The Stranger

An amazing documentary.

Even more amazing: having him appear after the screening and announcing plans to build an Orwellian mini-city. Please god no!

Someone from the audience asked him who he admired more-- Hitler, Goebbels, or Riefenstahl. The fact that he had no answer at all seemed more disturbing than the question.

Couple comments:

The Real World came first, so he wasn't totally original. Though his performance art piece Quiet was still amazing.

Second, while the doc interviews Douglas Rushkoff about the heyday of 1990s dot com culture in Manhattan, it misses the fact that Rushkoff came to see that culture as having the same neo-fascist tendencies that Harris brought people's attention to. But the difference is that Rushkoff created amazing documentaries, worked with Adbusters, wrote books-- something the documentary totally overlooks. See especially:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/…
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rushkoff… (click on "the talk" for full analysis of what went wrong with 1990s libertarian techno-utopianism)

Harris, in contrast, had similar insights but couldn't figure out what to do with them (I honestly wonder if he did some kind of crazy drugs that sent him off kilter). Instead became a megalomaniac who streamed his own self-destruction on the web before such pathos became blase. His continuing search for attention squanders his legitimate intelligence, and makes him not just sad, but also desperate in a way that makes him dangerous because even after all these years he still aspires to dehumanize people for his own fame and fortune.