We Live In Public

After our discussion in class yesterday regarding citizenship and surveillance, I kept thinking about a documentary I had seen a few months ago called "We Live in Public." The film details the rise and fall of internet pioneer Josh Harris. Harris was a dot com millioniare in the mid to late nineties who founded the first internet TV station: Psuedo.com. Harris was well ahead of his time with Psuedo.com, creating original content that viewers could only see online. Harris was also known for his playboy party antics, throwing outragous "internet avant gaurde" parties in warehouses of New York. But most importantly, and most relevant to our class discussion, Harris was obsessed with the camera's gaze.

In 1999 Harris began construction of a giant underground "hotel" in New York City for his newest project. It would be called "Quiet: We Live in Public." The hotel would be furnished with hundreds of cameras that documented every inch of space (including the showers, toilets, and bedrooms). Each room, or pod, was fitting with a TV screen and a camera so each "citizen" of Quiet could watch anything going on in the hotel at any given time. Harris was curious to see how much privacy people were willing to give up to live their lives on TV. Residents of Quiet did not have to pay for anything, everything was provided for them. The only exchange was the right for Harris' cameras to document every living moment. Harris took the project a step further by including mandatory "psychological evaluation" sessions that each resident was required to participate in. These sessions were not the traditional pyschological evaluations you may have experienced with your therapist, but designed to attack the residents mental stability and break them down. Harris also chose to participate in the project and became a resident of Quiet himself.

Everything about project Quiet was designed to see how far people were willing to go to live their lives in public. Harris' experiment seems dark and rather extreme but clearly he was well ahead of his time. Today we have TV shows like Big Brother who do the exact same thing. While the cameras may not always be on live television there are live streams on the internet where you can essentially watch the Big Brother residents showering, using the bathroom, eating, and sleeping - just like Quiet. I always find it fascinating to see the level of privacy people so willingly give up to be on camera.

Harris was not only fascinated with this himself, he was an active participant. Once project Quiet ended, Harris and his girlfriend decided to take their relationship to the next level: public. Harris installed cameras all over his apartment and began streaming his life on the web. He included a chat room next to the live stream of their lives so he and his girlfriend could see what people were saying about them. Not surprising, living a relationship in public took its toll. Fights began breaking out between the couple (in public) and Harris' ego took a large blow when he took to the chat rooms and found his public sympathized more with his girlfriend than with him. This, coupled with a sharp decline in Harris' company resulted in the downfall of the mogul. The once flamboyant internet party boy was now alone and in debt. So he turned the cameras off.

Harris' experiments tell us a lot about the costs of being a citizen of surveillance. People are willing to give up almost everything to be on camera. Despite the harsh conditions, isolation, and mental decay, most people who participated in Quiet said they missed it and would definitely do it all again if they had the chance. All of this makes me think of other privacy that we so willingly give up on the web. Our credit card information is stored on websites, our cell phone numbers, our home addresses. With so much of our information stored in the online world, it may not be a stretch to say that we too, live in public.

For more about the film check out the website and trailer: http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/