CheekyChicago

Back in the late ‘90s, when face books were “pig books” and tweets were for the birds, an eccentric dot-com millionaire predicted that one day we’d all share our lives on the Internet. His name was Josh Harris, and he’s the subject of this year’s Sundance-winning documentary We Live in Public, now playing a limited run at The Music Box.

Director Ondi Timoner (Dig!) made the film with Harris’ blessing and about 5,000 hours of footage shot over the course of 15 years. Early last year I took a gig at a Chicago post-production house to help transcribe some of that footage. What I saw blew me away. Apparently this Josh Harris character got a bunch of people to live in pods and broadcast their every move online, six years before Youtube would emerge. Esteemed artists and entrepreneurs called him the Internet version of Andy Warhol. So why hadn’t anyone heard of him?

An introvert raised on TV, with a passion for Gilligan’s Island, Harris saw early on that the Internet could offer not just “e-commerce” but our primary source of entertainment. In 1993 he founded Pseudo.com, a video site that hosted a variety of channels, some of which, like 88hiphop.com, still exist today. Though video streaming technology had hardly caught up with his vision, Harris made the early claim that one day Internet programming would replace TV. Pseudo made him a millionaire, and Harris became known in the downtown New York arts scene for his crazy parties . . . and his tendency to dress up as a clown called Luvvy. When his antics began turning off investors, Harris sold his share of Pseudo for $80 million. He could then put his time and money into darker experiments.

In 1999 Harris launched a massive, multi-media project called “Quiet.” Tapping his social network of cutting-edge artists, Harris recruited about 100 people willing to live in a SoHo warehouse under constant video surveillance. Members of Quiet wore standard-issue jumpsuits, endured Gestapo-style interrogations about their personal lives, used the toilet and had sex online and signed away their right to leave. All food, drink and supplies came free. “Except the video we capture of you,” Harris explains in one of the film’s most memorable moments. “That we own.”

Next, Harris turned the experiment on himself in a project called “We Live in Public.” He lived with his girlfriend as cameras all over their apartment – yes, even in the bathroom – transmitted every moment of their lives to an online community. Harrowing footage shows the couple fighting bitterly and then rushing to their laptops to see what the commenters had to say about it. Suffice to say, living in public caused a nervous breakdown for Harris, and the tech bubble burst and 9/11 didn’t help matters. Depressed and in debt, he disappeared.

And now, just as Harris predicted, we’re all tweeting, blogging, status-updating and, of course, watching others do the same. Masses of people offer up their personal lives to reality TV shows and the opinions of Youtube commenters. We share every detail, from our musical tastes to our most intimate e-mail discussions, with companies that tailor advertising to our keywords. We walk down the street staring at tiny screens, checking constantly for feedback.

After the screening at The Music Box, Timoner took the stage with none other than Harris himself for a Q&A. Amazingly, it turns out Harris had not seen the film until that night. He’d attended Sundance and other festivals but refused to watch. Why now? “Ondi twisted my arm,” he explained.

What a trip that first viewing must have been for Harris, who watched from the booth with his comments recorded for the DVD. With great economy, the fast-paced film delves deep into the mind of its subject and the effects of his actions on the people around him. Especially hard to swallow is Harris’s relationship with his mother, which sadly reveals his dependence on “virtual” relationships. Footage shows members of Quiet, including Timoner herself, in raw moments of turmoil as the result of extreme loss of privacy. Amidst the juicy human-interest stories, a solid plot line traces the growth of the Internet in business and culture, culminating in a look at our Facebook-ruled world.

During the Q&A, Timoner made the accurate guess that we were all mentally ticking through our Internet habits (a quick search reveals that her audience was tweeting as she spoke). Harris was true to form, making stark predictions about the dark side of an online society. “You can buy free-range chicken, but most of us still eat Purdue,” he quipped, noting that it’s cheaper for companies to put their commodities in cages. “And we’re becoming what we eat.”

Calling herself the “Luke Skywalker” of the pair, Timoner countered that Harris presents a cautionary tale, and that overall the Internet has done vastly more good than harm. You just might, she suggested, want to meet those online friends for coffee. And reconsider taking out the Blackberry at lunch.

Tuesday, Oct 20: 5:20 pm, 7:30 pm, 9:45 pm

Wednesday, Oct 21: 5:20 pm, 7:30 pm, 9:45 pm

Thursday, Oct 22: 7:30 pm 9:45 pm