Josh Harris

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Pseudo.com founder and Web 1.0 wackjob Josh Harris, he of the sadistic yet prophetic “art projects,” is asked to anticipate the future in a really thorough article by Courtney Boyd Myers at The Next Web. An excerpt from his bleak and bold vision:

“What drove Harris crazy when he lived in a Truman Show like reality with his ‘fake girlfriend,’ other than losing his fortune, was when people online, his followers, started to get into his head and he was barely able to make a decision at any moment. Harris says that scenario was like a caveman version of what’s to come. With your day split into microparts, you will suffer from a psychic fracture. The issue won’t be about maintaining privacy. Your privacy will be long gone. The issue will be when your brain overloads, what in computer terms happens when the CPU goes into complete multi-tasking mode. And this is how we will enter the hive, also known  as the Matrix. And that’s Harris’ Singularity. It’s just a matter of time, he says.

‘This is how you have to look at it. I try not to make judgements, it’s just a natural evolutionary process. I don’t know how they knew it but The Mayans were right: 2012 is the end of the world. The world isn’t going to blow up. But 2012 is the year when the Singularity’s effects will start to take place. When our lives become a collection of micro day parts. Unlike Isaac Asimov, who said his biggest regret is that he wouldn’t be alive for The Singularity, we actually are going to be present at the shift. It’ll start next year. It’ll seem like magic, just like television was magic, radio was magic, the telegraph was magic, and maybe even smoke signals were in their day. This is going to be real magic and we’re going to be alive to witness it.'”

Another Josh Harris post:

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Documentarian Ondi Timoner is no stranger to volcanic egos, having chronicled a couple of feuding rock bands in her excellent 2004 doc, Dig! But even she couldn’t have been completely prepared for the unrestrained and unstable hubris that was Web 1.0 entrepreneur Josh Harris, when she was asked to film his exhibitionistic Manhattan commune during the final month of December 1999. That project and others perpetrated by Harris are the subject of the fascinatingly repellent doc We Live in Public.

The poster child for the extreme excess of Silicon Alley in the late ’90s, Harris was a misanthrope with a sadistic streak who cashed in a couple of early web businesses for the disposable income to hatch disturbing “art projects” that investigated his personal issues with voyeurism, exhibitionism and mind control.

The first one, called “Quiet: We Live in Public,” housed 100 volunteers in a Manhattan bunker that was filled with free food, a firing range with a massive cache of weapons and ubiquitous surveillance cameras to capture every last instant of the participants’ lives. People had sex, showered, went to the bathroom and sat for humiliating interrogations before the lenses. Harris was no Warhol but he created a Warholian police state, until the NYPD shut down an increasingly ugly scene.

Harris followed up this wacky project with other similar ones, until he had burned through tens of millions of dollars and disappeared himself from the public eye (and his creditors). Before his retreat, he foresaw the increasing invasiveness and exhibitionism of our media-drenched world: social networking web sites, the explosion of reality TV and the information-collecting of search engines.

But getting there first isn’t necessarily a distinction worth having, since he behaved like a creep when he arrived. Surveillance can no doubt alter human behavior, but you have to believe Harris is no charmer even when no one’s watching.•

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