We Live In Public Review

In just 10 years the internet has altered the economic, technological and psychological landscape more dramatically even than television did in the 1950s, and Ondi Timoner's documentary tracks the rise, fall and strange lurch sideways of the medium's first prophet. We Live In Public tells the story of Josh Harris, an entrepreneur, performance prankster and visionary geek who has, with messianic zeal, explored the most extreme implications of interactive technology.

Timoner encountered Harris at the start of the 1990s, by which point he'd been involved with a nascent version of the net for years. A dysfunctional loner obsessed with technology and TV, Harris rode the first wave of the dot.com boom, making millions via his early adoption of interactive streaming video. Then, like the internet itself, things in Harris's world started getting weird.

Harris sold his company, Psuedo, for $800 million dollars and ploughed his energy and resources into an ongoing project to demonstrate the real-world consequences of our journey into virtual reality, "explaining to humans," as one commentator says here, "what's happening next." As the millennium drew to a close, Harris instigated an extraordinary two million dollar experiment in voyeuristic fascism called 'Quiet: We Live In Public'. One hundred of New York City's artists and boho scenesters, including director Ondi Timoner herself, were recruited to live in a bunker beneath the city where for 30 days their every move would be filmed by a battery of webcams and streamed online. Participants were provided with everything they needed and quite a lot they didn't, including an arsenal of automatic weapons. The result was like an unedited, ungoverned and finally unhinged version of TV's 'Big Brother'. The lesson: being watched makes people do things they wouldn't normally dream of. (Or, perhaps, might only dream of.) Constant surveillance, in this context, was coercive rather than restrictive. It was a spectacular exercise in social manipulation. The cost: the beginning of Harris's slow slide towards mental collapse.