(2008)
The internet boom of the late 1990s saw many young entrepreneurs quickly amass staggering wealth. Josh Harris was at the forefront of that rush, eventually netting more than $80 million with his company JupiterResearch and later the internet television network Pseudo.com. We Live in Public portrays the peaks and valleys in the career of Harris, "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of."
Josh Harris (image via boingboing)Harris was an eccentric visionary who used his fortune to fund human experiments. Just before the turn of the millennium, he invited 100 artists to live in an underground bunker in New York City outfitted with webcams to document their every move in a project called "Quiet: We Live in Public." This compound featured Japanese-style sleeping pods as well as a shooting range and an interrogation room in which the occupants were asked deeply personal, probing questions by a highly aggressive interviewer. Harris sought to foreshadow the fact that one day, the internet would put increased pressure on our lives by completely eradicating our privacy. Fortunately, the fire department shut down the project before anyone lost it.
He imagined a kind of Orwellian dystopia in which every second of our lives would be captured on video and put in the public domain for the world to examine. Today, many facets of our lives are on display on various websites. But the future has brought a different kind of transmission than Harris had imagined. By and large, we have control over what is published for the world to see. We are the publishing supervisors of our Facebook pages and the editors-in-chief of our YouTube channels. Perhaps Harris’ vision of an totalitarian future simply hasn’t yet materialized.
After the collapse of "Quiet: We Live in Public," Harris was clearly not satisfied with the results of his experiment. He immediately put his hypothesis to the test once again, this time putting himself under the microscope. He outfitted a New York loft with 30 motion-controlled cameras (including one in the fridge, litter box and toilet bowl) and 66 microphones and moved in with his new girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. After a “giddy” first month, the honeymoon quickly faded. Harris and Corrin became so distant to the point where they would sit in different rooms and talk to their viewers in chat rooms more than each other. Eventually this pressure cooker exploded in a very ugly way, for all the world to see. Timoner postulates:
I think that's an important lesson; the internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It's just not. If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn't post it.The film opens with an uninviting video of Harris saying goodbye to his dying mother. It then jumps to a history of the internet before moving on to focus on Harris and his endeavors. Some may see the film as off balance, but the documentary is successful for its perseverance if nothing else. Timoner captured footage from every unique venture of Harris’ life over the past 15 years, including his escape as an apple orchard farmer in Columbia County, NY. With 15 years worth of footage on any oddball such as Harris, one could make a compelling film. Each one of his undertakings could be the subject of an entertaining film in and of themselves, but Harris’ eccentric persona brings it all together.
official film site
Trivial Tidbits:
- We Live in Public won the Grand Jury Prize award in the U.S. documentary category at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival
- In the early days of the internet, videos streamed at 1 frame/second
- If you have seen the film, you might be interested in this video: Crazed fan of pseudo.com attacks founder Josh Harris after screening of We Live in Public. Though, seeing as he has recently said that Pseudo itself was a fake company, I wouldn't be surprised if that attack was staged as well.
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