We (Shouldn’t) Live In Public
“We Live In Public”, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a documentary about a millionaire who capitalized on the internet realm, Josh Harris. From the beginning, we learn about Josh Harris’ background and his childhood life. We learn that from a young age, he had grown distant from his family, especially his brothers and sisters, all because his mother was protective of him. His mother would want him to watch television, knowing he would be safe doing it. Harris felt trapped to the television screen, and it seemed like the enclosed lifestyle he had inspired the genius ideas in the beginning of his business ventures, but ended in his demise. Josh Harris began his career capitalizing on the rising trend, the Internet. He started his career in a market research agency, where he worked around anti-social coworkers, and during his hours of the day, he was becoming infatuated with the internet. Within years, the young Josh Harris would become a millionaire, forming the internet video streaming site, Pseudo.com. Through Pseudo, people could stream shows and video through the internet, it eventually became a competitor of television networks, as Harris sternly told CBS’s “60 Minutes”, as he divulged the goals of his company to eventually take news stations out of business and engage the world in an all-internet reality. Throughout the documentary, we can begin to feel a troublesome feeling developing as it seems Harris becomes beguiled with the out of ordinary.
Josh Harris, growing up living a sheltered lifestyle, was engrossed with the idea of ensconced behavior. He came up with the art idea, “Quiet”, an underground hotel that once you came in, you could not come out, and the occupants would give their information in order to be accepted into the sanctuary. Harris and his team of artists configured the subterranean asylum with cameras and televisions in every pod where the occupants would sleep. They could switch through the channels, which would broadcast everyone’s pods to see what everyone was doing, allowing everyone to see the public lives of each others pods. The cameras would capture sexual encounters, showers, parties, shooting guns, and people losing their minds. Eventually, on January 1st, 2000, the experiment was shut down as it was suspected of being a cult with an end of a mass suicide.
Throughout all of this, Josh Harris was losing his mind slowly but surely. Josh ended up meeting his next partner, Laura, who would accompany him in his next sinister experiment, “WeLiveInPublic.com”. This site would broadcast the daily lives of him and his partner. At the beginning, they seemed to live a normal life, but as time progressed, they began to challenge each other in fights and allow others to control their lives through the chat room on the site. They would have judgement sessions reading the feedback of who would win the fight. Josh realized that the attention was put mostly on his partner, so it ended in the dissolution of the two, and the eventual fall of Harris as well.
Harris would eventually go bankrupt and be part of the dot-com millionaires that helped for one of the greatest lows of the stock market in its’ history.
What I found intriguing about the documentary, was to how relevant it is to today. We look to the internet for judgement. We tweet things that really, no one truly cares about, but as long as we get that like or that retweet, we feel that we have accomplished our goal of being recognized. I believe this is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we are not posting everything about our personal lives online. My favorite classic example of this issue are the couples that post everything about their relationship online. You know, the boyfriend that gets mad and posts about how angry his girlfriend made him because they broke up for a day or the girlfriend who wants revenge so she posts text messages between the two showcasing only context of him being rude to her. What I find interesting is that the majority of these relationships always come to a complete falter. They end. Just like Laura and Josh, who seemed so in love, but couldn’t handle the pressure of the judgement from others. We shouldn’t post our whole lives on social media, we need our privacy, just as the people in the pods began to realize as they were being watched everyday.
The scary part is: Only we can prevent ourselves from living in public.
If there is anything I hope I’ve learned from watching this documentary, I hope that I know that to live the way I want to live, I shouldn’t post my life in the public. Keeping cherished moments private, so that we won’t be judged on the validity of our feelings.
