We Live In Public

Part mad scientist, part Andy Warhol wannabe, Josh Harris is certainly an interesting character. As a documentary subject he was a fantastic choice. Switching between internet mogul, cult leader, insane clown, and rural farmer, his life in the past 20 years has been an eerie set of living predictions about the course of technology with the growth of the internet.

It's probably useless to describe the series of ultra-voyeuristic "experiments" he ran in th 90s, because the truth as it was meticulously recorded on video is so much stranger than you could expect. The documentation is fantastic precisely because he was obsessed with video surveillance, and the idea of cutting together a documentary from the 5000 hours of footage he had stored, including interrogations bordering on torture, is unnerving at best.

While the editing is fair, the whole thing feels a little raw. I suspect this is because he is such an unbalanced figure and there was no sane plan behind a lot of his projects. The whole thing could have benefited perhaps from some coverage of other projects from people in the same circles at the time, or more coverage of the reaction in society. As it is, the story is so fantastic that it's a bit hard to connect it to reality. A good effort, but a bit hard to place.