American entrepreneur Josh Harris has been an impresario of the
internet almost since its inception. In 1986, a twentysomething Harris
founded the online-research firm Jupiter Communications, which in 1998
very successfully went public and was ultimately sold, making its
founder a very wealthy man. Harris then devoted himself to Pseudo.com, the company he founded in 1993,
when Pseudo.com hyped itself as “the
world’s largest original producer of interactive streaming video
programming.” Nearly a decade before Big Brother, Josh Harris
was playing Big Brother, creating a series of outlandish and extreme
“human experiments” presented as entertainments for what he dreamed
would be an ever-growing audience of round-the-clock internet viewers.
In the end, Harris drove himself crazy, Pseudo.com went bust, and, eight years later,
documentarian Ondi Timoner expertly captured the whole brilliant mess
on film.
Taking its name from Harris’s most
ambitious/terrifying
internet art experiment—in which 100 New Yorkers were sequestered
in an underground bunker rigged with surveillance cameras and a fully
stocked arsenal—We Live in Public recounts the
well-chronicled Josh Harris Story™ with unprecedented depth.
Timoner’s film not only offers an extraordinarily rich portrait of
Harris, who’s presented as an ever-less-likeable head case until his
truly surprising rebirth, but also provides invaluable documentation of
Harris’s work. More than any of Harris’s individual internet art
experiments, We Live in Public showcases the grand and
sometimes psychotic ideas behind his controversial projects, and
Timoner’s film is the work of art for which Josh Harris will be
remembered. If you like good documentaries, go see it. 
