“We Live in Public” reflection (blog post 3)
This retelling documentary left me unsettled, to say the least. Ondi Timoner created a documentary titled “We Live in Public” about internet pioneer Josh Harris. It follows him and his actions, looks at his upbringing, his career successes and flops, and his choice to broadcast his life 24/7. The film exposes the dark underbelly of the digital age and the ever-blurring lines between public and private. While this film is now over 15 years old, its core messages remain true.
Harris is a complex character. He oddly enough has a very prophetic, persistent vision of what the digital age will look like in the future and is scarily accurate. He engages in cringe-worthy and relentless self-promotion throughout each of his career stages, leaving viewers, like myself, with a sour taste in our mouths. I would describe him as narcissistic, as he is driven greatly by this desperate need for attention, connection, and control, things he lacked as a child. One aspect of the film that I liked was the post-interviews with this brother. This gave us a better look into who Josh Harris was as a child, and the reasonings for some of his actions. Harris was sold that the internet was the greatest platform and was an area for radical and complete transparency. He also believed in it and its capabilities, that it would one day revolutionize human interactions, which in a way, it has.
A large aspect of the film was his human surveillance experiment called the “Quiet” experiment. This was such a strange concept to me and at first, I was baffled that people would participate in such a thing, but the more the participants were interviewed and we got the context of the details of the period as well as the living situations I understood why everyday people would want to be a part of something so transformative. However, as the film went on we were able to see from post-interviews as well as exposed real-time, first-person videos that show various participants, who were once eager to be in front of a camera, cracking under the pressure of this constant observation and surveillance. I also was very concerned, and somewhat disgusted at the clips of individuals blindly obeying the mediators. I struggled to see the ethicality of the practices that forced participants to attend interviews where they had to retell stories of hardships, or worse, get undressed and perform tasks or demands.
I was also extremely uncomfortable watching the 24/7 livestream footage of Harris and his girlfriend, at the time. Watching someone place video cameras in every part of their house, even places like the toilet, the bedroom, and his cat’s litter box (!!!) was off-putting. A connection to this that I made was to reality TV shows, which I enjoy, like The Bachelor series, which have cameras and microphones in various parts of the residence, as well as during dates and trips. However, in these shows the people are not able to watch back the footage or interact with those who are also watching the show until months later, after it is aired. Harris and his girlfriend, while once noticeably in love with one another, and living together, turned to the online connections of chatrooms and viewers, and this experimentational surveillance situation ended up separating the two physically and mentally, to the point of breaking up.
Overall, I found this film very interesting as it once served as a sort of cautionary tale or call to action/change sort of documentary. Being able to watch this years and years later, where there is no separation from the real world to our digital world, I think was almost more beneficial. Like Harris did, we live fully in public. Even if you have held out of downloading social media apps, or things of this nature that are resisting the reality of the digital age, you are still being surveyed and watched, and it’s nearly impossible to slow down this process. I had never heard or been aware of Josh Harris, but I am comparing him to one of the most famous, unnecessarily wealthy, and powerful men like Bezos, Musk, and Gates, who seem to be ahead of the time, but who are handcrafting, predicting, and persuading what our society and human interactions will look like in the future. This film left me with an uneasy feeling in my stomach and sent my brain down a spiral of fear, worry, and now want for pushback of the digital age and the ever-watching eye of the internet.
