Sundance Toasts an Early Online Life

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PARK CITY, Utah — Few people sitting at the MySpace Cafe here last week would have guessed that the guy on the patio who looks more a golf pro than a digital seer is someone who anticipated the socially networked world they now live in. While the rest of the patrons at this cafe, temporarily branded for the Sundance Film Festival, stared into iPhones and the tiny computers that dappled the tables, his most prominent accessory was an unlit cigar.

But if they had managed to squeeze in a viewing of “We Live in Public,” a documentary by Ondi Timoner that won a grand jury prize here on Saturday, they’d know that the guy in the Ray-Bans, Josh Harris, made $80 million on a Web consultancy and used it to first build a television network on the Internet when most people were on dial-up. He then oversaw a social experiment art project called “Quiet” at the turn of the millennium in which 100 people lived in a bunker in Manhattan under the constant scrutiny of video cameras until the police raided the joint. In the process the real man behind the digital Andy Warhol character lost many millions of dollars, along with his mind, and moved to an apple farm.

It almost sounds fake, but the documentary makes for compelling viewing for many of the same reasons “Woodstock” is. In addition to featuring a fair amount of nudity and drug taking, “We Live in Public” offers a portrait of a moment in the culture when everything changed.

When Mr. Harris formed Pseudo Programs in 1993, personal e-mail addresses weren’t the norm, but Mr. Harris was convinced that lives would come to be lived not only on the Web, but in public as well. Among other prescient notions he suggested that the Internet would become the platform of choice for all media, much of which would be generated by the people formerly known as the audience.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/movies/26josh.html?th&emc=th