Josh Harris is one of the most important Internet innovators that you have never heard of.
The 2009 documentary about his work, “We Live in Public,” is a tale of visionary genius and part tale of tragic delusion. This movie highlights the very real ups and downs that followed an Internet pioneer during the 1990s dot-com boom and bust in a more poignant way than Aaron Sorkin's “The Social Network” could ever portray Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.
In 1993 Harris, a goofy, introverted techie, founded the website Pseudo.com. Pseudo, predating sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, and all of the TV-online websites, hosted live audio and video webcasting where anyone with a computer and Internet connection could on one screen both passively watch the progression of the video program and actively participate through message boards.
Pseudo became a huge hit, expanding at its peak hosting over 200 live hours of programming a month on a number of topics such as music, sex and computer gaming. Investors were quick to finance the venture and Harris was just as quick to spend his newfound wealth on both improving the program content as well as hosting legendary parties, which served as casting events for potential programming hosts at Pseudo. The huge artistic leeway that Pseudo allowed program creators together with the party ethos led to comparisons to Andy Warhol's Factory, and Pseudo became both physically and figuratively a destination for artists in New York City in the 1990s.
Yet there were signs of trouble. As Pseudo grew, Harris started acting in seemingly bizarre ways, dressing up in clown's make-up and costume as his alter ego Luvee, loosely based on Mrs. Howell the III of Gilligan's Island. After one too many appearances as Luvee at corporate events, Harris was forced out of Pseudo with $80 million.
For Harris' next endeavor, he personally recruited and screened 100 artists to live in an isolated terrarium he had built underground in New York City. The catch: the entire place was wired with cameras such that absolutely everything was on film. The participants, who slept in a Japanese-style capsule hotel equipped with closed-loop television monitors, were given free provisions (food, alcohol, and even drugs) in exchange for the rights to the footage. The experiment was a manifestation of Harris' vision that everyone would be voluntarily be connected and exposed to the public on the Internet. Eventually the artists felt exhausted by the cameras and lack of privacy. The experiment ended in chaos on New Year's Day in 2000 when the New York Police Department evicted everyone from the bunker. The rest of the movie follows Harris as he films himself 24/7, loses his money, and winds up in Ethiopia via a Washington apple orchard.
Harris' story is a rare, successful embodiment of the optimism of the dotcom boom and pre-9/11 world. By looking at the genius and the madness of Harris, the documentary asks the larger question of whether anyone can be a visionary without being a little delusional. This theme of the exceptional-and-delusional, together with the persistent questions raised by the pseudo-Orwellian experiments concerning the future progression of the Internet and privacy concerns, make “We Live in Public” a timeless movie about a Internet pioneer ahead of his time.
Dan has a new appreciation for the Internet. Send him yours at djgarry@asu.edu
