We Live in Public

Saw We Live in Public, a documentary about the life of Josh Harris, an early 90s internet mogul. He opens with him greeting us with a "Hello, Mom." He addresses us, or perhaps his camera, as his caregiver. This is a clip from a video he sent to his dying mother in lieu of visiting her. He immediately follows this with a declaration of "virtual love." It's an odd moment. Josh Harris, we discover, had the foresight to predict youtube and streaming video as being a media game-changer back in the 90s back before broadband even existed. He also predicted the rise of home-brew, flash-in-the-pan internet celebrities. He then missteps in his remarkably accurate prediction and extends this to everyone. Ala Andy Warhol, he predicts everyone will be living public lives all of the time. But in a way, of course, he's right.

So, the film follows Josh as he becomes suddenly and fantastically wealthy (net worth $80M) founds some far-fetched media websites and descends into excess and art-film experiments on how constant attention effects society. Throughout it all, he and other new-media personalities pontificate about how everyone wants to be seen and how this will change everything. They've got a point that here in the future we are sharing things a lot more than we used to be, but he doesn't realize that much of what we put out is carefully filtered and posed to show off our best sides. Control of our public image and the ability to conceal what we want has only become more important. The reality-tv pioneers of the past thought we would become more comfortable with being more open and accessible but if anything it's resulting in personas and masks and poses becoming more important. To be art-school cute for a moment, We Pretend In Public.

One of Josh's experiments involved setting up a bunker of food and and drugs and guns and cameras and inviting a bunch of attention starved (and very enthusiastic) performance artists to live there for a few months. At first they're loving the non-stop attention but after a while they get very tired of constantly performing. The project is shut down after a police raid (which is hilarious) and Josh then reverse the camera, becoming the star of his own 24-hour surveillance show and, of course, broadcasting everything onto the internet. He slowly discovers what every actor already knows: that a performer is really far more at the mercy of their audience than the reverse. His desire to be watched is really a desire for acceptance but all he gets is scrutiny. How like his absent and "virtually loved" mother we are perhaps. All Josh seems to want is a hug but discovers that a stage is a lonely place to be, even one as seemingly intimate as an internet chatroom.