By Gary Dretzka Dretzka@moviecitynews.com
We Live in Public
What follows is an extremely brief history of the Internet.
Once upon a time in America, computers couldn’t talk to each other, instantly or otherwise. Then, they could.
Once upon a time in America, e-mail didn’t exist. Then, it did.
Once upon a time in America, commercial use of the Internet was forbidden. Then, it wasn’t.
Once upon a time in America, communication along the Internet was limited to researchers, scientists, engineers and the military. Then, it wasn’t.
Once upon a time in America, common folk spoke to each in person, by phone, walkie-talkies, Dixie Cups attached by string or not at all. Then, they discovered the Internet and everything else was rendered obsolete.
That, in a nutshell, is all one needs to understand about the Internet to enjoy Ondi Timoner’s fascinating, if occasionally frightening documentary, We Live in Public. It’s also good to remember that the people you’ll meet in the film have forgotten more about computers than you’ll ever know, so sit back, relax and follow Timoner back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, before the dot com boom went bust and geeks like Josh Harris ruled.
Harris wasn’t there at the beginning, in the 1960s, when computers began networking with each other, and engineers and professors kept news of their new plaything close to the vest. He entered the realm in 1985, as senior Videotex analyst for International Data Corp. A year later, he founded the New York-based online research firm, Jupiter Communications, which he sold years later for about $80 million, and, in the mid-’90s, the interactive streaming-video enterprise, Pseudo Programs Inc. That artistic endeavor would lead to Pseudo.com and group-living experiments, “Quiet” and “We Live in Public.”
By 2001, after pissing away millions of dollars in his own money – and that of unsuspecting investors – on parties, performance-art events and jobs for friends and hot babes, Harris was bankrupt.
As such, the publicity for We Live in Public declares, Harris was “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of … an artist, futurist and visionary.” It might have added megalomaniac, poser, provocateur, rip-off artist, total dick and a nerd’s nerd, at a time when that really meant something.
Let’s start with him being a “total dick”: the first thing we see Harris doing in We Live in Public is delivering a farewell message to his mother, who’s on her death bed, as it was posted on MySpace. In it, he lectures the poor woman on how such good-byes soon will be all the rage among the Internet crowd. Then, Harris asked his mother to say, “Hi,” to all of their relatives on the “other side.”
Most of the footage used to create We Live in Public was shot nearly a decade ago when the so-called “Warhol of Web TV” was riding high with Pseudo Programs Inc. and the fledgling Internet television network, Pseudo.com. Timoner was invited to Silicon Alley to interview some of the talent behind Pseudo and to chronicle “Quiet,” an event in which 100 people agreed to live their lives before his cameras in an underground bunker for 30 days.
After submitting to an exhaustive questioning by Harris’ “neo-fascist” thought-police, the participants lived in a honeycomb structure, not unlike the “Hollywood Squares” set. All of the compact housing units were equipped with a camera, as was nearly every other nook, cranny and shower stall. The group performed regular chores, ate, drank, snorted coke, fornicated and staged events for their own amusement and that of viewers. More than anything else, though, they partied like it was 1999 – which it was — and Harris was sitting in on guitars and vocals for Prince.
Police shut down “Quiet” On New Year’s Day, after getting reports of automatic-weapon fire in the bunker. Considering the direction Harris was steering the debauched geeks, Timoner believes something violent might otherwise have occurred, and the puppet master wouldn’t have objected one bit.
The filmmaker also would be on hand to witness the experiment that ultimately led Harris to a mental breakdown and his girlfriend to abandon him. For six months, he and video artist Tanya Corrin would have every hour of their lives scrutinized by friends and strangers, alike, on line. They were willing not only to share conversations and mundane activities with viewers, but also their arguments, bowel movements and Harris’ attempts, at least, to conceive a child. It ended prematurely, when Corrin stormed out of the loft (“I’m not a porn star!”), causing Timoner to put the footage on a shelf.
Meanwhile, the Internet evolved and prospered without Harris, as did the filmmaker.
“Two years ago, I looked around and realized that what I had documented back then was a physical metaphor of how people would react to the Internet, which Josh predicted would eventually take over our time,” said Timoner, who, in 2004, released the Sundance rock-doc sensation, DiG! “I finally understood what all of his work was about. I saw that what seemed nonsensical at the time was part of a much bigger picture, which needed to be communicated to the world.”
She also was inspired by the realization that nearly all of her friends and acquaintances were voluntarily living out parts of their own lives in public, via social networks. It was an obsession that brought her back to the “ugly feelings I had in the bunker.”
One thing Harris understood, perhaps better than anyone else in the infancy of broadband communication, was that “in the future, it wouldn’t be enough to be famous for 15 minutes in a lifetime. People will want to be famous for 15 minutes every day.”
Timoner said she was shocked to see people update their Facebook pages and Twitter their tweets every chance they got, including during conversations and while driving. The dramatic rise in popularity of reality-TV shows also revealed a paradigm shift in attitudes toward privacy and self-esteem.
“Today, contestants on game shows will swim through worms just to be seen on television,” she quipped. “Ironically, when Josh launched his Internet television network, almost no one outside the studio had the broadband capability to watch it. Since then, the Internet has experienced exponential growth and there hasn’t been time to consider the ramifications.
“Apparently, we can’t stand the thought of being alone for any period of time … we’re herding ourselves into these little boxes, which we can decorate … but they’re still cages. The Internet may be the greatest technological innovation in our lifetime — when it comes to communication and knowledge, anyway — but it has a dark side, and I’ve seen it.”
Even if Harris was every bit the visionary he and Timoner think he was, it may have happened by accident and the virtue of having more money than sense. While providing fertile ground for other people’s creativity, he was also was a sucker for pop cultural iconography and a bit of a plagiarist.
The pornography industry began charging consumers for the privilege of watching actors live their lives on the Internet well before the “Quiet” experiment, which enjoyed the singular distinction of being embraced by the art crowd in Lower Manhattan. The novelty of Voyeur Dorm and other sites eventually wore off, however, to be replaced by gonzo and fetish sites.
The number of people supposedly obsessed with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social sites likely is exaggerated, as well. What began as a medium for young people to share ideas and gossip has been co-opted by corporations, Boomer parents, entertainment-industry publicists, infomercials and bored office workers. It’s to bored web surfers, today, what Solitaire was to the same people two decades ago.
Big Brother’s influence also has cast a shadow on Internet communication. Censors, spies and hackers hover over the Web like so many vultures in search of rotting road kill, and a war is raging between predatory capitalists – the same content providers who made their fortunes in mainstream-media outlets – and those who embrace the long-held belief, “Information wants to be free.”
Today’s hits are tomorrow’s memories. America Online, once considered to be the future of Internet commerce and communication, has been abandoned by subscribers angered by the censors who monitor chat rooms, stale news reports and adherence to mainstream values. YouTube is a wonderful medium, but it, too, could succumb to a freer and more open forum. There’s nearly as much free pornography available on the Internet, today, as that on pay sites.
The release of We Live in Public has raised long-dormant debate over Harris’ true contributions to the Internet. No one doubts his generosity, while with Pseudo, but was he leading the artistic community over a precipice, merely in a demonstration of unrestraine d ego? If he truly were such a genius, why hasn’t he been able to devise something else that’s new and amazing … if not for artistic expression, then, profits.
Perhaps, it’s because: once a geek, always a geek. After all, how much credence should be given to anyone – filthy rich, bankrupt or both – who believed he was making a profound statement by appearing in public in clown make-up, or who considered Gilligan’s Islandto be the crowning achievement in western culture?
“He was raised on the show and wanted to be (executive producer) Sherwood Schwartz,” Timoner pointed out. “When I asked him if he wanted to attend the premiere of this film, he said, ‘Sure, I’m ready for the performance.’ He didn’t see it as being his life story.”
In the period between “Quiet” and the Sundance debut of We Live in Public, Harris lived a reclusive existence at his commercial apple orchard in Upstate New York, before serving as CEO of Operator Exchange Corp. – its Operator 11 was intended to be a “live version of MySpace” — and the African Entertainment Network, based in Ethiopia.
Timoner allowed that Harris didn’t return to Africa after attending this year’s Sundance festival, where the film brought the filmmaker her second top documentary prize. Instead, he began playing poker to raise money for his next incarnation.
She’s moved on to a documentary on global warming, traveling to coastal cities to discover what steps are being taken to avoid being submerged. Judging from the We Live in Public website, however, Timoner has overcome her trepidations about being attached too tightly to the Internet. Once there, browsers are encouraged to follow the movie on nine different services, link to all sorts of media sites and download a widget for use on their own pages.
– Gary Dretzka
September 25, 2009
