Park City, UT — Profiling one the least known internet visionaries, Ondi Timoner’s second feature film We Live In Public, gives us a window into the brilliance and the controversial experiments of Josh Harris.

As the founder of Jupiter Communications, Josh created the first analytical system for measuring users and online chat rooms. Jupiter Communications attracted massive amounts of investment capital and when Josh took the company public, his net worth soared to around $80 million. This sprung up a huge interest in investment in internet companies and thus the first generation of internet entrepreneurs was born.

Josh was also known for throwing legendary parties. Attracting a crowd of artists, supermodels and super geeks, Josh used the parties as a way to recruit employees for his next venture – Pseudo Programs. Pseudo turned out to be the first internet TV station, combining live chat with hours and hours of streaming original content. Once again Josh proved to be ahead of the curve and soon people began to refer to him as the ‘Andy Warhol of the Web’.

But Josh had always wanted to be an artist himself, and the way he personified that artist was through a clown-like alter ego he called “Luvvy”. Unfortunately, the investors weren’t too happy when Luvvy started showing up at important meetings and client parties, and eventually they bought Josh out, leaving him free to explore other interests.

Josh wanted to try a social experiment. Called QUIET, the experiment took place within a bunker, where people would stay for a month with all the free food, drink, drugs they could consume. But in order to become part of the experiment, you had to be interrogated, stripped of all your possessions, given a uniform, and were forced to live in a communal space without any privacy. If that weren’t enough, the entire place was rigged with cameras and each bunk had a TV, so each subject could observe everyone else. For a month, every moment of their lives was public including eating, using the restroom or even having sex. Unsurprisingly, people began to withdraw, each person having feelings of isolation and becoming angry (even violent) because of the constant observation. After the turn of the millennium, authorities were tipped off to the experiment, and believing it to be a millennium cult, they immediately shut it down.

Tired and worn out, Josh invited some friends for a fishing trip. The trip gave Josh time to relax, start a new relationship, and to come up with his next experiment. This time, he decided to put himself and his new girlfriend under the microscope with a new website called WE LIVE IN PUBLIC. Wiring up his apartment with cameras, Josh and his girlfriend would stream every moment of their lives on the internet and would interact with their viewers using chat. The site was an instant hit, bringing in tons of publicity and thousands of visitors daily. But like the QUIET experiment, the constant observation and the lack of privacy would soon cause the end of Josh’s relationship and the struggle to maintain his sanity.

We Live In Public is an intriguing and unnerving documentary. The film demonstrates the brilliance of Josh Harris’ early contributions to the internet, and his experiments – which are not only disturbing, but a terrifying prediction of the effects of our society’s ever-growing internet addiction. It soon becomes clear that the QUITE experiment and WE LIVE IN PUBLIC were just low-tech predictions of where we’re actually at today. And with more and more of our personal information being put online, the film leaves viewers with the realization that soon we may all be (and some of us are already) living in public.

For more information, check out the official site.