Past the Point
Prior to my viewing of We Live in Public (2009), I had never heard of Josh Harris, the film’s focus. I read Roger Ebert’s review of the film, and agreed completely when he said, “I can be excused for thinking Harris was the fictional hero of a pseudo-documentary, until the film quickly and obviously became authentic.” If I were to explain this story to someone, it would be extremely tough for me to sell the idea that his experiment with 100 artists living underground, actually happened. As I watched, I could not find myself to believe that I had never heard of this, the images were that of a horror film. Naked bodies, scarred minds, and every single personality clash possible. It was insanity, but it was prophetic… Every day we see people gaining popularity through jarring and shocking images.
Harris is a man that seems to have fallen under the condition that a majority of geniuses ahead of their time have; their ego leads them to believe that they’re untouchable. Kanye West and his recent peril, Vic Mensa and his domestic abuse case, and Pablo Picasso and his legacy of how he treated others, all serve as shining examples of how great minds can escape one’s body and do more harm than good. The same goes for Josh Harris; so as a fan of the aforementioned artists, I’m willing to move aside of the terrible things that he did, in order to truly understand the work he conveyed.
To group Harris with other artists, is a bit of a stretch. He is an artist in a completely different sense of the term. He really had no examinable talent, but he had more than just a disposable income; he a mind twenty years ahead of his time. His exhibit, or more clearly described experiment, “Quiet We Live in Public” defies almost any ethical and moral compass with which one has been installed. He ruined lives. This, in my humble opinion, is unacceptable, unless, the ends justify the means. I do not mean this statement in a Machiavellian way, but a “for the greater good” way. If his work would have shifted the culture of the internet towards a more positive outlook, than we would have a different story; but it did just the opposite. It exploited us, it showed the worst aspect of humankind, it ruined us.
We saw what people will do for fame, we witnessed the atrocity of man in a confined place, we were shown how cameras change us. As a film student and lover of the medium, I see a glowing possibility to have explained his ideas through a narrative; social commentary in film has changed the world over and over again. Actors and crews could have taken the idea and exhibited it to the world, without harming a soul. Imagine a world where we saw this film We Live in Public, directed by Harris. Masses of people would have seen it and were forced to adjust their ways. Maybe we have a much more optimistic outlook of the world, rather than the, while pragmatic, depressing view we currently obtain.
Nonetheless, what Harris was saying, was right. It was so foretelling, that when I watched the film, I could not believe that this was conceived in the 90’s. But this entire idea brings up another that must be addressed, What good does a fortune teller serve, if we cannot deviate from their negative predictions? He laid the opportunity out to us, and we could not see the error in our ways; we continued to destroy ourselves, with a smile on our face as we received and gave more and more likes on several different social media platforms, we gave into every sin possible. We’ve used social and cultural capital to invest in ourselves and feed our own egos, I, myself included, we’ve moved past conformity, and sailed into a sea of despair. We have created the worst versions of ourselves.
Now this declaration leads most to ask, “Can we change this?” My answer is no. This is the Zeitgeist, this is us. We have no power, because we handed it over Satan himself, or whatever evil force you believe to exist. In a parallel universe, we have learned from our ways, but not today; today, we must maintain damage control. Rapper, Lupe Fiasco, recently releases an album titled DROGAS Light; the acronym loosely stands for, “Don’t Ruin Us God Said”
His view is somewhat late, and instead of prophetic status, it’s simply on point cultural reporting. We have ruined ourselves; but, this is not a nihilistic viewpoint, this is a cautionary tale.
I refuse to subscribe to any notion that our generation is any less than those that came before us. While the Baby Boomers may have supposedly worked harder, they still had their problems — Socrates once stated,
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”
This helps prove the idea, that, every generation and society have their observable flaws. We have no choice in the matter, we cannot stop it, we simply can take a ride on the said Zeitgeist and try to make the most of ourselves.
This post is not supposed to work as a pessimistic outlook, this is not meant to change anything. This post, just like Harris’s work, is meant to explain my view. We can’t change the world from what it is now, but we can change ourselves. If I, and so many others, decide to do this for the better, we can gear the future populace to learn from this. We can demonstrate that living in public is inevitable in our technological age, but with that social capital that anyone can achieve, we can begin to shift the cultures towards a much more positive and productive end.
So many despise Harris and his work, so let us work to make sure that his predictions are not the end all, be all.
