True Stories: We Live in Public, More4

With the last ever series of Big Brother dominating Channel Four’s schedules for the rest of the summer, the first TV screening of this Sundance Film Festival award-winner couldn’t have been better timed. Because the chillingly disconcerting “art project” that dot-com pioneer Josh Harris devised back in 1999 (just before Big Brother came on air for the first time) made the world’s most controversial reality TV show look like Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, by comparison.  American film director Ondi Timoner’s documentary is an unsettling look at Harris’s struggle to find himself which could be viewed as a cautionary tale for any parents who use their television or PC as a child minder.

The first image we see of this one-time multi-millionaire is, appropriately enough, one filmed by the man himself. Having not spoken to his mother for several years, Harris is saying a cheery farewell to her on her deathbed via the medium of video tape. He concludes by asking her to give his best wishes to any ancestors on the other side, before saying a final goodbye in the same tone one might say goodbye at the end of a casual phone chat. In this footage, Harris is controlled, calm and even charming. But is this the way a normal person would behave? Of course not. The rest of the film tells Harris’s story and, in the process, becomes a thought-provoking look at the Pandora’s box of Internet chat rooms, online TV and omniscient surveillance cameras that he helped to open, and had a childlike fascination with.

When the 24-year-old Harris arrived in New York in - appropriately enough - 1984, he had just $900 in his pocket. Fired up by an almost evangelical faith in the possibilities of the Internet (something only his fellow geeks had heard about at the time) he made his fortune, and then lost it all again when the dot-com bubble burst. This kind of story is of course a familiar one, but it’s the unpredictable strangeness of the man himself that makes Timoner’s film so compelling. It is quickly established that Harris spent most of his childhood as an outsider, bathing in the comforting glow of the television set, and seeing his often absent mother in a more idealised form as the mother in his favourite show Gilligan’s Island. The television becomes his world, and it’s a world he needed to enter rather than just watch.

And so in 1993, Harris started up the first Internet television company, Pseudo.com. At first, Harris comes across as a hyperactive schoolboy playing at being a businessman, but then things take a disturbing turn as he invents an alter ego called “Luvvy” which he plays on screen. With his blacked-out teeth and feather boa, Luvvy came across like a cross between Elton John at his most freakily flamboyant and Krusty the Clown. But when we hear that this, quite frankly, pretty scary TV character has started to attend corporate meetings, it's apparent that all was not well with Harris or his relationship with the company. And we are told that he walked out in 1999. 

It was then that he created Quiet: We Live in Public. Artists, new-age hippies and other New York outsiders were invited to live in rather cheaply constructed-looking chambers not much bigger than coffins. Cameras were trained on them day and night, while they in turn could choose who to watch on their own personal TV monitors. All food and drink was free, but contestants – sorry, I mean, volunteers – had to wear unflattering uniforms which made them look part prisoner and part mental patient. But despite the now familiar concept, this underground-bunker world had more to do with Orwell’s Big Brother than Endemol’s, and needless to say – with just about any behaviour permitted – things went pear-shaped pretty quickly, and the cops closed the whole thing down. At one point, Harris turned to one of the hundreds of ever-present cameras and said gleefully, “You can see what everyone else does! Who says that is necessarily bad?” Who indeed. There’s no denying the man was ahead of his time.


Harris finally finds love, loses love (by broadcasting online every aspect of his life with his girlfriend until she walks out), has a shot at farming apples, and then ends up becoming a basketball coach to a team of orphans in Ethiopia. As they say, you couldn’t make this stuff up. But one can’t help but think that when Harris decided to up sticks and go to Ethiopia there wasn’t a part of him thinking what a great twist this would make to the Josh Harris Story. For this seemed to be a man who only came fully alive when all eyes were upon him.


In the end, although this strange half-there man remained something of an enigma, Timoner’s film did tell us, without proselytising, as much about our relationship with all the new, cunningly invasive technology being thrust at us, as it did about Harris himself. How we are target-marketed to, and how dissipated yet solipsistic we have become as we jump from our emails to Facebook to MySpace, while Twittering sweet nothing(s) to people we might never even met. But of course Josh Harris saw all this coming in the year of our overlord, 1984. It might have been interesting if he’d been asked by Timoner, what’s next? Or maybe we’re better off not knowing.

• Find We Live in Public on Amazon

Watch the trailer for We Live in Public