WE LIVE IN PUBLIC: On DemandMarch 11, 2010

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC

On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the perspective of watching them from the comfort of your home. This week, Gravitas Ventures WE LIVE IN PUBLIC. Learn more about Gravitas with our one-on-one interview with founder Nolan Gallagher here.

Award-winning director Ondi Timoner’s (DIG!) latest documentary comes to Video On Demand. WE LIVE IN PUBLIC covers the career of who the film feels is “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”, Pseudo founder Pseudo Josh Harris. Not dissimilar to DIG!’s main subject, the rock band’s Brian Jonestown Massacre’s lead man Anton Newcombe, Timoner has found a public visionary that goes to the beat of his own drum, even if that means destruction.

The film’s decade-long journey following Harris also wants to be a cautionary tale of the internet controlling our lives. “Everything he does is a precursor to something that will happen to all of us,” said Josh Harris’ brother Tom.

Harris, once called the “Warhol of the Web”, made his first fortune with his consulting and analysis firm Jupiter Communications. In the mid 1990’s he then launched Pseudo, an internet network of web-based video programs. It was with Pseudo where he became a more public figure, including threatening to replace entrenched networks like CBS on 60 Minutes of all places. His peculiarity would then reveal itself when he descended into his elderly, clown-like character Luvvy, who he channeled from Gilligan’s Island and perhaps his version of his estranged mother.

Following the success of Pseudo, the artistically frustrated Harris then funded controversial multimedia projects: In 1999, with the new millennium approaching and Y2K front and center in the public mind (thanks to overhyped media). he created “Quiet,” a basement of pods for people to live in equipped with cameras and TVs. Everything was provided for the participants, but Harris made it clear he owned the video. What could go wrong in a bunker complete with free food, an armory of guns and its own “Interrogation Artist?” Lucky for them, the New York City police shut it down.

Following the demise of Harris’ community experiment, came “We Live In Public” (and thus the source of this film’s title) where he and his then girlfriend opened their home to 30 cameras. I wonder if Sumner Redstone ever thought about becoming the star of his show? Timoner spends a lot of time letting Harris’ version of “We Live In Public” play out. In hindsight, it was obvious this was another experiment doomed to fail in the complexity of human emotion being recorded 24/7. Makes me glad for never owning a web-cam.

Harris’s experiment and fortune simultaneously eroded with the 1999 dot.com crash. He left New York City to check back into reality by running an apple orchard for five years. But not before one more failed attempt at a new media venture called Operator 11. By 2004, social networking had taken more shape with companies like MySpace. Instead of being lauded with attention for his return to glory, Harris could only attain a meeting with a junior executive at MySpace. A stunning fall from grace.

At his peak, the film says Harris was worth $80 million. The film concludes with Harris story by accounting for his whereabouts in Ethiopia coaching youth basketball. A place he deems “pure humanity.”

The film opens with the quote, “lions and tigers were kings of the jungle. And one day they ended in zoos. I suspect we’re on the same track.” In the film’s press notes, Timoner asks “imagine if the Internet stopped functioning for a month— how our generation, one which enjoyed life before there was an ‘online’— how would we cope without it?”

Narrated Timoner, who had first-hand experience with Josh Harris, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC entertains ou curiosity about the recent history of our dependence on the internet and helps us question our allegiance to the internet. I wonder how much I want to commit to interacting with the web as I write this [the irony of writing this on my website doesn’t escape me]. Perhaps it will also pave the way for future documentaries on the current internet visionaries shaping our world. Will Mark Zuckerberg and Chris DeWolfes ever open up like Josh Harris? And what does it say if they’re not willing to while making their fortune off the masses that unwrap their lives to commerce?

- Britt Bensen

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC (89 minutes) Rated TV MA

Gravitas Ventures

Available on Movies On Demand until 5/06/10 in over 70 US million households including: Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevision, Charter, Insight, Mediacom, Bresnan, and Suddenlink.

Tags: