We Live In Public

In her award-winning (Grand Jury Prize award in the U.S. documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival) film We Live In Public, Ondi_Timoner chronicles the life so far of Josh Harris, a dotcom whizkid of the 90s who is introduced as "the Internet pioneer you've never heard of". Ondi chronicles Josh's life as he founds pseudo.com in the 90s, tells _60 Minutes_ that his goal is to beat and take down the major networks, and continues as he explores the hyperconnected life in an end-of-the-millenium social experiment called "Quiet: We Live in Public" where he built a panopticon surveillance living space and invited more than a hundred people to move in and live in complete surround surveillance with free food, lodging, and so on, to see what happens. (These days we have reality tv shows to show what happens.) When you put people in a fisbowl with unlimited food and booze and no work, people tend to not do so well. (I must admit parts of the "set people up in isolated circumstances under control" setup called to mind aspects of de Sade's _120 Days of Sodom_.) After the police emptied Josh's bunker on Jan 1 2000 he then continued his research by equipping his apartment with complete surveillance on live web feeds. As the dotbomb happened he disintegrated into a complete mental collapse as people watched in real time.

Ahead of his time in many ways and prescient regarding some issues surrounding social networking software (his lack of privacy experiments were in some ways predictive of the myspace photos hurting peoples' careers and of the modern Net, this is a film that it is hard to say I enjoyed, but easier to say that I found it thought-provoking and at least slightly relevant to some of the issues I and others I know face. Recommended to people who spend extensive amounts of their time interacting through the Net, and especially if they have more than three of blog, smartphone, twitter, myspace, or facebook accounts.

(It was only appropriate to the topic to include a picture of myself, being watched.)