User:Lbattich/notes/We Live in Public
Notes on class session & screening of We Live in Public, a documentary by Ondi Timoner, 2009
We live in Public
The story of dot-com entrepreneur Josh Harris. "The greatest internet pioneer you've never heard of." [citation needed]
Josh Harris founded Jupiter Communications, a firm which sold data and analysis on internet traffic.
Start-up in the 1991 in advance of the dot com boom.
In 1984 Josh Harris arrives in New York.
-Brian Holmes: Future Maps
The narrative of Josh's early career: follow the myth of the American dream
Arrive in New York with $900, to end up as a tycoon in the 1990s.
-Pseudo: a mix of video and chat: the future according to Josh.
- The MTV of the Internet
- It would represent the whole of the Internet.
He poses as the Warhol of Internet TV.
-Creat a Patform / environment for artists, etc.
"We are in the business of programming people's lives."
The film shows a narrative of Josh personal life: he's portrayed as goofy, nerdy, an alienated kid, who loved his mother virtually rather than physically.
Economics of the internet: The Ad, the click, the transaction
Total freedom and total control.
Luvvy: the name of a creepy face-painted clown persona Josh adopted. What Josh wanted to be. Luvvy as his mom.
It shows someone who really wants to reach out and connect.
connect with people mediated by TV
He leaves Pseudo.
(The importance of Gillian's Island in Josh's life narrative)
Group: our identity is not represented but performed, constantly.
Quiet
Upon leaving Pseudo he embarks on a new project:
"Quiet: We Live in Public"
An undergroup society, hotel-like: a party-social experiment: a precursor of Big Brother-style TV shows.
Everybody may feel like celebrities, just by being on televized.
- There's a fascist overtoned to the whole thing.
Similar attemps as hippie communities, self-sufficient, etc.
-"Everything is free except the video that we get from you."
Constant survellaice, where everywhere and everyone is televized.
A prototype community.
An analogy of what the internet would be.
Someone says: it's more fascinating to watch your friends than to watch normal TV.
There is an initial sense of freedom while being watched. Having our lives exposed.
People want to have fame everyday (not just 15).
- Though it seems to me that there is a very easy equation here that actually does hold: that being on TV makes you famous, or gives you the illusion of fame. That may have been the case when TV was the main media outlet in the early 1990s, and to be televised meant to become famous, to be present for an audience out there, to be broadcast.
Yet when everyone is televised, when everyone is "famous", when everyone can be broadcasted (as is the case in Josh experiment, and is the case in today's web 2.0), this doesn't mean anyone is watching, or that you are famous at all. Just means your live is out there, not public, yet it have not much to do with fame at all anymore, but with personal freedom and survaillance.
To Live in Public: everything is exposed, so how do you get to know people?
some don't notice the lack of privacy.
- Not just to film, but to collect information.
At one point we see kids using guns indide the closed up community. Problems with the police start.
Josh introduces a weird concept within his community: interrogation.
This is abusive, degrading, and the participant seem to have no option but let themselves into it.
The authority of the camera is relevant here.
Psychological damage is evident.
Millenium: man against hte machine: leave something to future generations.
"It's a hard envirenment to be sober in." says one participant.
Suicidal thoughts anbd psychological instability among them also became evident.
Freedom turns people into beasts.
Josh is portraed as a puppet master, letting everybody go fucked up, but not doing anything to better their conditions.
With the mantra "Yea, that's the future", Josh seems to waive all problems.
The community is seen by outsiders as some kind of a Millenium cult.
The subjects in Josh's experiment had become human parasites.
-At the end everyone had a different idea of what it was that they experienced, of what the whole experiment was.
To go from love to hate, from creativity to destruction.
The police interrupt in the ealy hours of New Yeas day 2000, and closes the premises: the show is over.
Josh leaves on a trip boat.
We Live in Public
Next project:
To experiment with himself.
"We Live in Public"
Josh and girlfriend Tanya Corrin set up to live together and broadcast constantly their lives on the internet. There's also a chat platform in their site, so that the audience can interact with them. This means at the same time that they can know what their audience thinks of them in real time.
This allows a lavel of interactivity and communication between them and the audience, which goes beyond normal platforms of broadcasting, even of other internet broadcasting.
They are giddy the first month.
Back to Josh's personal narrative: the relationship with his mom.
He fantazises that people would be able to purchase tapes of him and his daily life: the logic here is that this is implied by being a celebrity (which he is, according to him)
For him, getting in TV was a way to validate yourself.
Slowly there's distance within the relationship.
Creating an alientation between them: to be in public yet have no connection.
-To be stuck.
When arguing in public its all about the egos: performing for an external other.
They are always eager to see what the audience's response was.
Harris had no control.
The audience is on control.
Dom com bubble busts: on March and April 2000, more than 75,000 people lost their jobs. Pseudo was sold, whole, and it went under in October.
Josh is waiting for Tanya to leave, yo get out.
He is a celebrity, yet people stop watching.
His personal worth depended on other's opinions.
The audience's response was a constant reminder: we watch.
Big Brother is not a person, but the collective consciousness.
The collective eyes of a society that survellance itself, without the need of a Big Brother entity.
"I'm mentally sick." He finally admits.
and then
2001:
The film slightly touches on the gentrification of New York.
Harris: a spirit and a vision.
The film holds him as unique.
He "retires" to an apple farm in upstate New York.
He presents the trees: "they are my friends". He shows his impulse to control, by believing that the trees are somehow influenced by is mere physical precesence.
Tanya Corrin is portrayed as a "virtual girlfriend", cast for the specific project "We Live in Public". Josh tries to present the whole project as a pseudo relationship with a pseudo girlfriend, in order to protect his image.
Relatyionship with mother again. She wasn't there for him, he wasn't there for her.
Back to the start of the film, when Josh is recording a godbye message on a video tape for his mother, who is in her death bed.
"I'm an artist." He insists that his work be read as an artist's.
Breaks all contact with his family
To rewrite his own history: Pseudo as an art project. Tanya as a fake girlfriend, etc.
2005
Web 2.0
Josh leaves attempts a comeback to the internet business by introducing "Operator 11: Run your own show."
Harris prediction slowly become apparent: Google, Facebook, bring the cameras to themselves.
We create value by feeding content.
We share, enjoy the attention, etc.
We live in public: Looking back Josh's ideas seem like predictions.
The "Quiet" community project as a physical prediction of the contemporary online networked survellance society.
Next we find him in Ethiopia. "No media."
"Pure humanity."
Real
Did he find his island?