We all live in public
Josh Harris is a pioneer, a genius, and what I think the first internet sensation. Throughout the entire experience of how Josh crafted his image into reality, you could tell he had a serious vision. A vision so extreme it broke him several times. Josh Harris to me seemed to be a genius of the dot.com era. Although his strategies were very much extreme, he still thought ahead of his time. Josh was able to envision the way human minds would wrap around the idea of the internet. The scary part about what he did, is that it all came true. For his projects, we can tell that they broke social norms. Harris interacted with others outside the norms of his time. I think this is especially true during the underground bunker project. This project to me was the most extreme, yet overall the most revealing. Josh provided free services to these people just to record them. In return he got video of their actions, mental state, behaviors, and who these people really are while on a camera. This holds so true today on the dozen of social media platforms. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. provide us with the free space to show all of these things that Josh Harris was able to get from his subjects. We act the same on the internet today as he once predicted. His claim that lions one day use to rule the jungle, now they are locked up in a zoo. This feels the same application as we use to spend a lot more time face to face, real social interaction. Now, we are controlled by these big social media companies as they collect data on us everyday.
Another part of the film that I found very interesting is when Josh and his girlfriend began to live everyday in the public eye. Streaming everyday life to the internet really took a tool on their relationship, allowing for inputs that shouldn't affect the private life of people. While living every second to public eye seemed a bit extreme, as a gamer I instantly thought of how this was so similar to the platform Twitch.tv. Josh Harris literally was creating the first twitch streams before the platform was even in existence. We see people do exactly what he was doing in the form of twitch, vlogs, and really any other video content on the internet today. The best part, it has consumed us! Just as Harris expected.
With the film being created before we even has broadband internet, it’s amazing to thing one man was able to see such a potential and predict how such a technology would change humans. I think in this sense Josh Harris is truly a genius, and a great pioneer that no one has ever heard of. His manipulations and games he used against other was very dark at times, but he was trying to craft a vision that did play out to be exactly true. Overall I really enjoyed the film. Everything about it was just so relateable to our world today which made it very interesting. I also find it very scary. If we have become this consumed so far, how much worse could it get? What does Josh Harris think of the internet now and how could it further evolve humans?
