algorave.”

“He was like ‘Oh, you’re doing this thing called livecoding.’ I was like ‘Oh, cool,’ ” Sicchio says. “That’s how I discovered livecoding—I was already doing it, and somebody put a name to it for me.”

When Sicchio moved to New York in 2014, she brought livecoding with her. She began meeting with the coders Jason Levine, Ramsey Nasser and Tom Murphy, and the four of them launched Livecode NYC—the first group in the city dedicated to their new art form. She got hired as a professor at NYU, where Loveless was studying digital media. In 2017, Sicchio brought Loveless to the Source Festival, a livecoding showcase on NYU’s campus. Loveless was not immediately sold.

“At first she was like. ‘I don’t really get this kind of thing,’ ” Sicchio says. “She had this moment where she had this epiphany—it’s process music. It’s this idea of actually seeing music unfold.”

Loveless has since established herself as a mainstay in the city’s livecoding scene. She joined Codie, Sicchio and Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo's electronic music group, and plays solo shows at galleries, clubs and art spaces. In the spring she began teaching creative coding at Hunter College and livecoding at the New School. She hopes the art world might soon consider coding an artistic medium as versatile and essential as any other; that art students might be taught to think of Python or Ruby in the same way they think of oil paints or charcoal.

"I really like that idea that like, hey, this might be a foundational class for someone just being an artist because of how important tech is,” Loveless says.

It makes me happy to be part of a livecoding scene within all these awful things happening in tech. Cause here we are showing our codes, being super transparent with what we're doing, using free stuff."

At 9 p.m. in late November, a chill settled across an outwardly desolate stretch of Thames Avenue in Bushwick. A woman in a bicycle helmet peers at the graffiti-tagged brick building that, supposedly, is home to Synesthesia—a gallery and art space where Loveless is scheduled to perform. 

Synesthesia, it turns out, is a third-floor loft apartment, laid out with a large projector screen covering sheet glass windows. I’m buzzed inside and met inside the doorway by the space’s curator Mio Nakai, who recently turned her home into a venue for experimental music, dance and audio-visual performances.  An audience of about 30 young people sit in rows of mismatched chairs or perch on the loft’s landing. 

About half an hour into the event, Loveless begins her set. She stands hunched over her laptop at a wooden table and with a few keystrokes launches a spare, echoey drumbeat. She begins to loop her voice, rising in a diffuse all-vowel hum. Languorous synth notes build in cascading phrases. A line of code is highlighted and changed on the screen behind her, and a watery melody line grows and intensifies.

Loveless types numbers, and the rhythm of the drum beat changes; another few keystrokes and her voice is chopped and transformed into a fractured plaintive cry.

She counts off to eight and begins chopping and layering her vocals over a sample of an insistent syncopated hi-hat. In the front row, a girl in a dark baseball cap nods her head and bops her right leg, crossed over her knee. In the rear, up on the loft stairs, feet and heads increasingly move in rhythm. A quick copy-paste and the synth doubles on itself, falling over its own feet. An edit and the notes extend another octave, into a bell-like glissando. The right side of the screen is now a blur of file names in blocky magenta type, jumping downward as each phrase plays and repeats. Loveless remains bent over at the mic, her eyes fixed on the MacBook screen: she looks up only at the end and smiles.

Loveless says she has a plan whenever she goes on stage—when to sing, when to loop, the structure of her composition. But livecoding has a way of making plans change. A song might become hazy and dreamy if she’s tired, or pulse with energy if her mind is racing. When she’s performing, she tells herself to be calm. To focus on the music as though it is the only thing that matters.

"There's definitely an emotional part. I still get that performer high, euphoria,” Loveless says. "That's a really nice feeling.”

There is a livecode manifesto that is kept fittingly in draft form, forever subject to change like the music it speaks for. It warns against obscurantism and urges artists to think of algorithms as extensions of their thoughts, rather than tools. Sicchio says the movement’s vision for computing runs contrary to how Silicon Valley has molded the American image of coding— commercialized, precise, proprietary and bluntly utilitarian.

“It’s much more about error and fragility and seeing where algorithms take you,” she says. “Here, software development is about a product and solving a problem. Livecoding isn’t about that. Livecoding is ephemeral.”

Loveless music lives in a space between high-concept art and dreamy electro-pop. She loves the deliberately pretty songwriting of the Postal Service and the eclectic minimalism of experimental electronic musician Carl Stone. When I ask what drew her to livecoding, she says it’s like a sensory puzzle; you can hear it, and see how it’s made. It shows the audience a magic trick while revealing how to do it; it inverts the ideas of coder as an isolated architect and musician as an unapproachable genius into something more democratic and free.

"It challenges the idea of what a performer should be. Or what should be portrayed as the most important part of a performance,” Loveless says. "I think I just like the idea of options." 

Editor's Note (3/11/2020): This story has been updated to include mention of Codie band member Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo, whose name was previously omitted. 

How Melody Loveless Makes Computer Code Sing

A dimly lit, yellow-like room of upward steps followed the red noise and smoke sneaking from the door at the top left of the stairs. Looking to your right side, a wall horizontally mirrored the reflection of your pre-gamed face; you weren’t yet drunk, and you looked totally hot. We were ready to dance to Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX songs that ignited the neon pink and green dance floor of Heaven on Earth, before recently a monthly party in Downtown Manhattan. 

The music’s sound got louder as you passed another table with one single rose plopped in a vase next to a tattoo artist. A random hand with rainbow-colored nails scratched the leather of the person wearing it and walking in front of you. And finally, there it was—the infamous, corridor-ed back room, where the songs vibrated in your brain and the air was a one-night love filled with cigarettes. An initial, tiny square of celebration suddenly became so much more than anyone imagined. 

A queer space that’s also dominated by queer-identifying DJs isn’t as private or underground as it used to be. It’s an atmosphere that welcomes its community, providing a home to the night owls of tomorrow—a chosen home they feel accepted to return to. DJing, plus a number of its specific technicalities: Trends, playlist curation, gig hosting and nightlife in general—especially regarding the LGBTQ+ crowd that it so often serves—has evolved. And it all starts with the flickering-wrist of the artist watching from behind the scenes.

thanks @dvf and @juz_padgett for having me last night. ❤️ @anaifould
so fun to share the stage with family
@tygapaw @honeydijon and @1inamilli0nangel

“Playing house—[a genre of electronic music]—and disco has been very important to my identity as a 40-something queer person [now],” said disk jockey Jd Samson. “I was born in the age of disco; I heard it on the radio. My parents listened to it, and it was that rhythm that seeped into my consciousness as a kid. I grew to learn the roots of disco and house—being relative to the queer movements of their time—and [I] spend a lot of time appreciating, and in some ways reigniting that energy of being in a room together. Safe and sweaty, we share that space and we share it with joy.”

But even today—in a music world filled with more playlists, variety and originality—Jd’s entire library still is almost completely house or disco. “I don't play much new music at all,” Samson says. “I [might] play re-edits or sample-based tracks that have been made more recently. I started to lose touch with the present trends and gave up on wanting to follow them. I stopped wanting to be cool or keep up.”

Every DJ has their own practice, though—according to Samson, being a DJ now can mean a million things: “Some people may think it has moved from song selector that knows what they are doing on the equipment, to an artist who is playing their own material.” Yet, each DJ’s technique and come-up is also their own.

@loveprismlove: full spectrum March 27 📸: @kennypchen

Enter: Ty Sunderland—popular for DJing his own iconically produced and hosted, New York-originated parties: Heaven on Earth, Love Prism, Gayflower. As a queer-identifying DJ, his set’s resources have expanded by the likes of rising, LGBTQ+ pop stars.

“There’s so many queer artists out there that we’re finding on Spotify, or on the internet,” Sunderland says. “You play Kim Petras for a queer crowd and most of the room knows all the words. It’s amazing having pop stars part of the LGBTQ+ community.” He contrasts his technical craft from playing for a queer crowd versus one that’s not: “I can play much deeper cuts—[basically, a less-commercialized or radio-played song] for queer crowds. When I’m a gay DJ playing for a straight crowd, I can pretty much only play Top 40—no B-sides or lesser-known singles.”

In terms of a DJ’s tools to rave, Sunderland says, for him, it all depends on the gig. For pop gigs and open format, he uses Traktor—a Native Instrument software for DJs—on his laptop, aided with a Traktor controller. If it’s a house music set, he just uses a Compact Disc Jockey, or CDJ, that a club provides. CDJs are blueprinted to be able to play files of music digitally compacted via a USB flash drive or SD card. 

There’s so many queer artists out there that we’re finding on Spotify, or on the internet,” Ty Sunderland says. 

“I learned on a controller and I still use one half the time,” Sunderland continues. “There’s so many software you can easily download and learn the basics [of DJing] on.” Ty’s mission when actually curating and readying a playlist for before a set revolves around ideas of nostalgia and escapism pop; he exclaims Dua Lipa as an example artist who is putting out “uplifting, disco pop music.” He also points to the future of queer DJing and socializing itself, highlighting the return of destination parties.

“There’s a new wave of what I guess circuit parties started out as, but not circuit music,” Sunderland says. He uses next month’s Backdoor XL for instance, a queer music festival happening in Mexico City in February. “The lineup isn’t circuit music, but the concept of going to a foreign country to party is very circuit-y. I’d love to see more of those big parties that donate proceeds to nonprofits give to smaller organizations; there’s a lot of orgs helping those in our community who could really use the funds and exposure.”

~TRACKLIST~
HILARY DUFF- THAT'S GAY PSA
CHER- BELIEVE
KIM PETRAS- CLOSE YOUR EYES (JAE JAE REMIX)
GWEN STEFANI- YUMMY (KANDY REMIX)
JENNIFER LOPEZ- PLAY (THUNDERPUSS TV REMIX)
TROYE SIVAN- MY MY MY (THROTTLE REMIX)
LIZZO- BOYS (JUICE BOYS REMIX)
JIGGLY POP- JAVASCRIPT
SPICE GIRLS- SPICE UP YOUR LIFE (JAVASCRIPT REMIX)
MNEK- COLOUR (CAHILL REMIX)
ALEX NEWELL, NILE RODGERS - KILL THE LIGHTS (AUDIEN REMIX)
SEU CRIME- PABLLO VITTAR
JOJO- LEAVE (GET OUT) (MOOMBATHON REMIX)
LADY GAGA- LOVEGAME (CHEW FU GHETTOHOUSE FIX) 
MADONNA- BITCH I'M MADONNA (SANDY KLEINENBERG REMIX)
JAX JONES, YEARS & YEARS- PLAY (ROB CROUCH REMIX)
AQUARIA- BURN RUBBER (HECTOR FONSECA & ZAMBIANCO REMIX)
CARLY RAE JEPSEN- I REALLY LIKE YOU (MIKE WILLIAMS REMIX)

KING PRINCESS- WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU
CIARA & NICKI MINAJ- IM OUT (REMIX)
CHARLI XCX- NO ANGEL (OJPAW REMIX)
DESTINY'S CHILD- LOSE MY BREATH (YUNG DEATH RAY REMIX)
BLACKPINK- KILL THIS LOVE (CBZNAR REMIX)
DORIAN ELECTRA- CAREER BOY (CHAIKA REMIX)
ARIANA GRANDE- 7 RINGS (DJ LIL KEL REMIX)
CARDI B- MONEY (DJ DRU REMIX)
BRITNEY SPEARS- BABY ONE MORE TIME (ACE MULA X SBF X DJ PROBLEM REMIX)
DJ SAMMY- HEAVEN (ALEX COMPTON REMIX)

THAT'S SO GAY MIX FOR BILLBOARD by Alex Chapman

Alex Chapman has DJ’d for Charli XCX and Kim Petras, among other pop-queen legends. LA-based, he’s also more-recently noted for his SoundCloud “THAT’S SO GAY” mix for Billboard, which he made in June of 2019—featuring tracks like Cher’s “Believe” and Destiny’s Child, “Lose My Breath” (Yung Death Ray Remix). Chapman first started DJing in New York during college: “[I was] just using Virtual DJ in my friends’ dorm rooms,” he said. 

“I worked for a promoter/DJ for a bit—he’d pay me to bring friends to the club. I asked if I could DJ before him one night and he let me; I started getting gigs because venues knew I could bring people.” 

Glimmer

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