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Ondi Timoner's We Live In Public is bound to be this century's The Power Broker. While Robert Caro's extensive look at how bureaucrat Robert Moses single handedly restructured the population of Manhattan as a city planner, Timoner's 90-minute documentary about dot-com kid Josh Harris paints Harris as a venerable Nostradamus of the Internet age, a man who predicted the popularity of social networking and lived out its highs and lows years before Facebook was dreamed up at Harvard. The Power Broker became a bestseller, won Caro the Pulitzer Prize, and made a household name out of Moses; We Live In Public won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, will no doubt win over legions of filmgoers, and may just place Harris in the limelight.
We Live In Public jumps right into the private life of Josh Harris with footage from a videotape Harris made for his mother as she lay on her death bed. Clearly, this is a character who only seems to find comfort in front of a screen, and yet he seems aloof and too uncomfortable to say anything of substance in a time when any normal individual would be pouring their guts out. The opening scene is a wise choice on Timoner's part; it sets the stage for a narrative that seems to get progressively odder as the years roll on.
We Live In Public poster
We Live In Public dashes through Harris' childhood reared upon Gilligan's Island episodes to the moment when Harris knew the Internet was the wave of the future. Through various dot-com companies he founded, most notably the video-casting website Pseudo.com, Harris amassed a fortune worth millions and fortuitously exited the business world just before the dot-com bubble burst. Molding himself into an "artiste," Harris proceeded to experiment with video-casting on a greater level with his "art instillation" called "Quiet: We Live In Public." In what Timoner later describes as a physical version of today's popular social-networking sites, 100 individuals lived in a collection of underground pods and opened their lives to 24-7 video recording. Timoner's culled images from a month of the experiment will certainly make you question the implications of what extent people are willing to go simply to get noticed online.
Clearly, the life of Josh Harris needed to be told, and Ondi Timoner was the right person to do it. We Live In Public may be a cautionary tale, but Timoner isn't about standing on her soapbox; rather, she patiently traverses the trials and tribulations that Harris has undergone over the years and allows we, the public, to ultimately choose our own online fate. As for the fate of the nearly-forgotten Harris? Well, it's hard to tell. Though Harris predicted a certain amount of power that lay in the near-zygotic state of the Internet back in the 1980s, one can't help but marvel at the fact that, just a handful of years after placing every private action of his daily life online, he's become all but forgotten, a concept Harris couldn't have expected and one he still can't seem to grasp. The net may bring wealth and fame, but as quickly as you can access someone's profile picture, you can just as easily forget it. However, with such a such a vivid portrait as We Live In Public, it'll be tough to forget the story of Josh Harris the next time you post your picture to Myspace or Tweet what you just bought at the grocery store. And that's probably a good thing.
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