If you take the time to stop and think about it, the internet can be a terrifying concept: all the world’s information accessible in a public forum. This information is unlimited and people feel an inclination to share the narrative of their life with strangers. We have been turned into our own ‘big brother’, documenting all we think and do, not only with words but also with pictures and video We Live in Public is a documentary which examines this phenomenon through the equally fascinating and disturbing actions of Josh Harris: “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”
In 1993, Josh Harris founded Psuedo.com, a website which attempted to create a legitimate competitor to television. The site broadcasted a variety of edgy shows through a tiny, distorted RealPlayer window. While the technology available was not able to fully support his vision, it was enough to earn way more money than any twenty-something nerd should have access to.
like many Gen-Xers, Harris was raised in front of a television and he became obsessed with the concept of people relating to each other through this medium. He saw the future as a world in which everyone had a video broadcast on the Internet and everyone was famous. This led to what, (I suppose), could be described as a conceptual art project which I found truly frightening.
Harris built what amounted to an underground bunker in which 100 people chose to ‘live in public’, having each and every moment of their lives broadcast over the internet. He provided them food, firearms and cult-like jumpsuits and watched as they showered, used the restroom, had sexual intercourse and fought each other until the police became involved.
The failure of this experiment did not discourage him. Shortly after his project was shut down, he began to fall in love with a woman from one of the shows on Pseudo.com and she agreed to live in an apartment with him and over 200 cameras. People on the Internet spent hours watching them and commenting on their actions through a chat window. Eventually the viewers even began giving opinions on their arguments. As you can imagine, this made for a fairly uncomfortable relationship.
The story of Josh Harris underlines the disturbing extremes which social networking sites can lead normal people to. Today, there are more than one hundred billion users on Facebook and as Harris predicted: we do, in a sense, live in public. Let this documentary serve as a cautionary tale.
