We Live in Public

What a documentary. I was first in line for ticket holders to the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary showing at the Library Center Theatre, not knowing which film would win the award until the crowd was seated. The entire crowd was trying to get the scoop on which film won the award by texting, using Twitter, etc. How ironic that "We Live in Public" was indeed the winner. What a captivating depiction of the intense influx of technological advances and the people behind the scenes in the process. I had never heard of Josh Harris, his vision of the future, or his antics on camera before. MySpace, Facebook, Youtube and every reality TV show ever created seemingly owe Josh Harris for the implementation of his visions of the future of technology.

There can be few more tedious groups of people than dot-com entrepreneurs and performance artists: Josh Harris was one of the former who thought himself one of the latter; and in this documentary of his life, he reveals himself to be every bit as self-regarding as you might expect him to be. That he has a collection of groupies willing to assert his utter brilliance is even more annoying. What it seems he has done right is to predict how the internet will change the world; what he has not shown is any ability to get the timing right when it comes to taking advantage of this in a business sense, or the ability to suggest how we can shape this evolving world to make it a better place. Instead, he seems to have specialised in freak shows that might have accurately predicted some unwelcome aspects of the future and whose funding has depended on the the false confidence they might prove lucrative. The fact that Harris has himself retreated from the world of the web is telling; as is the fact that the chief executive of myspace claims never to have heard of him. Far from being the "visionary" as his friends attest, Harris comes over simply as the boy with too many toys. The documentary is lively, however, and oddly entertaining, even though one quickly comes to dislike and distrust the film-maker (a certified Harris groupie) and participants alike.

This film was shown at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX after winning the grand jury prize at Sundance. It was well received in Austin as well. It is a fascinating look at the early days of the Internet through the biography of one its pioneers Josh Harris. The film is well-done in a technical sense and fascinating ride, but I'm not sure if it ever figures out if it's a history of an industry, a study of the social impact of Internet, or a biopic about the peculiar mad scientist, John Harris. It tries to be all of these things and thus perhaps undermines its own ability to completely succeed at any of them.

The film is informative in filling in some of the early history and Harris's key role with the mostly forgotten 1990s pioneering ventures of Jupiter Communications and Pseudo.com. But Harris seems to move away from his role as a computer nerd and begins to evolve into a dysfunctional performance artist who seems to want to demonstrate that the Internet will break down all remnants of human privacy. The film maker seems to want emphasize his visionary qualities in which he is predictive of today's MySpace and Facebook culture.

However, this reviewer doesn't find his bunker experiment or his living in public online to be particularly insightful or predictive. The whole concept was more-or-less foreshadowed in Jim Carrey's Truman Show in the 1990s. Nor is it particularly predictive. Harris was creating venues in which people were forced to live in public in front of cameras with predictably unhealthy and destructive results. Today, we choose voluntarily how much of our lives to allow the public – and really only our chosen friends – to view online. The difference between everyone's lives being on display and allowing our friends to see limited glimpses of our lives is vast. Harris seems like a tragic and self-destructive figure, who is constantly rewriting his own experiences in his own mind. He is estranged from his family and unable to establish and maintain intimate relationships.

In the end, he seems to have stranded himself on his own Gilligan's Island (with which he is obsessed). He is either a clown (another one of his characters) or simply a reclusive madman. The film provides an intriguing picture of an internet pioneer who went off the deep end, but I'm not sure if it achieves its goal of truly using Josh's experiences to critique the virtual world that he played a key early role in helping construct. The virtual world, for all its flaws, is not the world of total public voyeurism that Josh imagined it would become.

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC charts the career of a man who not only embraced, embodied, and celebrated the World Wide Web practically from its inception, but was able to guess certain directions that this phenomenon would take. However, the premise of the film is that Josh Harris is a genius because he was able to develop internet social networking years before anyone else, and I find this to be a kind of false assumption. Granted, he might have had the original idea, but what good was the notion of a 'real time social networking system', if the internet had not evolved enough to support this activity. The bandwidth simply was not there! Many ideas are marvelous in the abstract, but if these concepts cannot be brought to fruition, what good are they? A true genius not only develops the concept, but must make it work in the real world. Timing has to account for something, and I think that this was Mr. Harris's Achilles Heel. WE LIVE IN PUBLIC is a great look at an era in the development of the Computer Age, and certainly documents Josh Harris's many accomplishments. but the film fails to make the case that this man is as much a pioneer as he would have us believe. The reason that he is not in the same league as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, is that they successfully accomplished 'real things', whereas Mr. Harris came up with a major idea which was not really supportable at the time.

One critic of this film objected to Harris, doubted his genius, and hated the director's uncritical look at him. That person clearly knows things about Harris which made the film unenjoyable for them, but whether Harris was a genius or whether he had the impact on the Internet the director thinks he had, it did not affect my enjoyment of the picture. Genius or not, Harris is fascinating, a man whose voyeuristic experiments anticipated the TV show "Big Brother" and Facebook by years. His "quiet" experiment was a living version of "1984" and "THX-1168", and his home apartment experiment showed how a total lack of privacy warps people and their relationships. Critics who know Harris better than I may have legitimate gripes, but I found the subject matter to be fascinating and thought provoking.