We Live in Public

Ondi Timoner’s interesting but incomplete documentary We Live in Public traces the quick rise and bizarre fall of Internet pioneer Josh Harris, who all too willingly became a symbol of the self-indulgence which precipitated the late 1990’s dot-com bust. Harris, a pocket fascist who internalized the emotional withdrawal of the wired age years before everyone else, also took to staging elaborate “social experiments” with his rapidly vanishing fortune. Among them was Quiet: We Live in Public, which housed 100 artists in a wall-less, subterranean terrarium equipped with omnipresent cameras, one public shower, copious firearms and a torturous “interrogation room.” Harris’ ex-collaborator Timoner strains to paint this as a bold artistic statement on a privacy-free society, but getting fame-hungry New York bohemians to act like baboons on camera seems more akin to shooting fish in a barrel.