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.