The era of privacy is officially dead, and Joshua Harris, “the Warhol of the Web,” predicted it. This incredibly innovative, and equally twisted Grim Reaper was the subject of We Live In Public, a documentary released last year that eerily maps out our current relationship with the Internet—a decade before it all went down.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—platforms that feed our culture’s desire for celebrity and recognition—were built from the bricks that Josh Harris constructed and ultimately destroyed. In the early ’90s, Harris knew that television programming would gravitate to the web, and that with just the right platform and encouragement, regular people would willingly cash in their 15-minutes of fame card, and even the rights to their lives, simply to be publicly recognized.

During the years of the dot.com boom and bust, Harris, a successful tech dude, saw the still-maturing World Wide Web as an incubator for experimentation and millionaire status. In 1994 he created Pseudo.com, which was the world’s largest original producer of streaming video programming at the time, featuring dozens of interactive shows. Long before high speed Internet, Pseudo.com helped solidify the Internet as the go-to destination of the youth. The market crash and subsequent crumble of early web startups forced Pseudo into bankruptcy, but Harris had already moved on, catapulted into freaky-genius mode using the Internet and the audience that he helped nurture, to stage public demonstrations of personal sacrifice that he considered art.

Harris’ first project, called Quiet, packed over 100 volunteers into Big Brother-style underground pods in New York City for 30 days. The documentary details the madness that unfolded when unsupervised, uninhibited adults (and even a random kid), were given as much food, drugs, and even guns as they wanted, all while being filmed, from every possible angle, every hour of the day. It was a bizarre live-action social network gone wrong.

Participant Steven Kaplan wrote in a blog post,

“We were also constantly on camera, producing our own flow of images. Anyone at the central control booth could watch as we ate, shat, argued, made art, fucked, etc. Theoretically, anyone in the bunker, at any time, could tune into anyone else in the bunker.”

Sound familiar? The idea of people volunteering intimate aspects of their lives to total strangers is nothing new. An extreme case of this open relationship with the public was displayed in Harris’ next project, another Big Brother surveillance experiment that documented the lives of Harris and his girlfriend—pre-MTV’s The Real World. 

In a recent interview, Harris insisted that in a few years, “We are going to demand ’self surveillance.’” 

Honestly, I fear those days. If privacy is dead, I desperately want to grab my shovel and dig it up. Resuscitate the days when “dirt” unfolded behind closed doors, between journal pages, or in trashy supermarket tabloids that people glanced in passing, but rarely took home. I often get tired of hearing the random thoughts that burst from people’s minds and onto social networks. Where you’re having lunch, your frustrations with men, the latest phrase your child recited, the amount of alcohol you consumed at the glamorous party last night, your insecurities, indecisions, loves, successes and frustrations —are all valid experiences and emotions. I must admit, I’m guilty of life-farting on Facebook as well. And some people’s life-farts I enjoy breathing in, but when you do you draw the line? At what point are you forced to tune out and turn off, because the virtual conversations are just too loud and too noisy? On the other hand, being a social media maven is pretty much a prerequisite for any modern-day profession, especially in media.

This is a complicated, but never-ending conversation. In the meantime, check the documentary.

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