Josh Harris - We Live in Public
 

True Stories is always a good bet for quality documentary, and last night’s was no different. The absorbing, disturbing and faintly mind-blowing We Live in Public detailed the strange, pioneering and irresponsible career of Josh Harris – an Internet entrepreneur turned self-proclaimed artist.

Having engineered information-gathering online at the start of the dot-com boom, Harris’s company – Jupiter Systems – made him a millionaire 80 times over. The climate in New York was such that former school-geeks and misfits were creating web-based businesses and making a mint, and Harris was right in the middle of it, suddenly throwing extravagant parties where ‘unclothed supermodels were sitting on the laps of geeks who were playing Doom’.

Leaving Jupiter with a healthy set of shares and a fortune in cash, Harris set up Pseudo.com – an online TV channel where viewers could interact via text chat. There was some great accompanying footage here of Harris telling CBS reporter that his intention was to use this technology to take networks like CBS out – and this was the first sniff we snuffed of the man’s overriding insecurity and power-hungry mindset. Aside from the opening sequence, in which we saw him say goodbye to his dying mother via online video link.

From Pseudo to Quiet, and by now Harris was calling himself the Andy Warhol of his generation. The premise of Quiet was essentially Big Brother before the Endemol product had even happened. And Harris’s version featured alcohol, drugs, firearms, children, people with bi-polar disorder and an interrogation room where, in probably the most powerful and upsetting scene in the film, a suicide survivor was asked relentlessly to detail her own attempt to take her life.

Quiet was eventually closed down by the New York police – and not before time – and by now Harris’ finances had taken a bruising. But from Quiet, he moved on to We Live in Public – an online reality show that showed his daily life with new partner Tanya in excruciatingly personal detail, with the ubiquitous chat log on the side of the screen.

When tempers frayed between Harris and his lover, viewers dwindled in light of the main character’s unstable and disquieting attempts to keep her involved. When the boom turned to bust and Harris suddenly jumped into the black, he was down to ten readers, and had to give it up for his own good. In the event, he went off to run an orchard in isolation. After one more crack at the online market, and after refusal from MySpace, he now lives in Ethiopa where he’s basically a credit card exile, living in fear of American Express.

Even a potted history is filled with insane details, and watching this simultaneously instilled feelings of horror and admiration for a man who barely knows his own mind. The footage from the Quiet bunker was so alarming in places I thought it’d all have ended in massacre, whilst seeing Harris’ impulsive attempt to keep Tanya in his experiment was beyond uncomfortable.

An illuminating documentary, giving insight into a man who wanted to make the very first reality TV contestants, then put them in a ‘concentration camp’ type environment and ‘break them’, only to find his own culture breaking his own sanity. A startling precursor to the online environment we know now.