Facebook is Worse than AOL
Devin Troy Strother, Please Don’t Shoot Up the Dancehall. From The Armory Show 2010 preview.
“Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else. I don’t know if they’re even considering what users want anymore. It’s all about how to maximize revenue and all that crap. It’s wanting to be everything to everybody possible so they won’t have to go anywhere else.”
– Matt Haughey. (via.)
Facebook is worse than AOL. It’s like a neverending digital teambuilding exercise. But instead of trailing a rope course or catching blindfolded people leaning backward, participants post pictures of doppelgangers and list “25 things” about themselves.
I really dislike the term “walled garden,” as it brings Frances Hodgson Burnett to mind and people imagine something privately enjoyed rather than simply restricted access. Don’t confuse this with invite-only message boards or mailing lists that make the Internet wonderful. To end the confusion, lets call the good places secret gardens.
Back in the day, AOL had a lot of secret gardens. According to my friend Erin, there was a Spin magazine message board frequented by established rock critics that was at an off the index location. A lot of corporations and publications created “channels” which would include chat rooms and message boards. These were about as successful as the businesses with Second Life presences. But some users would take over the dead space and make it their own. Several online friends and I once claimed the message boards for a Canadian radio station long after it was launched and quickly abandoned. Likely the citizens of Second Life do that with virtual ghost town storefronts.
It’s a little surprising Facebook isn’t used more like a message board or a mailing list –most people seem to use Ning or Google Groups for that purpose. The problem is something that tries to do everything can’t do anything well. Anyone who remembers Usenet or even the AOL message boards knows that as soon as posts dropped to one or two a week, the whole thing died not long after. Constant updates keep a social network alive.
I don’t have a problem with secret gardens on the Internet. Actually, just about everyone I know is on some kind of private invite-only mailing list or message board. But a walled garden leads to a number of complications. In 2007, Jason Kottke called Facebook the New AOL, referring their platform:
What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating. It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously…imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.
As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.
This sort of reminded me of Alex Payne’s The Case Against Everything Buckets. Someone smarter than me about these subjects could probably make a comment about how this is happening with mobile apps right now. Android developers, for example, fear that too many differentiated models will make their job harder. I’d love to see data on how many users don’t install Facebook apps at all. Or never use them. Or only use them. For a lot of people Farmville is Facebook.
My real frustration with Facebook has to do with context collapse. This was exactly why I was slow to sign up for the service. I can’t remember exactly when I did, maybe 2006, but I used the email I have just for online shopping and mailing lists and never imported my gmail contacts. I knew then I wanted it to be as small a part of my life as possible. Why? Because my friends weren’t on it, but a bunch of professional acquaintances were. And also because of the poke feature. danah boyd’s Facebook vs MySpace class distinctions was very apparent, as I was living in Chicago, and had few friends affiliated with universities, but old work colleagues from DC were all there. Even today, many of the musicians and artists I knew there still favor Myspace, but is there a 4.0 average student alive who doesn’t Facebook?
And when I heard about the “poke” feature that did it for me. It indicated the creators just weren’t serious about making something that could be more than a place for goofing around in a perplexingly formal way. “Poke” is the dumbest and worst feature ever invented for a social network. Even worse than that “suggest a match” thing on Friendster back in the dark ages (I still turn bright red and wince thinking of the time a less than socially savvy pal suggested a match for me with the person I had a crush on at the time.) I don’t really like when people lay out “best practices” for social networking like, “oh, she doesn’t @ reply enough people on Twitter.” And “netiquette” very often neglects the fact that introvert/extrovert classifications also exist in the digital world. But no, there’s never a good time for a poke. (Why stop with the poke? Why not call me and hang up before answering? Why not send me a blank email with no subject? Why not blank @ me?)
Rule of thumb on who to listen to in social media: ignore every non-artworld person talking about “curation” and instead subscribe to the feeds of those blogging about “filter failure.” (More on this in an upcoming post.) Facebook epitomizes filter failure for me. Yes, there are ways to segment information and keep groups, but there aren’t very good ways to keep worlds from overlapping. Facebook isn’t a more neutral LinkedIn and Myspace. It is the collapse of LinkedIn, Myspace, and a bunch of other networks, while many people want these worlds compartmentalized. I mostly avoid Facebook the same way that I’ll get drinks on a Monday night with colleagues, but not on a Friday or Saturday night. This generation blurs the line between work and play, but there is still a line or else you’re not getting the best out of either.
Now, this is my experience with Facebook. I don’t doubt there’s value to it for lots of people. I like it as a visual rolodex, and if I were a heavy user, I can see the advantage of adding just about everyone you meet at a conference or class as a “friend.” But mainly my use of Facebook is transitionary. I import my contacts to newer, hopefully better social networks as they come along like Foursquare or Quora.
That being said… add me.
Previously: The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns
Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter
Second Life Dumpster (2008) by eteam at the Sculpture Center. (via Sixteen Miles of String)
Does anyone actually use Second Life who isn’t an artist or grad student writing a thesis on it? Anyway, eteam, New York-based German artists Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger have a Rhizome Commission-winning project, Second Life Dumpster. An installation, as part of their work, is now on view at Long Island City’s Sculpture Center, in the exhibit “Degrees of Remove: Landscape and Affect.” (Here’s a review on Inhabitat.)
Previously, the artists purchased a 10-acre piece of land in rural Nevada for under $500 on eBay. The International Airport Montello “operates like a perpetuum mobile,
an impossible machine, which is perpetually in motion and sometimes on strike.” In other words, residents of Montello (population 67) playact, with a convenience store temporarily selling IAM gifts and bars masquerading as airport bars. The town organizes a culture about the nonexistent airport. More from the website. Moderegger said he wanted to “create something emerging temporarily—that is what a town is. There is nothing here, but in a way there is everything here.” (Video.)
For Second Life Dumpster (located here on SL) eteam wrote a script to collect items from Second Life users would otherwise trash, which shows the decay. (This month there are a lot of Obama and Palin posters.) Here is their activity log. Part of the project includes real life rebuilding of decaying Second Life objects. From their statement:
- Is there a need for avatars to get rid of their trash in some other way, then just clicking the delete button?
- What kind of waste will be disposed (objects, viruses, messages, behaviors, avatars, cache, histories, programs, etc.),
and how will this effect the appearance and “inner life” of our land and the dumpster?- Will the disposal site be a heap that builds up and grows bigger, or will it transform into compost, where “matter” decomposes and turns into new material?
Will we have to program “worms” to initiate this process? And, what will we do with the new substances?- In which way will we (or Second Life management) be able to control the potential directions of growth?
- Will we be able to create an aesthetically filthy area that sticks out from its artificially clean surroundings?
- What kind of reactions will the dumpster provoke in avatars that own land adjacent to our land?
- How will we be able to get rid of the land and the trash on it after the duration of one year?
“When we heard about Second Life for the first time, we imagined it to be a kind of utopia, where people would create things that are impossible to even think of in the Real World. But, even after SL replaced our first life for a while, we could not permeate the top layer. There is no shovel around to dig that ground, no way to go beyond the surface. Maybe that’s why we are currently investigating the possibilities of our SL land as a public dumpster — to fill the place with some kind of history by leaving traces, to introduce the decay script,” eteam said in a recent interview with Rhizome’s Marisa Olsen:
There is often an element of field work or research, which can involve performance, followed by videos, and installations. Does your take on virtuality apply to your take on documentation?
We are constantly trying to figure out this problem: If virtuality is the inherent ability or potential of something to come into existence, how do we picture this potential, how do we document it, what do we call it and how do we protect it from turning into a reality that will be fenced-in by its practicalities?
Until we worked in Second Life, we called physical access to a site “facing reality”. When we went out West and visited our property, we had to wear boots, hats, sun lotion and drink water. Despite the fact that we tried to stay as abstract as possible, we still had to deal with facts, listen to people, and stay around long enough to find out if a certain reality was present at the site, one that was waiting to be identified so it could temporarily emerge with a name, like “International Airport Montello,” for example. Now we are asking ourselves: Was this a reality, because it was based on two abandoned landing strips behind the town of Montello and therefore connected to the land? Did this reality temporarily manifest itself, because it had been innate to the air around this place anyway, or were we lucky, because we proposed our concept to a group of people who believed that “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve!,” as Dr. Ron, our airport manager, said.
And, how do we compare this experience to working on a piece of land in Second Life? A real invention versus an invented reality? Take this conversation we had recently with someone who visited the dumpster:
[12:50] eteam: mmhh, I am just trying to figure out what this whole world is about
[12:50] Rolando Ember: i noticed
[12:50] eteam: and on what level it operates. I get stuck a lot and in the end it’s just a relief that I can clean up this dump in order to make space for new stuff. How do you spend most of your time?
[12:52] Rolando Ember: either at my military base or exploring. I don’t take this seriously at all. How about you?
[12:53] eteam: I sort through trash and attach the decay script to objects
[12:54] Rolando Ember: is this all you do on here?
[12:54] eteam: what?
[12:54] Rolando Ember: tend to the dumpster
[12:54] eteam: yes, mostly. sometimes I go to freebie places and get some more trash
[12:55] Rolando Ember: what’s the fascination with trash?
[12:55] eteam: that it does not look like trash. that it always looks brand new, never looks used or worn-out. that’s why I asked you earlier how you decide what’s trash and what not. I can not get over that…
[12:56] Rolando Ember: why can you not get over it? It’s really not that deep.
“it always looks brand new, never looks used or worn-out.” That describes everything on the Internet. Design trends change but nothing fades or rips apart. There’s no reason to ever delete anything online. Even Treehugger says the environmental benefit from trimming your gmail account is negligible.
Think of a box of old photographs. There’s usually one mistake per roll — someone’s head is cropped out or yellow spots ruined another. At 30 or 40 years old, it seems wrong to throw out those photos now. But we think nothing of deleting digital images that come out poorly, as it doesn’t cost anything more to take several extra frames per shot.
Similarly, there is no reason to junk personal email except for peace of mind. All past billets doux courriel is in an eight-year old email account I only use for social network logins. I so infrequently need to check it, I sometimes wonder if Yahoo hasn’t just deleted the account by now. And if they did, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
The funny thing about romantic internet correspondence is at some point, one person or the other will say how much he or she wishes the text were instead on paper. It’s sort of like the inevitability of talking about 9/11 on a first date. But only in special circumstances will anyone send a letter by mail and it wouldn’t be the same. It would be formal, maybe less romantic. Writing email accesses different emotions than pen and paper. No drafts. No rewriting, as the delete key is intrinsic to the process (more on this here.)
If you’ve ever been a college student instant messaging someone who is just down the hall, you know just how easily secrets spill out with technology to mediate. We don’t record our conversations over drinks. That would be creepy. We shouldn’t. But we tend automatically save all of our instant message chat files. Is it worth it to hold on to these memories?
There’s a company called BigString that sends email as html, which they claim the average user can’t detect. This means you can edit or delete a message after it’s sent. It’s been around a couple of years, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone actually use it. So few circumstances would call for it.
What I like about eteam’s project is this idea of rather than throwing something out entirely, you’re handing discarded items to someone else. Handing over the responsibility of thinking about them. In practice, this is abused. Rather than activating the decay script, some avatars are simply leaving their trash on the SL lot, (in case, they get dumper’s remorse?)
A smart start-up might create a kind of time capsule for all of our “oh, do I really want to get rid of this?” e-clutter. Those images where you are smiling but your friend isn’t. There is some guy in the background. Five years later, he’s a famous actor. Don’t you wish you never deleted that picture?
Wrap up all of those personal emails from someone right now too painful to remember. Shove it in someone else’s storage with the promise it won’t be deleted and can be accessed whenever forever. It could be a physical place, a library of our unwanted digital things. He or she could save all of these things on disks. Maybe even activate some kind of “decay” like the eteam’s SL project: turn the letter into pdfs, yellow the paper year by year, and within five years the text might bleed into itself a little, in ten years, it’s even less legible.
Much is said about the need for curators in the digital world. Why, for example, link blogs will never go away, they’ll just grow more specialized. Much is also made about the search for permanence in a world of ephemera. Quite naturally, things go missing and they break and we can never wear or play with them again. The natural process of losing and forgetting is missing here.
Gmail has that wonderful grey area between save and delete — “archive.” What are needed are more diverse tools which help us deal with abundance in similar ways. Methods to keep things completely out of sight while never running the risk of losing that which we might want to see later… eventually.
Images by eteam from their website and Second Life log.
Previously:
Synthetic Performances: Sylvere Lotringer, Second Life, and the Politics of Perversions
Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Really Freehand: Comics Going Digital
Did the pro-anas moved to Second Life? There’s a creepy Flickr group for “thinspiration” avatars.
Synthetic Performances: Sylvere Lotringer, Second Life, and the Politics of Perversions
“I don’t deny that my client was carrying a bomb. But this doesn’t prove he was going to use it. After all, I myself always carry with me all I’d need to commit a rape.”- 19th century French lawyer M. Henri de Rochefort defending his client, an anarchist, caught with a bomb.
What are we to make of the recent Supreme Court ruling on United States v. Williams? Now, just telling someone you have child pornography on your computer is a federal offense — even if you don’t. The New York Times wrote an editorial against the Supreme Court’s decision, explaining how, as much as they’d rather not stand on the perceived side of a child pornographer, “this law is drawn in a way that also criminalizes speech that should be protected by the First Amendment.”
Justice Scalia wrote there’s no “possibility that virtual child pornography or sex between youthful-looking adult actors might be covered by the term ‘simulated sexual intercourse,’” which further muddles this issue. Saying you have fake child porn is illegal, but the images are perfectly ok — no matter how skilled the photoshopping? A Boing Boing reader who once worked at Industrial Light + Magic, explained it well:
The first film adaptation of “Lolita” was directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962. As a concession to the MPAA, Kubrick raised Lolita’s age to fourteen, and largely desexualized her relationship with Humbert. As directed by Adrian Lyne (9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction), the 1997 version attempted to be truer to the source novel in those respects, and even showed a topless Lolita in the bedroom with Humbert.This is where my co-worker came in. Since the filmmakers were not legally able to film their underage actress topless in a sexual situation, they filmed her with a beige body stocking with X’s of electrical tape where her nipples would have been. They then re-filmed the same scene with a rather busty (but entirely legal) 18-year-old actress. My friend was then given the task of seamlessly tracking and compositing the nekkid 18-year-old bosoms onto the 14-year-old body.
Obviously there’s a difference between a professional VFX artist performing such manipulation for the sake of art, and some anonymous perv performing such manipulation for the sake of, er, self-manipulation. But how does one discriminate between these two goals? And more importantly, how does one /legally/ differentiate them? Defining what is and isn’t “art” has never been something that the legal system has shown itself to be particularly adept at.
“Virtual child pornography” is illegal in most countries, with many complications. Here its illegality is debatable. Lolita adaptations and hentai are exactly the kinds of things that could potentially be policed, as graphic images are prohibited under “obscenity” laws. (Virtual Bind explains the subtitles of this law.)
So what is child pornography, if it is not obscene? Everyone rational knows Bill Henson doesn’t deserve his current legal battle, nor do the many other artists who have found themselves defending their work to an excessively prude legal system. Philips Adams in his editorial “Lock up Lewis Carroll” points out the “paradox that nude photography of prepubescent girls was very popular in a Victorian society usually characterised as prudish.”
J.M. Barrie … would be viewed with deep suspicion today. The story of the boy who never grew up begins with a boy who never grew up, James himself. Just hours before his 14th birthday James’s brother David drowned in a skating accident and his mother took to her bed to weep for years. Realising that he came a poor second in his mother’s affections, James would try to get her attention by wearing David’s clothes.
He would write about lost mothers in adult novels as well as Peter Pan, and was happiest in the company of little boys. A pedophile? Perhaps, in a sense. But, as with Carroll, he has given a great gift to generations of children.
So what might seem simple isn’t. Although Barrie would certainly come under scrutiny today and invite trouble from the police, his tragic story should remind us to be cautious about moral panics. Does Henson have some psychological problems like Carroll and Barrie? No idea, but his photographs are a long way from Wonderland and Neverland. As prints sell for about $30,000, his audience is decidedly adult, affluent and very small. Until the present scandal, a few thousand might visit a Henson exhibition. Now business will boom; the censor is always the best publicist.
I read Sylvere Lotringer’s Overexposed: Perverting Perversions sometime just before the decision on United States v. Williams, and it’s further made me question child pornography laws. The book is blurbed by William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Kathy Acker. If you love any of those three authors (or all three, as I do,) you’ll really enjoy it.
The book explains aversion therapy (think A Clockwork Orange) as it was administered to sex offenders at Chicago’s Center for Sexual Behavior in the the 1980s. (The center no longer exists.) Lotringer brings up so many important points on how “perversions have no grammar of their own,” I’m surprised this book isn’t widely read.
Aversion therapy, as Lontringer explains, is really “boredom therapy.” From a review in Modern Painters: “While Lotringer is no satirist, his objections to the methods of (the composite character) Dr. Sachs and those like him are not so removed from those of Burgess. Our problem, as Lotringer sees it, is that we live in a Christian/Freudian world in which we are made to fear our awareness of our own capacity for free thinking; it is always the strategy of power to make us believe that we must be protected against ourselves. From the viewpoint of behavioral psychology, we are the first line of defense against our own fantasies and must be made to police ourselves for telltale signs of some psychic queerness… he in fact initially pitched Overexposed as a follow-up to The History of Sexuality. That it isn’t, due in part to his impatient assertions and his far-reaching aspirations. The author wants us to believe that in one therapy he has found the root of everything wrong with our culture.”
Nevertheless it makes for some interesting reading:
“What are you doing after the orgy?” Jean Baudrillard allegedly asked his partner in the middle of it all. Orgy, like the spectacle, is permanent. It’s not God’s death, but, boredom, American style. It’s the anxiety of the bulimic, the martyrdom of the obese, the obsessive fear of all those who monstrously consume themselves, out of sheer self-exhaustion, in order to better disappear…the great linguist Roman Jakobson rejected the idea of a language spoken by a single person as a “perverse fiction.” Idiolect was a kind of loner language prowling on the outskirts of communication. Now, it seems, the entire world has become idiolectal, speaking to no one, since communication now communicates nothing but itself.
I’d love to quote this book in its entirety, but this post is already long and that would be time consuming, but I will point out a few other interesting points. He explains how tenderness is usually expressed by l and m words, but k, t, and r, consonants tend to be used on words signifying aggression. “‘R,‘ which is produced erecta ad palatum lingua, is always associated with phallic violence. The same phenomena are said to exist in the language of chimpanzees, and, significantly, the Tibetans.”
Really intriguing was a section explaining how the psychiatrist would tease a normal desire out of what seemed to be a perversion. To give an PG-13 example: someone who gets off on the fantasy of a woman naked and hogtied, will, under examination, respond to the word breast, but not “rope” or “bound.” It’s not the binding he is drawn to, (not that there’s anything wrong with tying women up in good consensual fun.) The fantasy works with the right calculus of rote and forbidden. Another fantasy involving exposed breasts might be just as much of an erotic trigger. Context is important. Could the attraction several embarrassed men have drunkenly confessed to me, toward Natalie Portman in The Professional, be not her then delicate age, but the expectation of what she’d grow up to be?
What are we to make of Amanda Knox’s rape fantasy fiction or Cho Seung-Hui’s violent plays. And might we interpret the same of the so many people who fantasize outside the bounds of sexual conventions, but act out nothing? Did Bataille fuck an eye?
I first wrote about United States v. Williams last year, as it related to Second Life. Since then, Linden Labs has banned “age play,” even though it seems to fall within the non-obscene virtual child pornography limits.
The title of this post I stole from “Synthetic Performances,” a series of reenactments of historical performance art pieces, like Chris Burden’s Shoot, Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Imponderabilia, set inside Second Life by (the avatars) of Eva and Franco Mattes. It is now showing at the Netherlands Media Art Institute. (via.) What makes it so amusing is the absence of shock value, indicative of all sexual activity on Second Life as seen by outsiders. It’s pathetic and comedic, no more pornographic than Barbie dolls positioned in a lewd way.
Images by Balthus
Related links
- Overexposed:Perverting Perversions , MIT Press
- Review of Overexposed in Modern Painters
- The Center for Sex Offender Management
- Brooklyn Rail interviews Sylvere Lotringer
- Don’t Look in the Basement
- Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille
- Debate over Scorpion’s Virgin Killer.
- Wired, Inside Operation Candyman, the FBI’s crusade to sweep the Net clean of child abuse. (2001)
- Valleywag, “Sex Shopping in Second Life”
- New York magazine, Saving Justin Berry
- Debbie Nathan’s article on why journalists should have permission to see child pornography
- Fair, Perilous Reporting (On Debbie Nathan and Kurt Eichenwald)
- Does Snuff Exist? Google Video
- New Jersey sex offenders banned from internet, Ars Technica
- CNN, Who star released on bail
We Live in Public
The girls in this video by Brad Troemel (it almost exclusively happens to females) have had someone steal their photographs and create fake accounts with their names (via.) To prove their account is the right one, they take pictures or videos with their myspace number and send it to the community managers. None is any kind of celebrity, except in the very micro-sense — everyone that goes to punk rock shows in her hometown knows who she is.
The Internet has heard enough about Emily Gould this week, still, I found the passage where she showed her therapist (who insisted “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity”) the New York magazine article that nearly everyone in the media world read last fall, was a great anecdote about the strangeness of modern microcelebrity. Although Clive Thompson said it much better in Wired last year:
You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven’t our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip. Every time we get dressed — in power suits, nerdy casual wear, or goth-chick piercings — we’re broadcasting a message about ourselves. Microcelebrity simply makes the social engineering we’ve always done a little more overt — and maybe a little more honest
Naomi Campbell will never know or care if you blog smack about her, but writers and editors, even of the highest prominence, do. When I was just started out, I wrote a flippantly dismissive post about a writer I respected but found excessively self-promoting. The writer came across my website (by googling her name and the word “brilliant,” as I saw in my referral log,) and sent me an angry note. Since then I’ve curbed every impulse to best anyone else.
What made Gould’s experience unique is, with obvious repercussions on her personal and professional life, she was paid to write about her immediate circle — the creative underclass, the people who thrive on attention, but also survive on their reputations. That’s you and me and everyone else who receives the New Yorker in her studio apartment. We’re all within reach of each other, even if some of us have more google hits — I even sat behind a friend of Gould’s discussing her relationship on his cellphone, while riding on the Chinatown bus the other night.
Blogging took off because of the dot-com crash. The media types — marketing, conference planning, pr, or something else — were the first to go when the tech bubble burst. Out of work and bitter, blog software meant they could finally go back to their roots in journalism. The World Trade Center disaster only sharpened their focus, giving a sense of purpose to their writing.
The web would look a lot different without those two historic — if unfortunate — events. We might have skipped blogging and moved straight to vlogging. The end result would be fewer citizen journalists and more Julia Allisons, and we’d be all the worse for it.
New York magazine called him the “The Warhol of Web TV,” in 1999, but Josh Harris “thinks Andy Warhol was his ‘advance man,’ a John the Baptist to his dot-com Jesus,” wrote Jim Hanas in a Radar feature last winter. Harris got rich (80 million rich) off a would-be TV replacing dot-com “Pseudo,” but he’s better know for his We Live in Public experiment, soon to be revisited in a feature documentary by Ondi Timoner (director of Dig!)
We live in public trailer from RADAR on Vimeo.
You can’t buy your way into the art world, but with enough money you can create a spectacle. Footage of his previous experiment Quiet, plays out like a classic Ballardian tale, but it is We Live in Public that startup-types still reference.
In 2000, his website Pseudo (screenshot) offered 60 hours of original programming a week. Streaming video “channels” skewed toward emerging subcultures, the post-indie rock, post-Liquid Television, post-Alleged Gallery art landscape waiting for the next new thing. Each channel, not unlike like Gawker Media sites, had its own web address, for the prescient purpose of specialized advertising. (Much more on this at the fascinating blog Ghost Sites of the Web.)
Richard Metzger had a show and Gary Baddeley, publisher of Disinfo remembers the site fondly, “If you were in New York in the late ’90s and you had anything to do with that first wave of dotcom madness, [the documentary clip will] really take you back … and realize that not only did Josh throw a great party, he really was a visionary.”
He definitely made a mark on the art world. Among other things, Harris funded a 2000 prank by Austrian-collective Gelitin, ”The B-Thing,” creating a fake balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center (later “woven into the complex tapestry” of WTC conspiracy theories.) And even Alana Heiss of PS.1 and MoMA came by to inspect his experimental art project/millenium party “Quiet,” eventually calling it “one of the most extraordinary activities I’ve ever attended anywhere in the world.”
“The image I have in my mind is a concentration camp,” he says about the bunker built for the experiment. Staged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway, it was, “part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment,” as Hanas writes. A hundred “pod people” were recorded from their Japanese capsule hotel beds (each equip with a video camera,) to the dining room, to the dance floor. There was a machine gun firing range, chess tournaments. Sex was filmed, even showers and toilets were set against the wall with no partitions. Participants were interrogated in a stark white room by a team of artists known as the Bureau.
Head interrogator Ashkan Sahini, an artist in real life, would do things like pull people out of their sleep capsules and grill them about their preference for white wine over red. “I am the asshole of this event,” Sahini said with considerable pleasure. “This is a society, and we will flip the rules around.” Sahini was accompanied by someone who introduced himself as Zero Boy, his platinum-haired “bodyguard,” who was dressed in a tight-fitting Soviet colonel’s uniform and carried a megaphone. What was that all about? “I’m a mercenary,” Zero Boy explained through his megaphone. “I have my own trip.”
They’d reveal their suicide attempts and heroin addictions. A “neo-fascist temple,” Harris calls it, but it was also a party. “The innocence and fun of New York pre-9/11 is recorded there in a way that’s really poignant to look at now,” documentary director Timoner told Radar.
Nearly 100 people checked in for the 10 days leading up to the New Year—but only after completing detailed background questionnaires, enduring intense interrogations, and donning orange and gray prisoner-style uniforms.
Everything was free, as long as you gave up rights to your image, which was constantly being captured. “Some people cried, but that was Josh’s thing,” says one so-called Podwellian, photographer Donna Ferrato. “He wanted to make people hurt, and get embarrassed and scared, and fight.” By New Year’s Eve, the scene was devolving into a lethargic mélange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict, and on January 1, with no end in sight, the FDNY, NYPD, and FEMA arrived to shut it down.
It’s been said FEMA mistook it for a “suicide cult.”
The next project was WeLiveinPublic.com (the dot-com address now long gone,) by his production company “Panopticon,” collaborating with video artists The Verbal Group, including influential new media artist, Yael Kanarek. Cameras were constantly surveilling he and his girlfriend, and briefly Will Leitch, now editor of Deadspin. His girlfriend broke up with him and left, making her the Emily Gould of February 2001, (although her personal essay ran in the New York Observer, not NYT magazine.) Comparisons to The Truman Show were then inevitable, because it and some Twilight Zone episodes (and the first few seasons of the Real World) were all the references we had to go on. Survivor also premiered in 2000. Remarkable when you think about it … we’ve had an almost decade-long conversation about the ethics of reality television.
Then 9/11 happened, then the blogs, and now we are going back to Pseudo-style web programming, taking the We Live in Public idea past absurdity. You can see aspects of YouTube and Second Life in Pseudo, even micro-celebrity, “People want fame in a day-to-day basis, not over a lifetime,” Harris says in the Vimeo clip. Some of his ideas the Internet has yet to incorporate — for one thing, we’ve yet to make it easy to meet people through the ether without some degree of creepiness. Chat rooms are all but forgotten (unless we can think of Twitter as a time-delayed chat room.) I remember in high school, MTV would occasionally stream chat room discussions underneath video (yes, that was when MTV played music,) and seeing my comments on my television renewed my angsty life with a sense of purpose. I definitely wish there were a chat room to discuss the We Live in Public documentary clip as I was watching it.
It’s interesting how blogging technology now is tilting toward private applications. The blog and web 2.0 marriage is an uneasy one. Facebook was the first to gate us in communities with people we already know (it’s no surprise it started at Harvard — to keep out the plebes.) A cynical answer is Tumblr (where your friends list is actually hidden from view,) Twitter, and Vox are all to promote insider connections. But I think the move is as much for privacy. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with all the information swimming around out there.
As you can see in the clip (and do watch it!) one of the “Bureau” interrogators remarks — with the bustering confidence typical of everyone involved in the project — that some of the pod people will one day be famous and Josh Harris will have a file on them, revealing, who has “had anal sex…which of their parents they love more.” That was a little too lofty a vision. There are so many micro-celebrities no one really cares about you no matter how many personal details you confess.
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