IFFBoston Review: ‘We Live in Public’: A Disturbing Look At The Early Days Of The Internet

Ondi Timoner ( the Brian Jonestown vs. Dandy Warhols doc, “Dig!”) is no doubt a freak magnet and god bless her for that. “We Live In Public” is her latest documentary of Josh Harris, “the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of …” who rose quickly to fame and fortune through his internet breakthroughs in the early days of dial-up and eventually lost his mind and his millions when the dotcom bubble burst.

Harris was the youngest of 7 children who moved to NYC in the mid 80s to make a dent in the tech world with his visions of the future of the Internet. His first triumph was a consulting and analysis firm Jupiter Communications, but Harris’s first glimpses of madness were evident during his following heydays at Pseudo.com, a revolutionary Internet television company, which he funded 7 years before broadband existed. (Broadband is vital for Internet video to run properly, which shows that Harris was more interested in being “the first”, rather than “the best”.) An avid partygoer, and now a millionaire, Harris mingled with the artsy crowd in 1990’s NYC and was inspired to begin some “art” projects of his own. He would often attend Pseudo meetings as his alternate persona, a clown named Luvvy—a disturbing cross between Mrs. Howell of “Gilligan’s Island” and his drunk mother—which was off-putting to potential financiers, and alarming to his friends and coworkers.

When asked what drew her to Harris, as a subject back in the 90s, Timoner said she was fascinated by the way people choose to spend their millions. And Harris spent his on arty, self-indulgent multimedia experiments that always went over budget. First was “Quiet”, an underground “hotel” in downtown NYC full of bunkers each supplied with a camera where occupants were invited to live on camera for free for a month with zero privacy and limited space to yourself.

Timoner was one of the participants of Quiet and had originally intended to make it its own documentary. Only now that phenomenons like Facebook and YouTube have emerged did she feel that Harris’s story finally came full circle. Here was a man who predicted the future was headed in this direction of social networking, claiming that Warhol said everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime. But Harris predicted people will want their 15 minutes of fame everyday. The “Quiet” experiment played out like so many reality television shows, resulting in a No Exit-like hell of people driving each other mad.

Soon after the “Quiet” experiment—and as if he learned nothing from that bizarre fiasco—he jumpstarted a new project, We Live In Public, this time turning the cameras on himself and his girlfriend Tanya allowing every aspect of their private life together to be captured on multiple cameras and streamed 24 hours on the Internet. Thousands of viewers witnessed their initial harmony, then the chaos and the imminent implosion that sent Tanya packing. Subsequently, the dotcoms went under, Harris went bankrupt, and after a mental breakdown, he escaped to an apple farm.

The film portrays Harris as our internet forefather but tries too hard to link the road he paved with the Facebook/Twitter/YouTube phenomenon that has since emerged. A perfect depiction is recent footage of Harris, fresh from seclusion in Ethiopia, visiting Myspace to pitch another crazy experiment to no avail. That the man who was there first can no longer find a place among the new kids is tragic and bittersweet.

“We Live in Public” is philosophically provocative, attention-grabbing, and its theme struck a chord with the paradigm shift we’re experiencing, but at times can be nauseating to watch, which is probably due to the fact that Timoner was dealing with 10 years and 5,000 hours of footage. That she was able to whittle it down into a coherent, concise cautionary tale about a man who took technology too far is a triumph and well deserving of her Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance. However, that every song within the film is a recognizable pop-rock tune is slightly distracting and wholly unnecessary to tell Harris’ story, but it’s to be expected from Timoner who also directed “Dig!” about dueling rock bands and has a slew of music videos under her belt.

In the end, Harris’s predictions were on point and it raises the question of what direction we might be headed in regard to our threshold for living aloud in public. [B-] – Becca Rodriguez

Here’s the trailer to the film.