Original subtitles

- MAN: I'm about to be eaten.

[BEEPING]

[STATIC GLITCHING]

[BEEPING]

[WIND WHOOSHING]

- Hi Mum, Josh here.

Long time no talk to.

First of all let me say that I love you,

I always have.

I feel no angst, anger,

or anything of the kind towards you.

- When Mum was diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer,

and we knew it was terminal,

the whole family was there except for Josh,

and she was asking for us to get in contact with him.

- Our relationship has been sort of an odd one as they go.

Speaking to you virtually is how I know how to do this best.

I'm sending you out in style here.

I mean, this is haute coutour,

and now, this is what art is now.

- It was hard not having him there,

and just getting a tape from him,

and a tape that was actually a pretty cold tape.

- I guess that's pretty much it.

Good luck, I'll see you on the other side when I get there.

By the way, while you're there

give my best to everybody, all my ancestors and relatives.

Give 'em my best.

And,

goodbye.

[LIGHT PIANO MUSIC]

- The Internet's like this new human experience.

At first, everybody's gonna like it,

but there will be a fundamental change

in the human condition.

As time goes by, you're really becoming

in these more constrained virtual boxes.

Our every action will be counted.

One day we're all gonna wake up and realize

that we're just servants.

It's captured.

- Yeah, years ago the lions and tigers

were kings of the jungle,

and then one day they wound up in the zoos.

I suspect we're in the same trap.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

♪ The way I feel tonight ♪

♪ Oh after that I wouldn't fight ♪

♪ And there's something going on inside ♪

♪ And I can't say enough I can't cool down ♪

♪ I can't get my head off the ground ♪

- NARRATOR: In 1984, Josh Harris arrived in New York City

with only $900 in his pocket,

determined to make his mark in the tech world.

He got a job at a market research company,

and tried to fit in amongst a sea of computer nerds.

- The lesson here for the children watching is,

eat your radioactive vegetables, have superhuman strength,

but then you're gonna have to wash out your mouth with soap.

- NARRATOR: He was just a common researcher,

but in a matter of years he would become a millionaire,

thanks to something very few people

had heard of at the time,

the Internet.

[MODEM BEEPING] [ELECTRONIC MUSIC]

- Josh had a vision at a very young age,

he was telling me there's this whole new thing

that was coming,

we're gonna be able to communicate with each other

over this network.

- JOSH: In 1980, I was taking a course

with a gentleman by the name of Frank Webster.

He went to the drawing board,

and he basically showed a diagram which would be

kindergarten by today's standards,

of how you can have communications on a network,

and it was obvious to me that this was the future.

It was more like, oh yeah of course, that makes sense,

that's where it's all going.

And then I just stayed on that vein of online,

and believe me, in the 1980's,

online was not exactly fashionable.

- Even back then I can remember him saying,

"I've got to get into this now before somebody else does."

- Hello, I'm Josh Harris,

President of Jupiter Communications.

- And he got the idea for Jupiter Communications.

He thought there was a market to start doing

surveys, statistics, found out how people

are gonna use this newfangled thing

that's turned out to be the Internet.

- He saw that there were a lot of people

who were gonna need numbers,

in order to fill their business plans with something.

So Jupiter had a lot of smart, nappy, nerdy,

statistical people, who came up with data.

- MAN: He said, whenever you do a chart

and you project over the future,

nobody wants to see a bug.

You want to see a climbing 45 degree slope.

- JOSH: I made up my first report.

It sold four or 500 copies,

at 300 bucks a pop.

- Jupiter was making all these projections,

and the New York Times were using the projections.

Actually those predictions by Jupiter, proved true.

- And a check would just come in every month.

So he was sitting there in this loft,

with five or 10 programmers, and all this extra money.

So what do you?

You start experimenting,

and he was trying to figure out what the next thing was.

- JOSH: From Jupiter, I just knew the numbers.

I knew if I put in a chat for Prodigy,

I was gonna rock their audience.

- NARRATOR: Josh also knew

that sex would sell on the Internet,

so he convinced Prodigy to let him create chat rooms

with alluring names, and the users entered in droves.

- JOSH: Personally I was accounting for 20%

of all billable chat hours in the United States.

- Then he wound up selling the chat platform to Prodigy,

and getting a couple of million dollars.

- While he was selling the company

for a couple of million dollars,

while we were all a bunch of kids getting paid

10 bucks an hour, to try to figure out HTML.

- JOSH: Time had to take its course

for the net to become mature.

I just held on and waited for the market

to catch up with me.

- He made his money when Jupiter went public.

[BELL RINGING]

- NARRATOR: When Jupiter went public,

Josh's net worth shot up to 80 million dollars.

- You could just watch your wealth grow.

You don't believe it, it's irrational to you.

- NARRATOR: Josh wasn't the only one,

nearly everyone who got in, got rich fast.

The World Wide Web appeared in 1991,

and by 1994, there were 100,000 websites.

It spread like wildfire.

By 1996, the first web browser went public,

and doubled in its first day of trading.

It's market cap by year's end was 2.2 billion dollars.

An IPO frenzy soon followed on the NASDAQ,

and as ideas were bankrolled into companies,

the dot com was booming.

It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million people.

Television did in 13.

It took the web, less than five.

By 1999 there were more than 150 million people online,

browsing through more than a billion webpages.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

- MAN: It's a good day to call-

- If you know anything at all about the Internet,

you know you can send emails to your friends.

That's the 20th century.

In other words, yesterday.

The new stuff is percolating out of a bunch

of old buildings in downtown Manhattan,

and the people who work there,

call themselves the dot com kids.

They're cool, they're hip, they become very rich,

and they're still very young.

Such staggering amounts of money

are being made by people who are so young.

- Get used to it, it's the future.

I remember one time going up to the Harvard Business School,

and speaking to that class.

The piece of advice I gave them was,

take whatever money have left that you haven't paid Harvard,

for your tuition, and leave school tomorrow,

and start an Internet company.

I watched these people go from being nobodies,

which I was, I was a total nobody on the Internet,

to all of a sudden, being celebrities.

[UPBEAT DANCE MUSIC]

We became gods, we became these titans,

because you knew how to set up a modem.

- We were saying, we're gonna tell our grandkids about

the 1990's in New York.

- And Josh Harris was like, the most unique character

of that whole period, without a doubt.

- We do these interactive parties about once a month,

bring down the different groups from downtown New York,

from arts and cinema, and music.

- I opened the door and it's like a rave going on,

and supermodels like wearing close to no clothes,

sitting on the laps of nerds playing "Doom."

[TECHNO MUSIC]

♪ I give it to you ♪

♪ You give it to me ♪

- NARRATOR: Like most people in New York,

I had no idea who Josh Harris was,

until I happened into one of his legendary parties.

♪ I give it to you ♪

♪ It's all I ever wanted tonight ♪

When Josh found out I was a filmmaker,

he invited me down to his new company Pseudo,

and what I found there, blew my mind.

[BEEPING]

- Pseudo, right now, as we sit here,

is the first Internet television network, ever.

- Uh, Little Wing, who is a new viewer,

Happy is a new viewer, we have some new people out there.

- Oh boy, word's getting around.

- So you're watching video, and the chat

going on at the same time.

- He started mixing those mediums,

in a way that people didn't understand,

and it was just the most ingenious idea ever,

because people were hearing him say

what they were saying in the chat rooms.

And then, basically all hell broke loose.

- Welcome to the Silicon Alley Reporter Net TV show.

Let me get myself on the screen here perfectly,

so you can see me with your Real Video player G3.

- It was genius because nobody had done it yet,

and that was the future, it was where it was gonna go.

It was gonna be interactive television.

- Look at me, ready?

No I'm just like moving like once every frame.

- But, you know it was a joke.

It was like one frame a second.

You know, it was really like, uh, uh.

- In the early days on the Internet,

streaming video barely worked.

[MODEM CONNECTING]

It still barley works.

So, it just didn't make any sense,

but yet it had all this investment money behind it,

and a huge bunch of excitement that people

really believed in.

- He was putting together chat rooms and radio stations,

and video before people were doing any of those things.

He took the approach of, assume it's gonna work,

assume it's gonna happen.

And if you take the assumption that it's gonna happen,

and you just race after that inevitability,

you'll get there before everybody else.

[ROCK MUSIC]

- We've got some great guests here today.

- Jason said, I want you to come on my show.

So I showed up, and it was being

broadcast live on the Internet.

That was when I realized that the Internet

was gonna become the replacement for radio, for TV,

just knew it right then and there, you could see it.

- The thing that drew me to Pseudo,

which was where I worked,

was the fact that they had this studio filled with

young people, an incredibly diverse group of young people,

and they were all making Internet television.

[RECORD SCRATCHING]

- Yo yo yo yo yo what's up?

This is 88 Hip Hop, your hip hop connection.

[GLASS SHATTERING]

- We are at a very hip, underground, Soho party,

and it's an aphrodisiac party.

- I don't have anything, but I'm holding the Viagra.

[LAUGHING]

I got the Viagra.

[TONES RINGING]

- His ambition with Pseudo, was to be Viacom,

it was to be a cable network, Time Warner,

have cable channels, with multiple shows on it.

- Hey welcome back to Josh Scales High Weirdness.

Snack girl has covered herself in peanut butter.

- We're watching space, so you can too.

Space exploration on the Internet TV.

[ELECTRONIC MUSIC]

- They put that together, I didn't even see that,

but it's kinda hot, you know?

- Here comes Hugh Grant.

What's the most crooked thing you've ever done?

- The most crooked? - Uh-huh.

- Well I think we all know the answer to that.

It's an extraordinary question.

- A good portion of that content was worth listening to.

And a lot of the talent in that, was actually talented.

♪ Go ♪

♪ No ♪

♪ Nowhere ♪

- NARRATOR: I came to find out that almost everyone

who worked at Pseudo had met Josh at one of his parties.

- I want to be a cyber star please.

- NARRATOR: In fact, he'd thrown those parties

for the sole purpose of finding

young creative people to work there.

- Like you could feel it in your soul,

when you know something is bigger than you.

I was talking to Josh, and I said,

I would lick the floors to work here.

And, he was like, "Well you're in luck."

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

- He's got an uncanny sensibility about casting people.

- Josh had 300 people working for him

and they all believed very much in this thing.

- I really felt like what he created in that building,

it was like the closest thing to Andy Warhol's Factory,

since Andy Warhol shut down the Factory.

- He had this part of him

that really wanted to be an artist,

but he didn't really know how to do that,

because he wasn't a classically trained artist,

so he created environments for other people,

to do creative things.

- He literally said, do whatever you want,

no restrictions, no hesitations.

He was there to back them 100%.

- Imagine you took the New York Times,

and you told all the writers, this Sunday,

they can write about whatever they want.

That would be the best Sunday New York Times, ever.

♪ Go ♪

♪ Whoa ♪

♪ Gonna ♪

♪ Stop ♪

- I believe in yesterday's USA Today,

we were is listed,

Pseudo was listed with CNN, CBS, NBC, et cetera,

as another network,

so within the United States we're now being recognized

as a quote-unquote, legitimate television network.

[CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING]

- And Josh was the first kind of, local,

who had the name of being one of these incredible

new idols that everybody thought they wanted to be.

- When the press called around,

I was the smartest guy in town,

and the reporters knew it.

I was a regular on CNN, the Wall Street Journal,

the New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times,

International Press, et cetera, et cetera.

This is 88 Hip Hop,

a channel specifically about hip hop music.

- "60 Minutes" was coming down to Pseudo,

because it represented

the whole dot com world, in a nutshell.

- Josh tells us ahead of time,

and my Mom gets all excited.

So we all watch "60 Minutes."

- This is a station which is worldwide?

- Yes, worldwide global footprint.

- MAN: You can tune in, in New Zealand or South Africa,

or Finland, or anywhere.

- Right.

Our business is to take you guys out.

I'm in a race to take CBS out of business.

- Yeah, he told CBS, "We're taking you down."

And he believed in his heart, that was not a game,

he believed it.

- What's the competitive edge?

- Much more efficient television.

My advertisers can be delivered a very specific audience,

and guess what?

My audience can be counted, because they're computers.

- When Josh Harris said to "60 Minutes" in 1999,

that he was gonna take CBS out of business,

because Internet businesses can contract audiences,

he was really ahead of the curve in a lot of ways.

- We show the ad, and one click away is the transaction.

That's why the Internet is going to subsume television

as the most powerful medium on the face of the Earth.

We're in the business of programming people's lives.

The covenant... Excuse me,

that sounds very scary.

- It's an inevitable fact,

my network has more channels than your network.

You can't suck anymore out of TV, the ways it's structured.

- I have no idea, and I don't know if anyone knows

how long it will be before

you can punch up "60 Minutes" on the Internet,

and get comparable video and audio quality.

- Josh Harris was absolutely right,

but he was smart enough, or odd enough,

or crazy enough to say it, in 1999.

[DRAMATIC PIANO MUSIC]

- We all thought Josh was very smart.

We'd call him the Nutty Professor.

He had these little black rimmed glasses that he wore.

- He was a goofy kid.

He was the Nutty Professor, he walked crooked.

He wasn't as sharp as he is now.

We didn't quite think he was gonna make it.

- JOSH: I had three brothers and three sisters.

Oldest brother is nine years older than me,

so I have teenage brothers in high school,

going through their own puberty issues.

Next room is three sisters, having at it.

There's no privacy in that kind of environment.

- He played with us.

He'd be hanging from our bed, and maybe tickle him,

and his shoulders would come out of joint.

And then my Mom would go crazy.

"Don't touch him."

So we sort of took a space back from Josh.

He got alienated.

- My Pop wasn't around, he did a lot of international trade.

My Mom worked in a jail for delinquent girls.

- Kids all over the place,

comes home with a bunch of kids that are southern kids.

It was just too much chaos for her.

She wants some peace.

So she went and got a martini.

- Imagine it's 4:30 in the afternoon,

your mother's just had a hard day

with the super-delinquents,

starts yelling that the house isn't clean,

pours herself a few martinis,

and then I ask her what's for dinner?

And she says, "Fend for yourself."

- He would go out on his bicycle, at age like eight or 10,

go to McDonald's, buy dinner for the entire family,

and bring it back.

- I essentially brought myself up, I'm a wild child.

And I think that I love my mother virtually,

and not physically.

I was bred by her to sit in front of the TV set

for hours on end.

And that's how I've been trained.

The most important friend to me growing up

was in fact the television.

♪ I want a television set to free my mind ♪

♪ Television set to drown 'em out ♪

♪ Television set, might as well have been blind ♪

♪ There ain't nothing better for the down and the out ♪

- All he did was watch TV.

I don't remember him playing with other kids, at all.

[LIGHT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC]

- My emotionality is not derived from other humans,

but rather from

Gilligan.

[THUNDER CRASHING]

I was emotionally neglected, but virtually I could

absorb the electronic calories

of the world inside the television.

- These characters that he would watch on TV,

they were like his family.

It was like a home-cooked meal.

It was nurturing.

- Maybe Josh wanted "Gilligan's Island", as his family,

or melted into their family,

because he wasn't melted into our family.

- John F Kennedy, the only thing that I really remember

about his death, is the fact that he took up

all the TV channels,

and I couldn't get my cartoons.

It wasn't John F Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe

that had the most influence

on American culture and society,

but rather it was Sherwood Schwartz,

the creator of "Gilligan's Island."

Who I am is much more like Sherwood Schwartz,

than it is like my parents.

That's how it works.

[EERIE AMBIENT MUSIC]

- ALL: Don't change the channel.

- If you'd said to somebody 200 years ago

that people are gonna spend eight hours a day,

looking at this moving fire, called a TV set,

zombied out, they would have said,

what kind of madness does the future hold for us?

Well, take that to an exponential level,

and that's where we're headed.

♪ Launder my head ♪

♪ Launder my head ♪

♪ Launder launder launder launder launder my head ♪

♪ Launder launder launder launder launder my head ♪

- The lyrics came to me, and I spent two years

turning it into a little piece of animation.

The art that I make is explaining to humans,

what's gonna happen next.

♪ Conform with me ♪

♪ Conform with me ♪

♪ Come form with me ♪

♪ Conform with me ♪

As the world has modernized, the social nature of things

is going to be done virtually.

The next magical medium is the virtual world.

So you kind of get this group-generated consciousness.

Our dreams will be programmed by each other,

just as Sherwood Schwartz mediated my relationships

with other people.

Of course there's a price to be paid for that.

I tend not have

particularly intimate relationships.

- Josh doesn't deal with people well.

He was an introvert, and then he became wealthy,

and then he became Luvvy.

[QUIRKY MUSIC]

- Luvvy is Josh's avatar-alias-artist persona.

- Luvvy is who Josh would like to be.

This artistic freeform

I can make noises and people will laugh at me.

I think he wanted to be a clown,

but no one would let him be that role.

They wouldn't let him be that role because he was Josh,

he was someone that we respected,

and Luvvy's the person you pointed at and say,

are you out of your mind, what's wrong with you?

- People wanted to go like and slap him over the head,

every time he brought out Luvvy.

- Luvvy is a character based on the wife of Thurston Howell,

from "Gilligan's Island,"

but isn't gay, or a woman.

- Oh I just love these, I want them.

- I actually think that Luvvy is my Mom.

There's something about Missus Howell, that's my Mom.

- What I saw in Josh going into a sort of a

Luvvy-esque mode,

was the last person who

really wanted to reach out and connect,

and is doing it in all the wrong ways,

so wrong that no one even wants

to connect with this character.

But I think underneath it all,

it's actually a sweet character.

- Oh the love, oh the love.

Oh the love, oh, the love.

- You know, you wouldn't see the Luvvy in action,

and say sweet necessarily, but underneath it

it was quite a sweet desire to connect.

Luvvy was almost like him,

like don't you like me?

I think he was really surprised,

when he would go into the Luvvy character,

that people were scared, and turned off.

- NARRATOR: Josh's friends and family

were put off by Luvvy,

but the investors behind Pseudo were horrified.

- I want to know why he's doing business in this manner.

- NARRATOR: Especially when Luvvy

started making appearances in magazines.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

- Like we would have these like corporate parties,

or whatever, we were trying to impress people to get money,

and he would show up as Luvvy.

And that's crazy.

- They're trying to make a business out of this

and get advertisements,

the guy who is the CEO is dressing up as a clown.

♪ Tried to save myself but myself keeps slipping away ♪

♪ Tried to save myself but myself keeps slipping ♪

As time went on, he started to use less and less

full sentences.

He started getting less and less focused on his business,

and Pseudo tried to disassociate themselves

from what he was doing,

because it was just too crazy.

- NARRATOR: Toward the end of 1999,

Josh walked away from Pseudo with his share of the stock,

and a smile on his face.

I thought he'd be sad to leave the business he created,

but was surprised when he told me that Pseudo

was just an art project to him,

and he was moving on to something way more important.

He called me to document his next project,

referring to it as cultural history.

But something stood out to me as odd,

he also called it an experiment.

- The name of the experiment is,

Quiet We Live in Public.

[LIGHT ROCK MUSIC]

Down here, we're building a capsule hotel,

to find out what the Internet

is going to look like when it takes over.

You got the TV here,

and you can see all these other people.

- NARRATOR: There would be a capsule hotel

underground to house over 100 people.

- The image I have in my mind

is like in a concentration camp,

you know those pictures where they're all facing forward.

- NARRATOR: And an 80 foot long dining room table,

with free food and drinks for a month.

- This is where pod land's gonna be right here folks, right here.

- INTERVIEWER: Is it gonna be fireproof?

[CLEARING THROAT]

- Of course it is. - Yes.

[LAUGHING]

- It's partially an event, partially a party,

and partially a social experiment.

- We have everything that society has.

We have a church, we have the police.

- We have our own power source.

We have our own food, we have our own hotel.

If worse came to worse,

there's a bunch of weapons in the basement.

- Pretty neat, huh? - What is this for?

- I'm making a firing range.

- NARRATOR: Josh brought in well-respected artists

from around the globe,

to help him build his underground society.

- MAN: Dara Burnbaum was one of the initial video artists,

you know at Studio 54.

- Josh would be like, here's 20 grand,

you're in charge of this section.

- Josh told me a number when we first started,

and I think we spent it the first day.

- I spend money like sand through the fingers of time.

- Josh was spending money like a drunken sailor.

He spent almost two million dollars on Quiet.

- My business associates,

they're worth a lot of money,

but they're gonna buy a big house,

two big houses, a couple of cars,

have their kids, but they'll never really

spend their money properly.

- You thought you could play off of that Warhol

kind of thing, and recreate the Factory.

- No offense, I'm a little sensitive on the topic,

but it's kind of been done.

There's a new boy in town called technology.

- Yeah all right.

- Josh approached me to wire these capsule hotels

with video cameras, microphones, and monitors,

in a way that you could interact between these capsules.

- You change the channel,

it changes you to other compartments in here.

If you're both locked on the same channel,

you can talk to each other.

- Every science fiction movie has video conferencing,

but in reality only a few people

have actually ever done it.

Have you ever done it?

- Two different buildings had four different floors,

which were all wired together

through a 75 channel TV station.

- The cameras were everywhere.

- There was cameras set up in the showers,

in the toilets, in the kitchen,

in the performance area,

in each of the little pods in the pod hotel.

[LAUGHING]

- As you get new and more interesting people in it,

you need the racks,

so you're gonna have to kick them out.

- Natural selection.

- You're gonna have to be kind of an exhibitionist.

You know, wanting to stay in.

Surely this is one big experiment,

and maybe everybody will feel like celebrities here.

- There's another element to this, which is

we're gonna record stasi type of intelligence,

of what people are doing.

- We started with very basic questions,

and then we go into the groups,

political, religious, psychological, emotional, sexual,

and we'll have files on them,

on such things as how the drug test came out,

whether they like their mother better or their father,

whether they ever have anal sex,

or were in jail for any political activities.

- To be a citizen of Quiet,

you had to really give up a lot.

There was a tremendous fascist overtone to the whole thing.

- If you wanted to be involved you had to be interrogated,

and then you get issued a uniform.

Once you're in, you're not allowed to go out.

Literally, you cannot leave the premises again.

- We've got to make sure there's discipline in the ranks.

- His vision was, you're gonna wear my outfit,

you're gonna sleep where I tell you to sleep,

you're gonna eat where I tell you to eat,

and you're gonna exist here,

and I'm gonna film every part of it,

from you hanging out, to you sleeping,

to you eating, to you showering, to you shitting.

- Don't bring your money with you, everything is free,

except the video that we capture of you, that we own.

[BEEPING]

♪ Who took the bomb ♪

- Please state your full name.

- Gabrielle Contessa.

- Jason Garret Wertzel.

- I'm Katrina. - Nico Haupt.

- Matthew Hopp.

- INTERVIEWER: Are you checking in?

- I'm considering it, seriously.

I'm about 80% sold on it, already,

and I've only been here one minute.

- NARRATOR: Without knowing anything about this place,

and what would happen to them there,

people were pouring through the doors.

- They were clamoring to get in,

and be part of this uber-documented experience.

- INTERVIEWER: And what is the reason

that you want to move in to the hotel?

- I want to make everybody happy.

- I love being surrounded by cameras and light.

- I'm gonna meet a lot of weird, cool people.

- He brought so many different people together.

- MAN: You know you have a clown behind you.

- Do I have a clown?

- To be registered people, please meet me in the back.

- There was a very formal process

in order to get a room in the capsule hotel.

You had to give your social security number,

you had to give away a certain amount of privacy.

- I did my personality test, 323 questions,

about my drug experiences,

and about my relationship with my parents,

and whether I'm a happy person, or a sad person,

that kind of thing.

- This is rather Orwellian,

it's all to find out where or not I'm a podwellian,

but we'll see soon enough.

- I'm marking my pod.

I think the idea is, as soon as

a few more people start marking their pods,

the race will be on.

I is our function ass artists

to make the spectator see the world our way.

- When I went to sign up, they said,

"There are no more pods left,"

and I said well that is impossible,

there is a pod for me, because I am who I am.

I am Alana Heiss, and there is a pod for me,

at which point, I got to choose my pod.

This is exactly the sort of project

that we long to see in this great city.

- The thing that's really interesting about this,

is that it's all free.

- If you want something to eat,

you go to the front of the building.

[ALL CHATTERING]

Afterwards, you want a drink, you go to the bar.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

- Anything you could want was there.

Is it drugs, is it alcohol,

is it women, is it men, is it food?

- I feel like I have a whole new beginning.

I feel like, reborn, by the cereal bar.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

- This is discovery of first pod person,

living deep under the ground,

in their pod.

- The fact that people came and actually put on the outfits

and stayed there, that was unbelievable.

- You moving in? - I joined the cult.

I've joined the cult.

- I was ready to give up everything,

just to be in this kooky kingdom.

- Where's the gun range? - Downstairs.

- I want to shoot the guns.

- You want to shoot guns? - I do.

[GUNS FIRING]

- Better than sex.

- Someone should have told us, no.

Josh was just being like

one of those really super-permissive parents.

[GUN FIRING] - WOMAN: Woohoo!

- It's day number four.

How is it?

- This was one of the most extraordinary activities

I've ever attended anywhere in the world,

and I really have gone a lot of places.

Really the question starts to become,

who is behind this, what's going on?

Behind the illusion there had to be a mind,

or a person, or even just a brain, and nobody else.

It was all we couldn't see,

and that's why we started calling him, Oz.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

♪ I'm an alligator ♪

♪ I'm a mama papa coming for you ♪

♪ I'm a space invader ♪

- This is a perfect analogy

of what the Internet will be like.

Inevitably, everyone will have a camera, and a monitor,

and it will be fast enough that we can do

exactly what we're doing today,

in this prototype community.

- You'd like look across the pod,

and somebody would be like eyeing you.

You'd be like, why are you turning on my channel?

♪ Keep your electric eye on me babe ♪

♪ Put your ray gun to my head ♪

♪ Press your space face close to mine, love ♪

♪ Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah ♪

- INTERVIEWER: What are you watching?

- One of the channels.

- INTERVIEWER: Which one?

- Watching the one where you were walking around.

- Oh yeah?

[LAUGHING]

- See we're all vastly more fascinating to watch

than television.

- If I'm in a certain mood and I want to be

hanging around certain people,

and I'm stuck with my family and my friends,

the alleviation to that our virtual world.

- I have been in a couple of experiments like this before.

The best ones that I have experienced,

happened when I was alone in a dive room.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

♪ Lay the real thing on me ♪

♪ The church of mad love ♪

♪ Is that your holy place to be ♪

♪ Make me baby ♪

♪ Make me know you really care ♪

♪ Make me jump into the air ♪

- MAN: The oral was graphic.

- It really inspired people to do things

that they wouldn't do anywhere else in the world.

There was a real sense of freedom,

even though you were also chained

by the concept of being watched, and videotaped.

- I loved the idea that I could watch

people on all these TV screens,

and that they could watch me too.

- I have never seen anything like that,

and probably will never see anything like it again.

- Really, you had to be there.

[LAUGHING]

I'm very proud I was there.

♪ Press your space face close to mine, love ♪

♪ Freak out in a moonage daydream oh ♪

♪ Freak out ♪

♪ Far out ♪

♪ In out ♪

- As time goes by,

we're going to increasingly have our lives exposed

in very personal and intimate ways,

and we'll want that to happen.

- Everyone's suggesting that this is

gonna turn into one big orgy.

And watch it all on TV.

[MOANING]

- Andy Warhol was actually wrong.

His view is of course

that people want 15 minutes of fame in their lifetime.

Our view is that people want 15 minutes of fame every day.

- They're eating and shitting and having sex in public,

and people ate it up.

It's highly embarrassing stuff, but yet,

this quest for fame, this quest to be noticed,

is willing to go past all shame,

and just put yourself out there raw.

- They say we live in public, so

and we're all sharing here, no secrets.

- What's interesting to me about this project,

is because everything is exposed,

there's a tension that I feel of how to get to know people.

- Hi. - How are you doing?

- Good, do you need to get in here?

- MAN: In about five minutes.

- Okay, I still have to get my wrap.

- There's all these people around you in close quarters,

and the more you get to know each other,

the more alone you become.

That's what this environment is doing to me.

- You know, when I'm sleeping, I'm being filmed.

I don't even notice it anymore.

- You're seeing this monitor 24 hours a day.

You have no privacy.

- No. Not today.

- I think what breeds madness is the feeling that

there's everyone else's minds,

and everyone else's energy, all encompassing you.

- Get that fucking camera out of my face, bitch.

- You see to me this is a very interesting phenomenon,

we don't realize how often we are being filmed.

It's wrong, to invade people's privacy with cameras.

- Were you ever politically active?

- Yes.

- Where was that?

- Here in New York, I was a member of the communist party.

- This could all be tied

to some huge data mining application,

collecting information about what people think,

and what they watch. What they listen to.

- Exactly. - Big brother.

- It reminds me of a beehive,

an electronic human beehive.

- This is the worker bee cocoon.

It's very frightening, and it reminds me of

slavery.

- All I know is, I came downstairs

and saw a bunch of people running around naked,

and shooting firearms.

[GUNS FIRING]

And I just thought, he's gonna wind up in jail.

- INTERVIEWER: How old are you?

- 11. - 11?

Have you told your other friends

from school what you're gonna be doing?

- Not, I didn't know I was gonna sleep here,

but I knew I was gonna shoot guns.

- You can hear bullets going off

at the courthouse across the street.

The Giuliani security forces have been dogging me for years,

because they always thought Pseudo was a nightclub.

So after a while, I got in tune with their inner workings.

I don't believe that they will bust me before my time.

[GUN FIRING]

- To me, a non-practicing Muslim is someone

who is reared as a Muslim,

but no longer practices the laws-

[GUNS FIRING]

of Islam.

- It was absolutely surveillance police state.

I mean just by walking into the premises,

you basically relinquished all your rights,

to your image, to your actions,

to your thoughts and your deeds.

That's his now.

- Any techniques that we can use to intimidate them,

you know, to break them, in essence.

- Pretend you really hate the person.

- Really? - Yes.

- I'm actually on disability.

Been depressed for months now,

and came out here and saw this community,

and I felt like this would be a jump start

to get out of depression.

- I have night terrors, hallucinations.

I sometimes... INTERVIEWER: Voices?

- No voices.

[GUN FIRING]

- The interrogation room was a very frightening experience.

It was a little bit like torture.

In fact, it was torture.

- I have struggled with depression and anxiety,

but I believe that I have choices around that.

- Fabulous.

- Horrible, horrible,

it was so abusive, and so,

I don't even know how to describe it.

It was really what people were being put through there,

and what they let themselves be put through.

- If you walked up to someone and say,

take off your pants, they won't do it,

but if you walk up to them with a video camera,

and say take off your pants, they'll do it,

because the eyeballs that perceive that moment,

give it power.

- Stand up.

Back on your knees.

- After a while, people were so obsessed,

from this hierarchy system,

that they got all a little bit brainwashed.

It was really a psychological drill.

- Josh was into mind control,

and moving things around,

to influence large groups of people,

and get them to do what he wanted them to do,

and got off on that.

[ALL CHATTERING]

- Mark and Matthew in the same pod,

put them all the way in the worst pod.

Move somebody out of that.

- Everybody was sort of rats in his laboratory.

They even didn't realize that he was

conducting experiments,

of what this technology would result in,

and he kept trying to pull me into it,

but I didn't want to be interrogated, or whatever,

it just seemed like it wasn't gonna end well.

[DIXIELAND JAZZ MUSIC]

[BEEPING]

- Day before the millennium, and we are not panicking.

We are definitely not afraid.

- NEWS REPORTER: There's no avoiding it,

Y2K is almost upon us,

but will it bring impending doom?

- NEWS REPORTER: Within the last month,

gun sales have skyrocketed.

- NEWS REPORTER: We may all be in trouble.

Some say another essential worth considering,

a good place to hide.

- How Y2K prepared are we?

- Oh, we're not prepared at all.

We are Y2k.

- This may be one of the safer places to be,

in New York City.

[MACHINE GUN FIRING]

- Okay, when do we get our military training?

- MAN: Tonight we celebrate the change of centuries.

- World War II was the most important event

of the last century.

World War III will be the most important event

of the next century, and will be man against machine.

- We need to consciously tell the infinite universe,

that man was here, man was here.

- He's touching on something,

that's very much a part of America.

Heaven's Gate,

there are aspects to it that,

you don't really want to think of, where they can lead.

[GUN FIRING]

- Wow, look at those indentations.

They're like bright lights.

- Do you want to go get interrogated?

- No, I'm just more curious.

[MAN GASPING]

Oh I'm sorry.

[VOCALIZING]

- This is my last shower of the century.

Get the fuck out of here,

you can't make me shower with you motherfucker.

You're a fucking cunt Gabe, you know that?

- What's wrong?

- I don't want to share my shower.

I want to have fucking 10 minutes to my fucking self.

And this motherfucker's got no fucking respect.

- I was a heroin addict.

- INTERVIEWER: So you have been clean, how long?

- Six years.

- What was the most fucked up place

that you used drugs?

- In front of an elementary school.

[VOCALIZING]

- You tried to commit suicide? - Yes.

- What did you do?

- I um,

I tried cutting myself.

[DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC]

- I'm telling you right now to back up.

- Look, I've got the uniform on,

I've gotta go to my pod, number 60.

I have my own space in there, let me in.

- I don't think so, soldier.

- I'm fucking like this with Josh.

If I tell him this crap,

he's gonna flip, man.

- Stand up straight, motherfucker.

- These are good security guys,

they're not gonna, we'll see what they do.

- You want me to shove this up your ass?

[LAUGHING]

I'm gonna blow your fucking head off.

- What sort of as progressively weird,

energy was turning.

[POUNDING ON TABLE]

- The whole table started, banging their fists on the table,

trying to get me to serve them.

People don't really know how to deal with free.

The freeness is turning people into beasts.

- Say you're sorry, you fucking already hit me.

- It was a crazy and somewhat dangerous scene,

because you knew that someone was gonna flip out.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

- She grabbed my throat, dug her nails in,

and pushed me back.

She assaulted her.

- I need, I need a camera guy.

- She attacked somebody. - Why did you say that?

- Oh I heard someone tell me

that they were rolling around in the fucking pod.

- Shut up I'm talking.

- And I don't control anybody,

like other people try to control people.

- Josh was the puppet master, creating this chaos,

and not connecting any of the puppets together,

but letting their strings get tangled.

[LAUGHING]

- Nancy, you crossed the fucking line.

[ALL SHOUTING]

- MAN: Everyone in their pod.

- ALL: Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four,

three, two, one.

[GROUP CHEERING]

- Cynthia.

Come to me, Cynthia.

Cynthia, come to me.

- Go for it.

- Cynthia.

Come to me.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

- WOMAN: Squeezing her ass

and just throwing her all around,

and Josh is watching all of this.

- I'm sitting here, six in the morning.

I'm staring at two people, basically naked

in the shower together, with 30 people watching,

and it's like, okay.

But that's the future.

Josh Harris.

- What's going on over here? - The police are coming.

[DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL MUSIC]

- They had been told that there was this doomsday cult,

and that there was gonna be some mass suicide or something.

- You know, they go downstairs,

they find all these bunks set up, and the church thing.

It's looking very millennium cultish.

We were definitely quacking and walking like a duck.

- People are not supposed to stay in the hotel anymore.

- Leave now, do not come back.

- NARRATOR: By the time the police shut the bunker down,

Josh was already tired of his experiment.

Not only was he millions of dollars over budget,

but after the people had proved his theory,

he had no reason to continue feeding them.

His fascinating subjects had become human parasites.

- I want to make sure they got everybody.

No no, out of here.

Get out now, I don't want to see you, leave.

Leave now.

Now, out, out.

- Don't be an asshole.

Don't be an asshole. - I'm not, get out,

get out.

[LIGHT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC]

- That was the day we got shut down

by the cops and the fire department.

Perfect timing, January 1st, 10 a.m.

- I like to think of Quiet as like a Rorschach test.

We spilled ink on a piece of paper,

and we folded it in half, to see what would happen.

- Everyone had a completely different idea

of what they thought it was.

- Quiet was billed as an experiment in futuristic living.

- It was a celebration of an end, or a beginning, of an era.

- A crazy political quasi bi-radical bi-capitalist

exploration of the art community.

- I'm still kind of figuring out what Quiet was.

- An invention of reality TV.

A closely knit group of people,

that went from love to hate,

that went from creativity to destruction.

- NARRATOR: After 30 days in Josh's bunker,

I needed a vacation.

[UPBEAT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC]

Everyone did, especially Josh.

This time Josh's obsession with "Gilligan's Island",

manifested itself in a pleasant way,

and he invited some friends on a fishing trip.

- I suppose that it was my three hour tour.

♪ Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale ♪

♪ A tale of a fateful trip ♪

♪ That started from this tropic port ♪

♪ Aboard this tiny ship ♪

♪ The mate was a mighty sailing man ♪

♪ The skipper brave and sure ♪

♪ Five passengers set sail that day ♪

♪ For a three hour tour ♪

♪ A three hour tour ♪

- NARRATOR: Unlike Quiet, everybody actually

enjoyed their time on the boat,

even Josh, for the first time since since I'd known him,

I saw Josh getting close to a woman.

It was Tanya, who we both knew from Pseudo,

where she hosted the show, "Cherry Bomb."

- Tanya was awesome, they're making out.

I've never seen him kiss a girl in my life.

- He was definitely one of the most interesting people

that I had ever met.

- JOSH: How do you think the trip on the Royal Polaris

has affected our relationship?

- When I was watching you fishing,

I understood you a little better.

♪ We're all in ♪

♪ We're all in ♪

♪ We're all in ♪

- NARRATOR: Josh not only caught

a lot of fish on that trip,

he found something unexpected.

Over the next few months, Josh and Tanya fell in love.

- I'm really happy. - You know why you're happy?

- Why am I happy? - Because I'm happy.

- You're happy?

- If I'm happy, you're happy.

- I think we're both happy.

- He was quite a few years older than me,

but in terms of our relationship, he was quite young,

in a sense of being immature.

- I think the breasts sticking out look great.

I hope the camera's, hold on.

- It was great, because for him it was like

sex was like, ohhh, you know?

[LAUGHING]

Like, a teenager, really excited.

[VOCALIZING]

- He had something finally that he loved.

They were in love, I thought they were a good couple, actually.

- NARRATOR: In the fall of 2000,

Josh proposed that Tanya move in with him,

and be part of his next big project.

She said yes.

- Good evening, it's your sanctuary from the outside world,

the most private place in your life,

unless you're the couple in our first story tonight.

- Did I wake you up?

- JOSH: With Quiet I saw what surveillance could do

to the human condition,

and the next logical step was to experiment on myself

by living in public.

- NARRATOR: He believed that in the not-so-distant future,

we'd all put our lives on camera,

and invite everyone in to watch.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

- We rigged a camera inside the refrigerator,

a camera in the cat box,

infrared cameras in the bedroom,

camera drilled up through the toilets,

so that you could see everything coming out.

♪ I turned my camera on ♪

♪ Outside there's stuff going on ♪

72 highly sensitive microphones,

I could whisper and hear everything.

Putting the cameras in is one thing,

then the next thing that you have to do,

is make sure that the cameras follow you.

There are sensors attached to the cameras,

so that when you walk around my house,

[IMITATING WHIRRING]

it's all automated.

Do you mind, can I read the paper here?

[CAT MEOWING]

Okay, thanks.

- And he said, I'm gonna put 32 cameras in the loft,

wire to the Internet,

and I want us to be the first couple to live in public.

And I was on board with the project 100%.

I felt that it would be an incredible growing experience,

and I thought maybe it would bring us closer together.

- If the relationship could survive living in public,

then it could survive pretty much anything.

- NEWS REPORTER: It was not exactly the proposal

Tanya Corrin's Mom prepared her for,

but no matter, love would conquer all.

Weliveinpublic.com was born.

- Good morning, welcome to We Live in Public.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

- Yes, it could be gross, it actually is.

Watching a guy do number two

is just not a happy sight.

[TOILET FLUSHING]

- It was viewable to the masses.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

- JOSH: The basic candidate is you have a video screen

on one side, and a chat screen on the other.

And so, they can compare notes as they watch

the interactions of my life.

- This is Dan, I wish I had the guts

to do what you are doing, kudos.

- Thanks, freedom.

- It's not some kind of a staged, scripted, show,

and it's not passive, it's interactive.

They're reaching out to us, we're reaching back in to them.

[LAUGHING]

- I love the idea of creating this new kind of reality,

where we're very connected to people,

so connected that you could literally say out loud,

I'm trying to leave the house to get out of here,

but I can't find my wallet,

that little silver cigarette case.

Has anyone seen it?

Do you know where it is?

Five minutes later they'll send you there.

[LAUGHING]

- Oh you know, you said, god I'm hungry.

And the person says, oh are you hungry?

Do you feel like pizza?

And he says, sure I'll have some pizza.

20 minutes later, you didn't pay for it or nothing,

and pizza arrives at your door magically.

[LAUGHING]

There is the giddy first month,

where Tanya and I were like playing with a toy,

and it was exciting.

It was like hundreds of people were paying attention

to our every detail of our life.

[YAWNING]

- The setters got to see our cycle,

they got to got to see who we were

in the most mundane way.

They're just living.

Yeah, we were just living.

- Oh.

- And they got to see we were just real people

who were like completely in love.

[MOANING]

Suddenly, there was all this press, and hype,

and they're gonna conceive in public.

- He would call his Mom pretty regularly.

And he would always send her his press.

Every time we did anything, he would send her press.

And I had the sense that she was very proud of him.

- JOSH: USA Today, I'm gonna be in twice.

I was in the Journal yesterday.

- I think that he had set his intentions

by the time that he turned 40,

that people would pay attention to him

in a really big way.

- People will literally be purchasing slices of my life.

There'll be tapes of my life stacked up.

If you're a collector, you'll collect tape 233.

Me sleeping, or me screwing, or Tanya changing her clothes.

- People are willing to do stupid, and dangerous,

and horrible things, in exchange for fame.

And Josh is driven by that quest

more than most people I know.

- The way I grew up, you were legitimized

by having the camera turned on you.

Getting on the Johnny Carson Show,

was a way to validate yourself.

Tanya, JeezyA7 wants me to take my clothes off.

[TANYA LAUGHING]

- I think I got the camera away from you.

I got the camera.

I think we ought to have a contest,

for who can motivate Josh to work out.

Lose 15 pounds.

- You could start seeing it eat away

at Josh and Tanya's relationship.

Also get on there sniping at each other like from across the room.

Eh, eh.

- Sometimes in a relationship,

you go through a stage where you don't talk for a while,

and you become distant.

So we didn't talk for a while and we became distant.

- Tanya would spend like hours up in her office

and Josh would be in his room, or wherever.

[LIGHT ELECTRONIC MUSIC]

- The atmosphere of living in public

had created this alienation,

and to be connecting incredibly deeply

with this community of chatters,

and yet have no connection between each other.

It was like the love got sucked out of it.

B-O-A-R-D, board.

- TANYA: That's wood on a floor.

- B-O-R-E-D.

[LAUGHING]

- No, no.

- Hello.

Every time I make a move to do anything,

you fucking block it.

- Don't, don't force me.

Don't grab me like that.

Josh, Josh.

Don't do this.

You're scaring me.

Stop it, leave me alone.

Don't, let go of me.

[TANYA CRYING]

- Come here, come here. - No, I'm leaving right now.

- I didn't hit you. - You grabbed me hard, Josh.

I don't want to be treated like that, ever, no.

Here's the thing, I can't go along with you, in public.

- That's like excuse 52B.

Then it's the power trip.

It's I don't like living in public.

- If you don't want it,

you don't have to do anything other than the regular.

- JOSH: Oh no, that's not true.

- When you're having an argument with a lover,

the best thing that you can do

is stop and really listen to each other.

But when you're arguing in public, it's about ego,

and it's about winning,

and you have an audience.

It's terrible.

So you know what?

Get a fucking porn star,

I have sex all over the house in public,

then you'll be the man.

- No, I'll just find somebody else

that I enjoy having sex with. - Okay, good.

- Anything we could think of

to hurt the other person, we did.

I've been fat and had sex with women and not have this problem.

- You have never been fatter than you are right now.

- JOSH: The moment the fight ends,

the first thing we did is rush to our terminals,

to see everyone's viewpoint on how the fight went.

And that was more interesting than the fight.

It wasn't just the cameras were on us,

we had other people entering our mind share,

and assisting in the management of our lives.

The next thing I know, out of character for her,

she tells me I've got to sleep on the couch.

One of her allegiants broke ranks

and informed me that in fact

the group had put her up to me sleeping on the couch,

and then I find out that of course the group

had also put her up to me leaving and her staying.

- Everybody's leaning towards Tanya.

He had no power, he had no control,

and he felt like nothing,

and that's his demise.

He has to have control of everything he does.

- Josh, with We Live In Public,

he crawled into a TV set,

he was finally inside a TV set,

without the control in his hand.

- It wasn't just, We Live In Public,

and all the pressure from that,

he was going down financially.

- WOMAN: Okay, I need to tell you

you've got a negative balance on your checking account.

- Okay, bye.

- NARRATOR: On April 14th, 2000, the US stock market

experienced one of its single worst days in history,

and the blame was placed squarely on the dot com kids.

- I was in a three year freefall economically,

personally and the company, the whole world was,

but we were right in front of the line.

- NARRATOR: People had been throwing their money

at the dot come startups throughout the late 90's,

whether the companies were based on viable ideas

at the time, or not.

You can only cram so much information into a telephone line,

and broadband was still years away.

At its peak, the NASDAQ held a grand worth of $6 trillion,

but by December, 2001, it had plummeted by 55%.

Over 75,000 people lost their jobs

in the first six months alone.

- Pseudo burned through $48 million of investment money.

- What we were hoping for, was that somebody

would come along and buy it,

and that was where we thought the money was gonna come from,

it wasn't gonna come from the sale of Pseudo stock,

it was gonna come from some idiot coming along

and buying Pseudo for $100 million.

- NARRATOR: After a desperate attempt to secure funds,

Pseudo went under in October of 2000,

along with 1000 other companies.

Going broke wasn't easy

for any of these dot com millionaires.

But while they could go home and suffer privately,

Josh was still living in public under 24 hour surveillance.

- JOSH: The cameras are on me,

half living with a girlfriend,

and half living with the television set.

- WOMAN: Do you need a timeout? Yes.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]

- Suddenly I felt like I was alone.

So it was very clear to me, that it was over.

[LIGHT GUITAR MUSIC]

- I couldn't wait to get rid of her.

Yeah, I just needed her out of the house,

out of the experiment,

off the island.

If I hadn't lived in public, I might have

asked her to marry her day 50,

and we might have conceived a child

and got married on day 100.

A lot of divorced people out there

that are thinking you know,

I should have lived in public.

[LAUGHING]

I need to tell you, Tanya without me,

she would have stayed the whole,

she didn't really need, she loved the watchers.

She loved you.

I'm not her love.

I knew I just had to take living in public to the end,

because I'm a celebrity, I live in public,

I'm a celebrity, there are people who watch me.

Hi watchers, you don't know this,

but I've been watching you the whole time.

In our hey day, with Tanya really happy,

1000 people would be watching,

but it was getting depressing,

so I was down to like the hardcore 10 or 15 people.

Oh, I'm hitting bottom.

And if there's 1000 people watching you one night,

and 10 people watching you another night,

that's the basis of your personal self-worth.

- You know, finally the pressure was on him

and it didn't feel so good.

Because, here were all these people,

watching and chatting, and just really getting kinda nasty.

- I've been getting like more fucking like-

- MAN: Shit mail?

- Yeah, and all this fuckin' bullshit.

In Quiet, I was in control of the rats in my laboratory,

and in We Live In Public, I was the rat.

They would bring up all the times

that I didn't wash my hands after using the bathroom.

It's a definite reminder that they're watching you

do your very intimate functions.

Sex went away when Tanya went away,

and even that was a problem,

but when you can't even do it with yourself,

you can't even have fantasies.

They're in your fantasies,

like, can they here me breathing?

Big Brother isn't a person as it turns out,

it's the collective consciousness that watches.

They're taking little pieces of you continuously.

It's all part of our subconscious.

It's all part of our subconscious.

It's all part of our subconscious,

yes it's all gonna come out sooner or later.

It's all got to come out sooner or later.

It's all got to come out sooner or later.

It's all got to come out sooner or later.

It's all got to come out

Sooner or later it's all gonna come out.

- WOMAN: I was really, really scared about you.

- I'm scared about me. Yeah

I put the place up on the market,

because I'm gonna quit living in public

at the end of this month, or sooner.

I lost most of my fortune,

shoved the relationship out the door,

and have been living with

continuous surveillance of cameras.

That combination is not designed

for mental stability and health.

- WOMAN: It's not.

- I'm sick.

I'm mentally sick right now.

I just don't want to give them anything more.

It'll kill me.

They'll take something from me that I can't replace.

[CAT MEOWING]

- I'll always remember the day when he came to my office.

It was one of those like wet, snowy days in New York.

Sitting there in an Excel spreadsheet, highlighting rows

and deleting them.

These were people, and their jobs.

Wildly depressing time.

And he comes up, into my office,

and I said, "What's wrong?"

"I don't know I just gotta get out of here."

And he leaves.

And that was it, that was the day he left New York,

and nobody ever saw him again.

[UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC]

♪ Cease to resist ♪

♪ Give him my goodbyes ♪

- New York in the late 1990's was really vibrant,

and then, it was like an exclamation point,

punctuation to the end of an era.

[BEEPING]

♪ On a wave of mutilation ♪

- So there's this break with reality,

and Quiet was in the other century,

and everything after 9/11 is now.

- It may seem like a lot that's going on is because of 9/11,

but I think that it's just a gentrification of New York.

It's becoming this gated island.

♪ Wave of mutilation ♪

♪ Wave of mutilation ♪

- No jobs, a lot of anger,

just the whole sense of frivolity,

and joy, and expectation, that went away.

- Josh is missed.

I think he embodies a spirit and a vision

that's literally one in a million.

- He severed his life from everybody.

He split.

♪ Wave ♪

[BEEPING]

- I don't know how he got my number,

but he called me, he said hello, I'm Josh Harris.

Do you know who I am? And I said, no.

As he started to identify himself,

I said, you're the guy, you're Oz.

And he said, "Yes",

and I said, oh gosh, this is great.

Are you calling to tell me

you're gonna give me a lot of money?

And he said, "Oh didn't you hear?

I lost all my money.

I'm calling you from the middle of an orchard."

And I said, what are you doing in the orchard, Mister Oz?

And he said, "I'm thinking,

I'm thinking about my next project."

- NARRATOR: I thought I'd never hear from Josh again,

and the story would end here.

So when he called me out of the blue,

I jumped at the opportunity to visit.

I understood why Josh left the island he loved,

but to run an apple farm?

- I hate to use the word 'bought the farm',

but it's been a dream every single day for five years.

And I've had no real significant urge to leave.

Want to see my favorite tree?

I went to the farm simply, so that I could find out

who I really was, and to start separating out

all the media that I'd been injecting

over the course of my lifetime.

I had no other choice, or I'd be in Bellevue, or dead.

Sometimes when I'm walking by,

I believe that they feel my energy source coming by,

and they'll kind of drop their apples,

to let me know that they know I'm there.

They're my friends.

- WOMAN: So Josh. - Yes, Ondi?

- WOMAN: Are you a lonely man?

- The implication when you say, am I a lonely man,

is that it's worse than being together.

It's just a different state of being,

one which I'm very comfortable with.

You know, of course I'd love to have a beautiful wife,

and a family, and all that,

but all I've got is my work,

there's nothing more than that,

so I've never been truly in love with a woman.

As I was living in public, that was,

I had a fake girlfriend,

and I knew it was gonna end while we lived in public.

Tanya was a pseudo-girlfriend.

I'd been trying to cast for her, and she was perfect.

- We were very much in love.

To say that you had a pseudo-relationship,

is a way of protecting your heart from

from, how you feel.

- After Josh finished We Live in Public,

he went through a deep deep, dark depression,

and he came to Ventura, in dire need.

He was reaching out for my Mom,

and she didn't take his hand.

She didn't know how to love.

- JOSH: In my darkest hour she was not there.

So I stayed in the house for a couple of days,

and then went and rented a hotel,

and never saw her again.

How about them apples?

- Mom's supposed to be there, and she wasn't.

And it hurt him bad.

It hurt him enough so he wouldn't talk to her any more.

- Hi Mom, Josh here.

Long time no talk to.

- She's on her deathbed,

and we're calling Josh,

"She needs to talk to you, she wants to talk to you."

"I don't want to talk to her."

- MAN: We did get a tape from him,

that he sent where he had his say.

- Some people won't agree with what I'm doing,

and think that it's awful and all that,

but I'm an artist,

one of the first great artists of the 21st century,

and part of what I'm doing now

is related to my art form.

- He got there after she died,

so she died without saying goodbye to Josh.

I mean, sometimes I'm sad,

because I know my Mom really wanted to see him.

She was so proud of him.

Every time she got an article on Josh,

she goes, "I want to frame this."

And Josh is all over my Mom's place.

- When he became famous, she cherished it.

Everything Josh did was gold, everything.

She wanted to know all the good things in his life.

She couldn't handle anything that's bad.

He gets that from her.

- By the way, while you're there

give my best to everybody,

and all my ancestors and relatives,

give them my best.

Goodbye.

- I haven't talked to Josh in a long time.

I would say, three or four years now.

He pretty much broke off all contact

with all members of our family.

- I don't think I'll ever see him again.

I'd welcome him back any time he wants.

I don't know if he'd wants it.

- This is my family.

- As a big brother,

I'd just like to see him again, talk to him.

- What am I gonna shoot?

[GUN FIRING]

- It's been many years, and so

I found a relationship.

- Go here, boom.

- I'm married, pregnant,

and teaching a lot of yoga.

[GUN FIRING] [GLASS SHATTERING]

- NARRATOR: You may have to be delusional

to be a visionary.

It seemed Josh was both.

Certainly he survived by rewriting his own history.

After he left Pseudo, he called it an art project.

And when Tanya left him, he swore she was a fake girlfriend.

So no matter what he said,

I knew that farmer Josh was just another episode.

[BEEPING]

- JOSH: I was lying on the farm one night,

dead of winter, and I realized,

I've got picked for the gig,

I'm like the messenger.

It's like, whoa, and this is a heavy chore.

- NARRATOR: By 2005, broadband technology

had made streaming high quality audio and video possible.

So we were sharing our lives online, just as Josh predicted.

- I have a Myspace account, I have a Flickr account.

I have a Facebook profile.

I have a Movable Type blog.

I have my website.

- I'm addicted to blogging, there's no question about it.

I wake up in the morning and I feel the need to

put something on my blog.

- NARRATOR: We were getting our 15 minutes of fame,

and we loved it.

In fact, social networking sites

were becoming more popular than McDonald's.

While 20% of Americans consume fast food every day,

50% are consuming these sites.

- Now Myspace has approximately 120 million unique users.

And we're in 28 different countries.

- NARRATOR: Now the technology caught up with his vision,

Josh was determined to show us all once again

where we were headed with life online.

So he cashed in his last asset, the apple farm,

to create Operator 11.

- Operator 11 lets you run your own show,

and the innovative thing about it,

is that it brings in all of these webcam,

chat, and online video,

all together into one user base.

- NARRATOR: With the site up, and thousands

of regular users producing 200 shows every day,

Operator 11 was off to a promising start.

So Josh poured the last of money into creating

a futuristic net-casting studio in Hollywood,

to prepare Operator 11 for sale.

Then he set out to see all of today's

top Internet executives.

Surely they'd want to meet one of the greatest pioneers

in the history of the web.

- I've never heard of Josh Harris,

I'm not familiar with him.

- NARRATOR: He pitched a lower lever executive

with everything he had.

- If I was in your seat, I'd pick us up

because the product is so compelling.

- NARRATOR: Sadly, Myspace didn't go for it.

No one did.

- I think it's an evolution in broadcasting,

but I've got to wrap my hands

around the business proposition.

- NARRATOR: Once again too ahead of the curve,

and unable to shake his past,

Josh could not secure funds to maintain Operator 11.

It went bust, and Josh did along with it.

- I wasn't clearing market with the money people,

because every time they did a background check,

all of my escapades would come up.

- He was the poster boy for the excess of the '90s,

especially the crash, I mean he was in a glass cage almost.

- JOSH: There was a moment in time

when I was worth $80 million.

And now, I'm negative,

[LAUGHING]

negative 1.50 if you will.

The sand through the fingers of time is now all gone.

- Out of all the money that was made back then,

I think that was definitely

the most entertaining use of funds.

- Heck, if I had the chance to do it again,

I'd do it twice on Sunday.

- People say this guy's a fucking fool.

I can't tell you how many times people said that to me.

And I think, you know what?

He's not, there's something there,

but it takes a while to appreciate him.

He may be doing something foolish at the time, right?

But it may not be foolish in another five or 10 years.

It may actually work.

- As time is going by, the world of Quiet,

and We Live In Public,

is going to become more and more real.

The virtual version of that is where

Google and Facebook are heading.

Turning the cameras onto themselves.

The way they gauge their self-worth

is how many Myspace friends

or how may YouTube views they have.

- NARRATOR: Facebook currently has 10 billion photos

uploaded to the site,

and 30 million more are uploaded daily.

- Just people shouting out, hey notice me, notice me.

I'm here, I'm here.

People don't look up anymore,

everybody's walking around like this, clicking.

We are slaves to these little digital boxes,

and he was just saying this is the way it's gonna be.

And he was right, he was right.

- JOSH: Google, Facebook and Myspace are training people

to automate themselves.

- We gave them the ability to customize it

in any way they wanted,

whether it was putting a video from YouTube on their page,

to putting their favorite song

in the background on their page,

to creating whatever wallpaper

they wanted in the background.

- NARRATOR: Myspace sold for $580 million in 2005,

and today Facebook is valued at $15 billion.

And who creates that value?

We do.

You do know that everything we post online

is tracked, collected, and profiled, right?

The ads that appear on our screen

or based on keywords that are found

in our likes and dislikes,

the groups we belong to, even our chats and emails.

Every ad by Google is generated this way,

specific to who they think you are,

and what they think you need.

Keywords are mined, from emails to your Mom,

even to your lover.

And we all willingly share this information.

We enjoy the attention, the feedback, the comments,

but check this out,

once out there, your information can be bought and sold.

It's no longer yours to make private again.

- Everything is free,

except the video that we capture of you,

that we own.

I'm gonna sell you your life back.

- NARRATOR: I didn't realize while filming the bunker,

that this was Josh's physical prediction

of how life online would be.

- Everything that he does is a precursor

to something that is going to happen to all of us,

everything.

- NARRATOR: You, me, all of us, we live in public.

The Internet world Josh helped to create,

now rejected him and his ideas.

- They thought I was the sucker.

The sucker being an interesting word,

because I was sucking their soul right out of them,

and onto media.

All I know is I had the cameras rolling.

[LAUGHING]

- NARRATOR: So with 15,000 in his pocket,

and a pile of debt, he put the tapes in storage,

and changed the channel.

- I believe he's in Italy.

- I know he went to Malta, to write.

- Last time I heard, Josh was moving to Rome,

but I think already some weeks later,

I heard he changed his plan

and wants to move to San Francisco.

- I heard these rumors that he went

and started an apple farm somewhere,

which sounds ridiculous.

- I think he's gonna disappear

into the sunset on his boat, right?

He's like, whittled his money down

to where all he can buy now is a boat and sail off.

[SINGING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

- NARRATOR: I found him years later in Ethiopia.

- I left maybe the most bankrupt group of humans

in the world in Los Angeles,

and came to the richest culture in the world.

- NARRATOR: You have creditors after you, don't you?

- They can't find me.

What are they gonna do?

There's no answering machines here,

it would cost them more in phone calls.

Let's go, chop chop.

[SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

- NARRATOR: Knowing that Josh had expatriated

to escape Amex, I was impressed to find him

coaching a basketball team of Ethiopian orphans.

[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

I'll show you how to play defense so no one can score.

Ethiopia out, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, out.

- Uganda. - Uganda?

I didn't cut myself off,

I'm like rebraising myself in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia to me is pure humanity.

If you consume in your eight hours of TV,

and N numbers of Internet and computer gaming

and all that, as a meal,

you're just 1000 cows all mashed up.

I don't want to be a Big Mac.

If you think about all the things I've done,

I'm well spiced.

You eat me, it's a memorable meal.

As much as he got burnt out,

that mind is just too sharp to sit there all day long.

He'll be back, definitely.

[JAZZ MUSIC]

[VOCALIZING]

♪ Futures made of virtual insanity now ♪

♪ Always seem to be governed by this love we have ♪

♪ For useless, twisting, our new technology ♪

♪ Oh now there is no sound ♪

♪ For we all live underground ♪

♪ Now there is no sound ♪

♪ If we all live underground ♪

I'll show you.

♪ Oh this virtual insanity we're living in ♪

♪ Has got to change yeah ♪

♪ Things will never be the same ♪

♪ And I can't go on ♪

♪ Well we're living in oh oh virtual insanity ♪

♪ Oh this world has got to change ♪

♪ 'Cause I just, I just can't keep going on ♪

♪ In this virtual, virtual insanity that we're living in ♪

♪ That we're living in ♪

♪ That virtual insanity is what it is ♪

♪ Yeah ♪

[VOCALIZING]

♪ Futures made of virtual insanity now ♪

♪ Always seem to be governed by this love we have ♪

♪ For useless, twisting, of that new technology ♪

♪ Oh now there is no sound for we all live underground ♪

♪ And I'm thinking what a mess we're in ♪

♪ Hard to know where to begin ♪

♪ If I could slip the sickly ties that earthly man has made ♪

♪ And now every mother, can choose a color ♪

♪ Of her child, that's not nature's way ♪

♪ Well that's what they said yesterday ♪

♪ There's nothing left to do but pray ♪

♪ I think it's time I found a new religion ♪

♪ Whoa, it's so insane to synthesize another strain ♪

♪ There's something in these futures that we have to be told ♪

♪ Futures made of virtual insanity now ♪

♪ Always seem to be governed by this love we have ♪

♪ For useless, twisting, our new technology ♪

♪ Oh now there is no sound for we all live underground ♪

♪ Now there is no sound ♪

♪ If we all live underground ♪

♪ And now it's virtual insanity ♪

♪ Forget your virtual reality ♪

♪ Oh there's nothing so bad ♪