Imagine This.

Imagine Josh Harris. Multiply him by a hundred or so.

First, who’s Josh Harris and what does he do? Check these links out.

Josh Harris: “Pseudo was a fake company”

If you’re not familiar with Pseudo (and Harris’) significance during the late ’90s internet bubble, here are a few profile links: NY Mag, Wired, Radar, Wikipedia, BusinessWeek. His online experiment “We Live in Public” predated the era of now ubiquitous always-on lifecasting video sites.

We Live in Public: Most fucked up movie I have ever seen

We Live in Public is the most fucked up movie I have ever seen, because it’s real and it’s happening. We Live in Public is a cautionary tale about the internet and its ability to push people further and further away from each other under the guise of “connecting people”. It is about surveillance and giving up one’s personal dignity in order to become a celebrity for 15 minutes of fame – not just in one’s life time, but every day.

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The result of all of this surveillance: People started to go fucking insane. A creative environment soon became a hostile one where people were pitted against each other competitively, much like the unravelling drama of reality television shows today. The footage is insane; people were told that they could do whatever they wanted. This was freedom. But what is so free about being taped 24 hours a day?

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Josh Harris made me very uncomfortable. There were moments when my jaw was on the ground because I could not believe that this was all REAL. He took pleasure in seeing people suffer and abuse themselves in the underground bunker, and then he did the same thing to himself with his girlfriend.

Suddenly Pseudo

The central concept of Quiet, Harris says, is that all the capsules will be wired with a two-way audio-visual cable system, so anyone in the “hotel” can tune in to anyone else. Programming will be available from the outside, too — Gilligan’s Island, for example. On the five other floors, there will be performance artists, poetry readings, video installations, a bar run by the “vampires,” three meals a day, board games, D.J.’s, and a dance floor.

The name, Harris says, came to him in the middle of the night about three months ago. He heard a voice that told him, “In order to hear the universal vibration, you must have quiet.”

As Harris paces the length of the room, barking orders to Koenig and Quiet’s new staff, you can almost see what he has in mind. “This is going to be a merger of the physical and virtual worlds,” he says. “What we do in chat rooms is like cave paintings compared to what will be created in the new world we are moving into. That is what all this is about.

For Digital Pioneer, the Web Was No Safety Net

Ms. Timoner, whose documentary spends time chronicling Mr. Harris’s troubled relationship with his family, said: “He needs to be significant. Whether it’s that the government is after him, or seeing articles about himself. Ultimately the only thing his mother cared about was reading those articles. That was how he felt loved.”

Walking past his old Pseudo offices at Houston and Broadway, Mr. Harris, who said he has never been in love, adjusted his dark sunglasses.

“It’s a funny thing being in fear for your life,” he said. “It’s kind of addictive.”

Steaming Video

“No one has done this on such an ambitious scale,” he says, noting that the total cost will exceed half a million dollars. Access will be free, and although he talks vaguely about selling tapes later, he doesn’t expect to make any money doing this. His ostensible motive is to learn firsthand exactly how total exposure and interactivity will change daily life.

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Finally, Harris is planning to extend his living-in-public experiment by installing cameras in the homes of his friends. “Imagine: I’m lying in bed, and they can all see me, and at the same time I can see them. At that point, we will be reweaving social communication, and I will be immersed in it. If it’s as successful as I hope, I’ll continue the experiment indefinitely. It won’t be like those people on Survivor, who have regular lives to go back to after the series ends. This will be my life.”

Harris is convinced that when broadband Net access becomes ubiquitous, millions of consumers will end up doing exactly what he’s about to do.

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… Harris is definitely turning heads, even in we’ve-seen-it-all Manhattan. “The Warhol comparison is probably out of line, in that I don’t think Josh has created a paradigm shift in art,”says Jason McCabe Calacanis, editor of the Silicon Alley Reporter. “But Josh has acted as a catalyst for art by injecting it with new technology. I think Josh has played everybody and goes to sleep with a very big smile on his face. In the world filled with boring technologists, he was the first avant-garde – if not insane – visionary.”

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“It was very simple,” Harris explains now. “I was looking for the universal cosmic vibration, the ‘boing’ of psychosexual energy that we know and feel but can never touch. The same as in an online chat room, where you can never quite get off.”

Caged King: Josh Harris and Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public

At this point Pseudo.com couldn’t deal with being associated with such a lunatic, and Harris had bigger ideas anyway. Harris moved onto his next plan; to sell his share of Pseudo.com and throw the biggest party of the century, “Quiet: We Live in Public.”

Now enter Harris the philanthropist of artists and essentially God-like person.

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… Nico Haupt, who was seen in We Live In Public, in the confession room being brainwashed and mentally tortured, through Facebook. Haupt is now relishing the idea that he is a celebrity as Harris and the other 100 artists that are featured in this film.

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For (Timoner), the catalyst for making this film came when she saw the connection between Quiet and Facebook. The status updates and information we put out there can be viewed by millions of people and while we might think nothing of updating a status message, fans or friends will read the message and comment and suddenly we are connected.

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Harris said that people want to be famous all of the time, not just 15 minutes. That may have been true for Harris who could not exist in a relationship if it wasn’t mediated through technology, but not true for everyone and not true for this author. Big Brother may be watching but that doesn’t mean we all have to pose for him.

Pseudo Youtube

What Harris really had wrong, however, was the death of privacy, which is a generational fight which will take much longer to settle. I’m still generally unconvinced that humans can live totally publicly, through things like Twitter, Facebook, and Google in general are contributing to an erosion towards attitudes about privacy erosion that we have very little control over.

Harris is obviously an exhibitionist who understood the power of the ‘net, and perhaps predicted phenoms like Tila Tequila and Justin.tv, but couldn’t speak for all of us.

The rise and fall of Josh Harris? The Twitter’s generation voice from the bunker

At the end of We Live in Public, Timoner finds Harris coaching sports to children in Ethiopia. She flew him back to the US for her Sundance triumph in January, and he never used his return ticket. Capitalising on the critical success of the film, Harris is now in LA trying to raise interest in Wired City, a large-scale TV version of his Manhattan bunker experiment. Typically, he talks as if the project is already a smash hit.

“It’s sort of the Hollywood version of Orwell’s Big Brother,” he says. “I’m close to getting a production deal — at least $150 million. Cash-wise, I’ve got nothing, but I have what Hollywood needs. I know how to produce internet television networks effectively, and Hollywood desperately needs that.”

Now imagine Josh Harris, multiplied by a hundred, along with those that idolize his god-playing-like ideals, taking over your life by force, yes, brainwashing and mental torture included.

In summary, I have no summary. Write your own, in your own words, and write it well. You have no Big Brother watching.

Image source: The Guardian, Josh Harris: The Warhol of the web

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