Spinning on Empty: Arielle Zuckerberg and the DJs of Late Capitalism

Earlier this month, a video emerged on social media of Arielle Zuckerberg—Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, also known by her alias “AZ”—DJing house music at a kickoff event for SF Tech Week. Like the millions of other DJ videos you’ll find on the internet, it was completely unremarkable. And yet, because of Arielle’s familial proximity to one of the richest men on the planet, a handful of simpering tech bros felt the need to publicly lavish her with praise.

“There are few people who could make DJing with a lanyard cool. @ariellezuck is one of those people,” a chief product officer for a venture capital firm posted on Elon Musk’s X, after watching the 15-second video of Zuckerberg awkwardly bopping around and touching knobs. “I wish she could join us for our Yacht event on Thursday under the blue angels. AZ?” pleaded one party attendee, hoping to score some Zuck star power to boost his AI startup.

As someone who has produced, performed, and DJ’ed electronic music for most of my adult life, I tend to stay as far away from DJ discourse as humanly possible. Even so, I am fascinated by the trope of the Celebrity DJ, even more so when the “celebrity” in question happens to be the sibling of one of the most hated tech oligarchs in the world. 

Unlike the artists and curators who defined underground rave and club culture in the 1980s and ’90s, the Celebrity/Influencer DJ can be viewed as a kind of late-capitalist cultural warning sign. Whether it’s Paris Hilton pouting from behind the decks or Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon swaglessly pantomiming at corporate functions, the contemporary DJ has mutated from a countercultural icon to a monolithic archetype that attracts opportunists and narcissists of all stripes. In some circles of online influencer culture, the DJ has become a being of pure spectacle: Whether or not it’s backed by a genuine love of music is often beside the point.

For her part, Arielle Zuckerberg—who by day herself works as a partner at a VC firm—seems fairly humble about her DJing practice. She quickly downplayed the viral attention, saying that while she has been DJing since 2018, she views it as a “side quest” that mostly involves playing for friends “to have fun and spread joy.”

In doing so, Zuckerberg preempted the speculation that inevitably occurs, especially with women, over whether or not the person in question is, in fact, a “real DJ.” While I would normally leap at the chance to mock a rizzless gathering of Burning Man-adjacent Bay Area tech elites, my unsatisfying answer to this perpetual question is that there is absolutely no way to know that from a 15-second video clip. Because outside of the algorithmic glitz and glamour of social media, being a DJ has never been more normal. 

In 2026, learning to DJ in the most basic technical sense is really not that hard. Contemporary DJ equipment and software have become so easy to use that virtually anyone with a bit of practice can plug in and play (and they often do). “Everyone in Bushwick is a DJ” sounds like it’s just a silly meme, until you find out there’s a roller rink that books DJs to play in the bathroom. There’s still plenty of serious talent to be found, but simply saying you’re a DJ or posting a 15-second Instagram clip tells people about as much about you as saying you drink water.

In spite of this, the general public’s impression of a DJ is still steeped in a cartoonish level of cultural mysticism. Arielle Zuckerberg’s Tech Week video and the reactions to it neatly demonstrate this. Not because it gives us any reason to doubt her alleged talent, but because it reveals how the DJ now functions in most people’s eyes: as an empty, decontextualized social media vessel, around which an elaborate social signaling ritual is performed.

The “DJ clip,” particularly on the Zuckerberg-owned Instagram, plays a very specific role. Rather than communicate anything of substance about your tastes, values, or artistry, it functions more like a placeholder—something that most people won’t watch for more than a few seconds, but might remember later when they vaguely associate you in their heads under the category of “DJ.” Sometimes, friends will ask me to “engage” with their DJ content to boost its priority with the algorithm, the hope being that if enough people see it, more gigs will come their way.

These algorithmic incentives and the addictive platforms that create them can bring out the worst in people, particularly the overly-thirsty “content creators” who are desperately striving to capitalize on their image as a DJ. I frequently encounter career-oriented social climbers who seem to view DJing and clubs as a networking tool—a means to build their online following through proximity to cultural capital. At parties, I can sometimes feel these upwardly-mobile DJs sizing me up, running a silent mental calculus to figure out whether I’m important enough to be a rung on their ladder. It’s the kind of cynical and insincere interaction that instantly turns my stomach, and at the end of the day, it’s not so different from the tech bros sucking up to Mark Zuckerberg’s sister.

The extreme end of this attitude can be found in the world of EDM, which developed in the late 2000s as a way for companies to mass-market electronic dance music by separating it from its Black and queer roots. Over time, this commercialization has spread out into the festival circuit and even to the more underground dance music scenes. What followed was a massive corporate consolidation, where huge entertainment companies like Live Nation bought up dozens of independent festivals, venues, and events. Today, more than 150 of the biggest electronic dance music festivals in Europe are owned by just four companies. The results of this monopolization have been both devastating and predictable: Production costs and ticket prices have skyrocketed; event producers have become risk-averse and less likely to book newer artists; and festival lineups have continued to homogenize, skewing heavily male, straight, and white.

It’s here that the DJ world and the tech world inhabited by people like Zuckerberg began to overlap. One key example is Boiler Room, which played a pivotal role in commercializing the DJ by uploading YouTube videos from underground parties in the early 2010s. In 2025, Boiler Room was acquired by Superstruct Entertainment, a massive entertainment company that is in turn owned by KKR, a global private equity conglomerate with investments in oil pipelines, weapons manufacturers, and Israeli companies that have fueled the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In response, groups of DJs and nightlife workers began organizing a global boycott of Boiler Room and all KKR-owned events, which resulted in counter-programming, protests, and dozens of prominent artists dropping off festival lineups.

By reclaiming the underground from influencers, CEOs, and war profiteers, these artists are channeling the history that made the DJ a venerated cultural figure in the first place. In Detroit and Chicago, the urban cradles that birthed techno and house, the DJs of yesteryear developed their craft in part as a survival strategy, combating racism, homophobia, and a post-industrial collapse that led to widespread socioeconomic disenfranchisement in the early 1980s. Producers and groups like Cybotron and Drexciya built their reputations atop an unyielding dedication to experimentation and discovery, making tracks with cheap synthesizers found in junk shops and meticulously curating the sounds heard at raves and clubs.

The best DJs of today still embody this spirit, practicing a form of sonic storytelling that can only arise from a profound curiosity and deep immersion in the scenes and culture they inhabit. Crews like Sisu and Daytimers have gained international recognition for uplifting women and other underrepresented artists without wavering on the principles or passions that drive them. This kind of community is not something you can fake—even in the age of algorithms, AI slop, and billionaire tech oligarchs. Even still, it’s hard to see any of that energy in the over-the-top way the DJ has been glamorized, packaged and sold as another form of consumption that we scroll past on our feeds. 

I can’t honestly say I’ve kept my own hands completely clean. While I would be happy to never cut another 30-second video clip or spam someone’s post with fire emojis ever again, like many artists these days I am not immune to the pressures of this late-capitalist DJ rat race. Venues and nightclubs are closing at an alarming rate. We are all struggling to eke out a living and express ourselves as artists. And all the while, we are constantly being told that the only way to do this is by obsessively curating our image on the social media prisons that Silicon Valley has built for us.

Maybe if more people understood what a DJ is supposed to do—build community around shared values and experiences that can’t translate to short-form video content—we could deflate the value of the DJ as a cynical, aesthetic media artifact. Then we could all get off these platforms and get back to doing what really matters: making people move.