We Live in Public
Dogwoof Pictures
R2
Too
often films on the Internet and technology only come in two flavours. There are
the doomsayers who constantly warn us of the internet sex predators, addiction to
computer games and cybercrime and the internet prophets who sell us a bright
new world where all of mankind will be linked in a glowing web of collective
Bliss. We Live in Public offers a surprisingly nuanced view of the development
of the world of the Web through the life of Josh Harris. Harris is not someone
who automatically comes to mind when you talk about the big wheelers and
dealers of the computer world. He is not a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, yet in the
1980’s he was a pioneer of online networks. Before the internet even became
popular, Harris had formed Jupiter Communications which produced reports on new
and developing technology and created chat rooms for Prodigy, which he later
sold back to them for a tidy profit. As the internet took off and dot.com
businesses became the flavour of the day, Harris became one of the “nerd gods”
of the period founding Pseudo.com. Pseudo was the first internet TV network, it offered live TV channels combined with
interactive chat rooms. The problem, however, was that it was way before it’s
time, a difficulty Harris would have over and over again. Pseudo was offering
live TV in a period before broadband and hence the transmission was painfully
slow and while it was a great idea the bandwidth required to make it work was
just not there.
As
we explore the exciting world of Pseudo, Harris also offers interesting
insights into the effects of television and then the internet on our lives. He
notes how the children of the Sixties and Seventies, including himself, found
their families in television rather than home life and hence the virtual world
of entertainment was more real to them than the physical one. This experience
was later transferred to the internet where socializing is done via social
networks and online personas or avatars are the masks of choice.
Harris, however, always innovative, deciding to
take his “avatar” a little further and developed Luvvy,
a strange and disquieting clown persona which he began to use to entertain his
friends. Soon it became an obsession and he wore his “clown
drag” to business meetings and in public. This obviously did not go down well
with the business world and media and he left Pseudo in 1999.
His
next project Quiet: We Live in Public was even more controversial. In the
centre of Manhattan he created an underground bunker to house a “Big Brother”
like experiment in the form of the Quiet colony. Some eighty people were housed
in pods and offered everything they would need; food, entertainment, a shooting
range, alcohol and a dance club. At the same time every aspect of their life
would be filmed and documented. They would literally eat, drink, have sex and
go to the toilet in public and would have to agree not to leave the underground
community. To up the ante he hired psychiatrists to interrogate the inhabitants
of the colony on every aspect of their private lives. These interrogations
became more and more invasive and what at first seemed like a media experiment
seemed to be spiralling out of control.
The
experiment moved from Anarchy to violence and freedom began to turn to
aggression. Many felt it was becoming too much like a strange cult and early in
2000 the police raided believing it was some sort of doomsday sect connected to
the end of the millennium. Many believed the raid was just in time before many
of the occupants would end up permanently psychologically damaged. Others
heralded it as major media and radical lifestyle experience. The answer is
probably somewhere in-between. Harris was certainly making a name for himself.
Following
Quiet, he went away on holiday, fell in love with Tanya and developed his first
(and only) intimate relationship. Together they embarked on the next “Live in
Public” experiment. They moved in together and turned their whole lives into an
internet experience. Cameras and microphones where placed throughout their unit
and filmed every aspect of their lives, feedback constantly streamed in via
chat rooms set up for the purpose on their website. While it went well for the
first few months slowly their relationship disintegrated under the pressure of
living in the public light. Tanya left and when the dot.com crash took caused a
55% fall in the tech market the project collapsed leaving Josh with little to
no cash.
In
2003 he was running an apple farm having lost his fortune and having no
meaningful relationships, having isolated himself from both family and friends.
He communicated via video tape and lived with his animals and apples. Strangely
Harris seems to be a person who has little connection with reality having grown
up in his own virtual world, in the form of both television and the internet.
He has rewritten his life he way he wants to see it including redefining his
relationship with Tanya as a pseudo-relationship for “Live in Public” experiment
only.
Of
course Harris couldn’t keep himself out of the world of technology for long and
in 2005 he sold his farm and opened Operator 11. Operator 11 was a unique
internet based site in which a user could “create their own television show”;
it was creative and innovative but once again way before its time. When Harris
tried to get investment no one wanted to touch him due to his past media
“experiments” and none of the current crop of media moguls wanted in, it
crashed into a heap.
In
2008 Harris resurfaces in Ethiopia working with Orphans and coincidentally
escaping his creditors. While he may have chosen humans over technology for
now, considering his career so far one may wonder whether this is just another
stage in his strange media managed life.
Josh
Harris seems to have a unique problem. He is always ahead of the trend, way
ahead. The ramifications of each trend are insignificant in Harris’ eyes, he
knows they are coming and simply explores them in his own unique, some would
say, bizarre way.
The
impressive aspect of this documentary is that it doesn’t pontificate; it
provides insight into the many aspects of the effects of media and the internet
on our lives through the lens of the business experiments of Josh Harris. We
Live in Public is a challenging and thought provoking documentary. It avoids
sensationalism, even though covering some truly wild and outrageous territory.
It will stimulate much debate about all manner of subjects from the effects of
media to privacy, celebrity and fame to the personal cost of a life lived in
the spotlight.
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This review will appear in Volume 3 No.2 of the digital and print
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