We Live In Public
| We Live in Public | |
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| Directed by | Ondi Timoner |
| Produced by | Ondi Timoner, Keirda Bahruth |
| Starring | Josh Harris |
| Edited by | Ondi Timoner, Joshua Altman |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $41,711 |
We Live in Public is a 2009 documentary film by Ondi Timoner, which profiles Internet pioneer Josh Harris. Its theme is the loss of privacy in the Internet age.
The film details the experiences of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of,"Josh Harris. The dot-com millionaire founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous tech boom of the late '90s. After achieving prominence amongst the Silicon Valley set, Harris became interested in controversial human experiments which tested the effects of media and technology on the development of personal identity. Ondi Timoner documented the major business-related moments of Harris' life for more than a decade, setting the tone for her documentary of the virtual world and its supposed control of human lives.
Among Harris' experiments touched on in the film is the art project "Quiet: We Live in Public," an Orwellian, Big Brother concept developed in the late '90s which placed more than 100 artists in a human terrarium under New York City, with myriad webcams following and capturing every move the artists made. The pièce de résistance was a Japanese-style capsule hotel outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allowed each occupant to monitor the other pods installed in the basement by artist Jeff Gompertz.
The film's website describes how, "With Quiet, Harris proved how, in the not-so-distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire. Through his experiments, including another six-month stint living under 24-hour live surveillance online which led him to mental collapse, he demonstrated the price we will all pay for living in public."
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