The Man Who Predicted Chaos

Last week one of my university lecturers emailed our entire journalism year (roughly 100 students) to let them know she would be showing a documentary called ‘We Live in Public‘.

The showing of this film was yesterday.

You can imagine my surprise to walk into an empty room and begin to watch this film with just the lecturer and myself!

If any of my journalism collegues are reading this…you missed out. Here’s why…

We Live in Public opens with the words “This is the story of the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”. It follows a man named Josh Harris. A nobody.

As a child, Harris’ Dad was away on international business and his mum was an alcoholic. He was left to fend for himself. Harris says “My most important friend growing up was the TV”. Even now as an adult he says “I tend not to have particularly intimate relationships”

In 1992, a twenty-something Harris had a vision of the future. He was one of the first people to realise that the internet would soon change the world. He started by developing what we would now describe as incredibly simple chat software. As the internet gathered momentum, Harris began to make a lot of money. ”We ["the dot com kids"] became titans because we knew how to set up a modem” he explains in the film.

Moving on, Harris founded pseudo.com- the very first internet television network way back in 1993. Despite everybody still using dial up connections, Harris streamed video and allowed users to ‘chat’ about what they were viewing. It was a huge success.

After selling Pseudo.com in the mid 90s, he was a millionaire. But this is where things start to get interesting.

Harris set up what he called an “experiment”. He got a basement in his home city of New York, fitted it with 100 sleeping “pods”, a huge dining table, showers, toilets, a bar and even a firing range. He then put cameras everywhere…and I mean everywhere! Each sleeping pod was fitted with a TV (as well as a camera). On that TV, you could flick through hundreds of channels. Each channel was the view from a different camera. After setting this up, Harris then invited people to come and live there for a month. Everything would be free. You could have as much food, drink and even drugs as you wanted. Needless to say Harris spent (or should I say wasted?) millions and millions of dollars.

The only rule of this experiment for the (suprisingly willing!) participants was “once you’re in you can’t get out”. Think Big Brother, but worse. Much much worse.

What Harris discovered is people will do anything on camera! This is an interesting concept. Many people “shy away” from cameras, but Harris found the opposite. People thought nothing of going to the toilet, having sex and…well you get the picture…all on camera. All being recorded.

The footage on this documentary shows absolute chaos. I won’t go into some of what is shown. Much of it is graphic. If you really want to see it then buy the DVD.

What is important to note is people began to communicate using the cameras and television screens. Often there was no need to go and talk to someone face to face.

A few weeks into Harris’ experiment, the police barged in and closed everything down. But Josh was happy. He had proven his point.

What was next? Well Harris and his new girlfriend Tanya decide to move in together and rig their home with video cameras. They streamed live footage of them living together across the internet for 100 days. You could see everything. As before with pseudo.com- there was be the ability for users to chat about what they were watching.

At its peak, Josh and Tanya’s website was getting 10,000 hits in an hour. After a couple of months of being totally in love, the couple began to experience difficulties. Arguments would not be about resolving issues. Instead they would be “playing up” to the people watching. It became about popularity and shameless celebrity. Who did the people online agree with? Josh or Tanya?

Unsurprisingly, Tanya had enough, got up and left. Around this time, Josh also lost his fortune in what has become known as the “dot com crash”.

“If there’s 10,000 people watching one night and 10 the next, that’s the basis of your self worth” Josh said.

What follows is a sad tale of a broken man. Very few people now know where Josh Harris is. He was last found in Ethiopia. No joke. He wanted to get away from the internet, and from everyone watching him. Can you blame him?

***

What is the point in this story? Well by 2005, Josh’s point had been proven. Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Twitter, YouTube all prove Josh’s point.

Something very interesting was said in that basement in New York. “Everything is free, apart from what we video tape. We keep that.”

Today, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc are all free. But what we search for on Google, who are friends are on Facebook and what we Tweet are all being watched. Of course, it’s all just for advertising purposes, but take a step back from the world of online communication we’ve all become so used to…

Josh Harris imagined a world where… we wouldn’t need to see each other literally, because we would have cameras and televison screens. [skype on a laptop]. He saw a world where… everyone would be watched, and everyone would be watching each other. [facebook news feed]. Harris dreamed of a time when… even the most mindless of tasks or events would be talked about virtually [Tweeting]. Harris effectively built a ‘mock internet’ in a New York Basement almost 20 years before social media like Facebook even existed.

The parallels go on…You can find all kinds of weird and disturbing things on YouTube. But the video site was 6 years late. Harris had already figured out that if you give the public a camera, they will film crazy stuff and then shamelessly broadcast it to millions. The people in that basement knew they were being video taped, yet they did the most embarrassing things.

By the end of the documentary I was left thinking….”wow. Harris saw all this coming. We truly do live in public. And things are just getting worse and worse”.

Let me take a silly example to end with. You’re at a party. One of your mates has a digital camera. You know that the next day all the photos will be on Facebook. Not just for you and him to see- but all your friends. Indeed- many people you’ve never met will be able to see photos of you by looking on your friend’s profile. Some very embarrassing pictures are taken.

The next day you look at them online and have a laugh…

Or maybe you decide some of them are too extreme and ‘un-tag’ yourself. But unfortunatly that changes nothing. The pictures are still there.

Either way, whatever our reactions. This much is true:

---