Josh Harris, Long Before His Time

Josh Harris was truly a revolutionary thinker way before his time. Though he was seen as a mad man, he deserves much more credit than that. Owner of Pseudo, a Net TV network, it was a mix of chat rooms and video long before the idea of Twitch. His main goal was to become like Time Warner and be the next big cable network. But it was his way of pitching these ideas that threw people for a whirl. Josh threw parties to find his new casts and crews. Though unconventional it was a stroke of genius that many other people should try and even do use. That is because people at parties are looser and more open to talking than a regular interview. The party scene actually helped Josh get the people he wanted to work for him and help him grow his new venture. His tactic was to find those who were that hungry, hungry in the sense that they were determined to be a part of something bigger and saw his venture as that next step. And it worked for a while until its time, as everything else, came up but he wasn’t finished there. Josh saw the next move, Quiet. This new idea became the next big project. He wanted to build an almost new civilization. For the next couple of months or so he gathered his faithful cast and crew and got help from big-time artists and architects who would help him build Quiet. This was a scape where anything and everything could happen and would all be recorded and uploaded to the web to be viewed by millions, sound familiar. That’s because this was way before it’s time and even doing it on systems that probably couldn’t even handle that much without buffering the feed every five seconds, but he made it work and made it his own. He kept pushing the envelope, kept trying to see what he could get away with and as the internet always has been, did not have any restrictions to stop him.

With Quiet, people began to do anything they wanted and were excited to be watched. There seemed to be no rules and with no rules became no restrictions on what could happen. The only thing that stopped people from going off the deep end was that there were cameras capturing everything. From showering to sex to even sleeping there was at no time a camera was not recording you. People began to flock to this new “civilization” to be a part of something new, that would someday become the norm. These people with through tests and interviews to be brought in and be the right people to join in the new craze. It was ultimately cultish in a way and nobody batted an eye at the time. At one point, people began to not even notice the cameras anymore. They just went about their daily lives together. It wasn’t until everything began to fall apart that things started to show the ugly side of Quiet. It started with the interrogation rooms; they began as just interviews but soon began to be torturous the citizens. It was almost like brainwashing the citizens. They became part of Josh’s experiment; he was brainwashing his citizens. He was making them do things in public that they wouldn’t do in “real life.” But no one put them up to it. It was them who volunteered to be a part of this. They knew how these interviews and conditions would be long before they began to live in these spaces for free too.

As each citizen began to go mad the people watched, waiting for the impending doom of each citizen exploding. As fast as his project started it ended and as quickly as he was to back this project, he quickly abandoned it and left for a new project. Soon he began to project this time on himself. He began filming him and his girlfriend living together. The cameras followed them everywhere and began We Live in Public. People watched and even interacted with the two via chat rooms. This was Twitch before Twitch. He predicted much of what the internet would become way before the time of Myspace, Facebook, and even Twitch. But that is not what I want to focus on. If you look at what occurred during his time with Quiet and We Live in Public, you can see how far he thought and how far he was willing to go to prove that what he thought was right. He showed that this will happen and would ultimately take over our lives and we didn’t see it coming and some of us still don’t. People call him a mad man for what he did, I see a genius that was born before his time. He broke ground in everything we take for granted today. I agree that some lines got crossed but those lines needed to be crossed, in order to know what belongs on certain sites. Harris was revolutionary to the age of the internet and should be taught as a warning and a genius so that others know what to and what not to do on the internet.