WE LIVE IN PUBLIC

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 9:12 AM, Jesse Monroy wrote:

I guess I should have asked, Do we know Josh Harris?
Supposedly was head of Internet video company in 1994? Juniper?

BTW, movie opens in LA this weekend.

Jesse

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 1:41 AM, John Sokol <john.sokol@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498329/
>
> Looks really stupid.
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 11:40 PM, Jesse Monroy <jesse650@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Josh Harris
>>
>> http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/09/18/04
>
>

This guy is a nobody!

Livecam was the very first anything streaming video on the internet. And real audio had the first streaming audio. White Pine had the first web chat. All around 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo.com  mid 1993, 

 I was in NYC with Lucy at the time and helped a few teeny ISP get started like Escape.com  while working for Fujistu on getting them up to speed on the internet.
Most ISP's then were little more then a T1 and some web servers and modems in some guys bed room.

The Pseudo channel on Prodigy   (fuck no wonder no one ever hear of him, only lame idiots used prodigy) That is not the internet!

Bankruptcy and closed operations in September 2000.^[2] In 2001, its remaining assets were purchased by INTV

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On the 40th anniversary of the Internet, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC tells the story of the effect the web is having on our society as seen through the eyes of "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of", visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director, Ondi Timoner ("DIG!"), documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade, to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives. Josh Harris, often called the "Warhol of the Web" through the infamous dot.com boom of the 1990's, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network and created his vision of the future, an underground bunker in NYC where 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days over the millennium. He 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 a 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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We Live in Public is the story of the Internets revolutionary impact on human interaction as told through the eyes of Internet pioneer and visionary, Josh Harris. Though once considered the godfather of the downtown Internet scene in NYC in the 90s, known far and wide for his outrageous parties, innovations in chat, streaming audio and the creation of the first online television network, Harris is but a footnote in history at this point all because he took his experiments with the Internet and media consumption too far. Award-winning filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, has been documenting his incredible experiments, and his ups and downs, for over a decade from puppeteer to puppet, from millionaire to exiled and broke. Timoner sets out with We Live in Public to tell the story of yet another walking cautionary tale in Josh Harris who, as Anton Newcombe did for artists everywhere in DIG!, will inevitably shake us all to the core about what the future brings for all of us as we increasingly live, work and love through media and technology.

The film charts the rise and fall of the man who, as far back as the early 1990s, predicted a future dominated by life online, where people will be actively willing to reveal all aspects of their private lives as significance and fame become more accessible, only to find themselves trapped in virtual boxes. Josh Harris foresaw online social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, and created the companies that serve as the direct predecessors to these fabulously successful ventures. But as Josh says, "The first guy gets the arrow, the second guy gets the castle.

Founder of the first Internet market research company (Jupiter Communications), and the first Internet-based television network (Pseudo.com), Josh Harris told his brother, I have to do this, or someone else will do it first. It didnt matter that less than 1% of the population had broadband when he unveiled Pseudo, so very few people could watch his 10 channels online. It mattered to him that he did it, and showed anyone who was watching, the future. Called by many the Warhol of the Web, Josh has spent his life coming to terms with his vision of the future and how media and technology affects social interaction and the development of personal identity.

How Harris became a media casualty provides the emotional core of our story. The youngest child of seven, and neglected by his parents, Harris was a lonely child, nurtured, as he says, on the electronic calories of television. He claims to have been raised by the tube and found his spiritual family in Gilligans Island. After several successful business ventures in the first dotcom boom, Harris set out to make up for his lonesome childhood by surrounding himself with people and cameras, creating his own island.

Theories that first made Harris a wealthy and successful Internet pioneer during the dotcom boom of the mid-90s are the same ideas that eventually drove him towards a mental collapse. Harris continued to place himself and the people around him in the middle of a not-so-distant future where he believed we will all want to live in public, using the media and technology to publicize our lives and create our virtual selves. He created an underground bunker in the heart of NYC at the turn of the Millennium and had over 100 people move into his living human Petri dish an artificial society where they lived in pods, each with their own surveillance camera and channel in a closed circuit network, and subjected themselves to artillery training and interrogations in order to be on camera. It was busted by FEMA as a Millennial Cult on January 1st 2000, where upon, Harris decided to take the experiment a step farther

This time, he was the guinea pig. He had his loft rigged with 32 motion-controlled surveillance cameras from the toilet to the bedroom, and announced weliveinpublic.com A live, 24/7 look into the lives of Harris and his girlfriend, Tanya. They set out to broadcast every aspect of their lives for six months, and even hopefully to conceive in public! The experiment backfired as the chatters began to control the Harris life, resulting in the deterioration of his personal relationship as well as his mental state. After having lived under complete surveillance while losing the majority of his money in the dotcom crash as well as his mind, Harris fled into seclusion on an apple farm in upstate New York for the next five years. He cut himself off from all the media and fame he had been obsessed with, to shed the electronic calories hed been consuming through that media his whole life - and find himself.

During his exile, Harris visionary predictions about technology and online social networking were manifesting in companies like Friendster, and then MySpace and Facebook, among others.

Harris returned to the tech world with his newest creation "Operator 11, an online streaming video hub where users could create and broadcast their own content never found an audience. This time he was too late. YouTube had already cornered the market with its slogan broadcast yourself.

Having sunk the remainder of his money into Operator 11, Josh Harris was now broke. With no money and the burning desire to finally prove himself as the greatest artist of the 21st century, Harris vanished to Ethiopia while the world he so succinctly predicted blows up around him.

Sundance Award-Winning director Ondi Timoner and Interloper Films have been chronicling Harriss story since his peak in 1999. As with Timoners previous films DIG! and JOIN US, We Live In Public takes us deep underground into a world we would never otherwise have access to. Told through visually-stimulating vérité footage woven into a dramatic narrative, the film then takes the power of documentary cinema one step further thanks to Harriss obsession with constantly documenting himself and the world around him. We are currently crafting an exciting hour and a half adventure out of the 3-4000 hours of footage accumulated for the project over the last ten years. The result will without doubt be a visceral ride through our recent history, back to a time not so long ago when life was markedly different for most all of us, before the decade between web 1.0 and web 2.0, before the greatest invention of our lifetime had taken hold of our lives, and according to Harris - were only seeing the smoke on the horizon.