We Live in Public

Rating R Genre documentary Starring Josh Harris Directed by Ondi Timoner Publisher Interloper Films

On the north side of Chicago, at the venerated old school cinema called “The Music Box,” a crowd bustles in to the large theatre. There is a buzz tonight. It’s invitation only, after-all. It’s a diverse group of twenty-something’s in film school and middle-aged hipsters, film professionals and curious bystanders.

They’re there for an exclusive look at We Live in Public, the latest documentary from director Ondi Timoner. The press for the film identifies it as a look into the “loss of privacy” in the Internet age, but this isn’t necessarily accurate. This is a film about Josh Harris, one of the earliest Internet pioneers and one of the so-called “Dot-Com-Kids,” a group of very young tech-geeks who became millionaires following the financial boom of the late 90’s. The loss of privacy via the Internet is more a theme of Harris’s life than it is a theme of the film, which focuses on the various radical experiments, technological, financial, and social, of Harris’s career, and his own off-putting personality.

And Harris’s life sure has been interesting. After starting numerous successful Internet businesses, Harris embarked on several sociological experiments. The first of which, titled “Quiet,” has to be seen to be believed. In the late 90’s, Harris enlisted the help of myriad artists, inventors, and like-minded individuals, to create a human terrarium under New York City. After adapting a vacant building into a labyrinth of steel, art deco, and surveillance, he gathered volunteers to live in it with every foot of the compound under constant surveillance, to be watched both by Internet subscribers and the other volunteers themselves.  The result is both mesmerizing and haunting.

The problem with this film isn’t the subject matter; Harris’s life and exploits are too interesting too muddle.  All-access nature of his experiments has created a plethora of footage very conducive to this project. The problem is that director Ondi Timoner seems to see a different man than the one that shows up on screen. Timoner was one of the participants in “Quiet,” and while her appearance on camera during the film is brief, the impact of her connection with Harris on her opinion of the man is clear.

Harris is a selfish man. Throughout the film, the viewer is bombarded by examples of his overwhelming sense of self-concern and self-satisfaction. At one point, he refers to himself as one of the first great artists of the twenty-first century. But he never acknowledges the impact of his actions on others. The film seems to write this off as a necessary side effect of his genius, but any unbiased viewer comes away feeling a great deal of animosity towards Harris. Too often, Timoner seemed to want to indict the Internet, when she was blind to the fact that it was Harris who was exploiting people, pushing them to the edge, and then abandoning them.

We Live in Public is the sort of film that does a great job informing in spite of its failures. Josh Harris’s story is captivating, if for different reasons than the director seems to acknowledge. Given the state of so called “social networking” on today’s internet, this selective history of its development through the life of one of its pioneers is a very enlightening way to look forward at what’s to come. I just feel like it was important to the creator’s of this film that I come away impressed with Harris. Not to like him, but to respect him. I simply don’t, and it baffles me how anyone would.