We Live in Public: The Story of Josh Harris, a Delusional Visionary
Josh Harris made the bold statement: “Lions and tigers used to be kings of the jungle and then one day they wound up in zoos — I suspect we’re on the same track,” (Matthew). And right now, you might be thinking: “Wow, this guy is insightful.” Well, let me tell you a thing.
I’m in absolute shock. I can’t process what I’ve just watched. The documentary We Live in Public follows the life of Josh Harris: a guy who has been dubbed “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of,” “the Warhol of the Web,” or “the delusional visionary” (my personal favorite). Harris was absolutely delusional (we’ll get to that soon). I’m talking worst case scenario, end of our sanity as a human race, what the f*ck kind of delusional.
However, Harris had a lot of predictions that came true today. And, he was able to get them out into the world because he earned a lot of money, and by a lot I mean millions of dollars, as a dotcom Internet entrepreneur in the 90’s. However, Harris quickly lost that money from his crazy social experiments, which made New York into something out a dystopian novel.
The Experiments: Jupiter Communications, Pseudo.com, Quiet, We Live in Public, Operator 11
In the ’90s, there was the infamous technology boom. That was when Josh Harris founded Jupiter Communications, a technology market research consulting firm, and Pseudo.com, the first internet streaming TV network. Jupiter worked to predict technology trends. Pseudo tried to merge video and chat before that was even a thing. Seems pretty normal, right? Keeping up with trends and growing as a society? Well, it wasn’t that.
Harris began throwing wild parties to attract artists to his company. He took the underground artworld of New York by storm, getting a bunch of artists on board with his ideas for social experiments. Then, he started dressing up as Luvvy, his creepy clown persona (he didn’t think was creepy — it was). With Jupiter and Pseudo, Josh made $85 million, but he blew through that money quickly when he left both the companies. Harris began to make his delusions into a reality by creating controversial human behavior experiments. However, there were no norms in his experiments. Nancy Baym defines norms as “a framework through which people determine what behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable,” (Baym 87).
His first experiment was Quiet: We Live in Public. Quiet was an underground bunker where people were free to have eat and drink, shit and piss, and have sex and fire guns. They could do anything and everything they wanted. These 100 artists gathered together to live in capsule hotels, or pods, and fulfill their dreams of doing absolutely nothing to gain fame. There was only one condition: all of this had to be videotaped and broadcasted live — that’s where the fame part comes in. Each pod had a live video camera and screens to follow the artists. But wait, there’s more. Every inch of the space had a camera; there were 110 cameras in total. Privacy was completely gone.
Everyone went absolutely batshit crazy because of the lack of norms and rules. The police shut down the project at the beginning Y2K (January 1, 2000). Bartender Gabrielle Penabaz said, “[Quiet] really inspired people to do things they wouldn’t do anywhere else in the world. There was a real sense of freedom even though you were also chained by concept of being watched and videotaped,” (Matthew).
After that, Harris needed more. However, he started seeing Tanya Corrin who was his girlfriend at the time. Harris met Corrin when she worked for him at Pseudo. They watched TV, took showers, went to the bathroom, slept together, and did nothing. Normal couple stuff, right? Nope, wrong again. Their entire relationship was broadcasted live. He created We Live in Public (weliveinpublic.com), a website that followed the couple under 24-hour internet surveillance.
Much like Quiet, privacy was gone. The Harris and Corrin Show went live for anyone who was streaming to see. The couple did everything I mentioned above on camera — and even fought on camera. During their worst moments, they had their audience take sides. The couple eventually split up because the lack of privacy destroyed their relationship.
Ondi Timoner, the documentary’s creator, explained that: “[Josh] climbs into the TV set and he becomes the rat in his own experiment at this point, and the results don’t turn out very well for him… I think that’s one of the important lessons in life; the Internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It’s just not. If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn’t post it,” (Matthew).
Finally, Harris tried to create one more delusion. He was still convinced that the world would be connected with video, live chat, and more; and, Harris was right. He creates Operator 11, giving an Internet television network another go. Harris tried so hard to create a live video chat community, but he failed once again. So, while Harris was right, no one accepted his delusions as their reality (except for the batshit crazy artists who couldn’t make it in New York and Tanya Collin before their breakup).
The Madness: Bred by the TV Set
So, how did this all begin? Harris said, “I think that I love my mother virtually, not physically… I bred by her to sit in front of the TV set hours on end. That’s how I’ve been trained,” (Matthew). However, I think that’s his excuse.
Harris wanted to control and manipulate people because of the lack of attention he received growing up. Harris wanted to make people feel and believe what he believed. He wanted power, fame, and fortune. Harris knew he could gain this by exploiting our human desire for connectedness. And, while Harris succeed to some extent with certain groups, his experiments were only effective on a small scale; they were not sustainable, ethical, or appropriate enough for the entire world to get behind like social media today.
The Ideas: Conform With Me, Come Form With Me
Harris said, “If you had said to somebody 200 years ago that people are going to spend 8 hours a day looking at this moving fire called the TV set, zombied out, they would’ve said what kind of madness does the future hold for us… the next magical medium is the virtual world,” (Matthew). He even made a weird animation titled Launder My Head in which he described this vision for the future. Again, his predictions were right.
But, I can’t get over all of the manipulation he used. Jaron Lanier explains that “people don’t realize how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system,” (Lanier 34). While Harris was not wrong with his prediction, he approach was all wrong. Harris was a manipulator. Harris thought people would just immerse themselves in the delusions he created. Since he was addicted to the TV as a child, he figured everyone would want to be sucked into the TV, literally. That wasn’t the case. In my opinion, most people participated because they wanted their 15 minutes of fame (chalk one up for Harris, yet again).
The Mission: Give People Their 15 Minutes of Fame Every Day
Harris said, “People want 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime, but our view is that people want their 15 minutes of fame every day.” Since his mission was to give people their 15 minutes of fame every day, so many artists and participants in his experiments acted out of character. They began to develop group think because they couldn’t separate their own willful actions from the ones Harris emphasized and encouraged. These people began to lack agency to make decisions for themselves. I think they all started to do crazier and crazier things in order to get more attention. They truly did have “collective consciousness,” (Matthew). However, this is similar to social media today. People will do anything to get likes, comments, views. They want fame, validation, and self-gratification.
The Rationale: Everything is Free, Except the Video
Overall, Harris explained that “everything is free, except the video we capture of you — that we own,” (Matthew). Social media don’t cost us anything and we can use them as much as we want. Like Harris, companies profit off of this. Like the participants in Harris’s experiments, we continue to let them use our information to create targeted ads, personalized newsfeeds, and identifiable business models that make them more money.
As Jaron Lanier claims “we’re being tracked and measured constantly, and receiving engineered feedback all the time. We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now,” (Lanier 5). But, unlike Harris’s experiments, we get something out of it that isn’t extreme: connection. In all of his experiments, Harris failed to find small ways to develop connections that weren’t for show. Social media does create community and connection through genuine content. While there are extremists out there today on social media, there’s nothing to the extent of Harris’s experiments.
The Return: The Wired City
After all of this crazy sh*t, I thought Harris had finally settled in Ethiopia like the documentary explained. Here he was teaching basketball to orphan children. I thought he was finally impacting people for good. But, I wanted to check.
After doing a little research, I found out his “lets-help-the-world-and-remain-quite” demeanor was a ruse. Harris had ONE more delusion that wasn’t mentioned in the video. In 2010, Harris wanted to create The Wired City. He argues that he could fly a group of people in to watch a broader group of people in their home or office studios; then it could extend to every household (that’s how I understood it anyway). He imagines it as “commodifying what the NSA is doing commercially… I’m doing what’s already been done, but the government doesn’t do it officially,” (Fast Company).
In my opinion, if we ever get to the point where The Wired City is real I’m going bananas (like a monkey in a zoo). I’m talking like the Coke and Mentos combination of crazy — I’ll explode. My brain just won’t be able to process the insanity. While Harris’s Kickstarter for The Wired City was a bust, it made $7,241 out of the $25,000 goal. There are 97 backers — NINETY SEVEN!!
The Wired City would be just another tool for human exploitation. In the end, I agree with Alana Heiss, the director of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center at the time, who said, “You may have to be delusional to be a visionary. Josh was both,” (Matthew). So, that’s Josh Harris, everyone… a delusional visionary.
References
Baym, Nancy K. “Communities and Networks.” Personal Connections in the Digital Age. 2nd ed., Polity, 2018. 81–111.
Lanier, Jaron. “Argument One: You Are Losing Your Free Will.” Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Picador, 2019. 5–26.
Lanier, Jaron. “Argument Two: Resist the Insanity of Our Times.” Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Picador, 2019. 27–41.
Matthew, Jason. “We Live in Public (Full Documentary).” Internet Archive. 13 June 2016, https://archive.org/details/youtube-LexyO9RMzs0.
