Living in Public
They call Josh Harris the “greatest” internet pioneer. Personally, I can’t help but wonder what their definition of great is. For me, Living in Public was difficult to watch largely because I couldn’t understand how any of it was legal. Everyone who took part in the experiment volunteered, but considering the fact that one of them was an 11 year old child, they should never have been given access to firearms.
This experiment was meant to test what happens when people are given zero privacy and all of their private moments to themselves. At one point, one man yells out: “I just want 10 minutes to my fucking self,” when fighting with another citizen over the shower. He was aware, as they all were, that they never had a moment to themselves. I understand that part of the experiment, at least on a basic level, though I don’t agree that someone who is not a scientist nor a doctor should be conducting a social experiment like that. That being said, I think what Harris said about the way the internet would become in the future was chillingly accurate.
Everyone knows that our phones are watching us, at least on some level. It’s not accident that looking at a product on Amazon will automatically generate ads for you on Facebook. We are willingly sharing and posting pictures of the most private times of our lives online for everyone to see — just as Harris said that we would.
However, a part of me thinks that much of the experiment had nothing to do with the internet. For example, the fascist undertones were extremely disconcerting. I can’t see how giving the citizens uniforms, interrogating them, and giving them free, unrestricted access to dangerous weaponry was saying something about our internet use.
Why begin the documentary with the story about Harris sending a video to his dying mother rather than going to see her in person? I think the director wanted us to doubt Harris’s motivations from the start. He is a brilliant, innovative person, but emotionally unavailable. He admits himself that he doesn’t do well with other people, though he blames Gilligan’s Island for this, saying that “I am much more Gilligan’s island than my parents.” He thinks this is normal when it is not. All of us grew up with television in our lives. It is other people and experiences that help shape our personalities — not television. I suspect that Harris likely has some kind of undiagnosed mental health problem that makes it difficult for him to form connections with other human beings.
That is at the heart of why he really conducted this experiment. The interrogations, the uniforms, his strange fascination with forcing people to do things they wouldn’t normally do, it lies at the heart of Harris’s own desire to connect with other people, to understand human intimacy in a way that was not possible for him in real life.
