~JOSH HARRIS . . scoops up the press, NEW YORK POST, WALL STREET JOURNAL & WIRED !!
JOSH HARRIS – THIS MAN, COULD TELL THE FUTURE.
or:
FERAL . . . is a 5 letter word.
ANDREW SMITH’s book on Josh . .
and the early 1980s dot.com era in general,
‘TOTALLY WIRED’ / ‘THE RISE AND FALL OF JOSH HARRIS AND THE GREAT DOTCOM SWINDLE’,
originally published in 2012, has just been re-released, by Black Cat publishers . . hot on the heels, of the 10th anniversary of the astounding, 2009 Sundance Grand Jury prize – win of the documentary, ‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’ . . . the story of Josh Harris / which netted director ONDI TIMONER, her notable, second Grand Jury prize at Sundance.
(Her first was for ‘DIG’ . . Brian Jonestown Massacre & The Dandy Warhols).
the new release just came out on the 19th of March 2019, & it’s already burning up the charts / if the reviews are anything – to contend with !!
it’s . . . hot. hot. hot !!
Josh, and his ‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’ brand – is just so complicated / and has so many facets, so many depths of field, all the way from wholesome, ritualistic artifact (lol, Quilts), to evil, to creative, to visionary, to web innovation, to commercial product (i.e. art, movies and book), that it’s no no surprise that the 3 reviews I know of, . . not only reflect Josh, in vastly different ways, but also reflect the agenda/program, of the publisher on which – they have popped up.
which makes for a really, jolly literary party.
1. of course, being a . . New Yorker (!!),
my fave is the one that surfaced today . . in the NEW YORK POST !!!
BAD BOY, JOSH !!!
side note: my kid, Theo, now all grown-up and very fine, thank you, . . .
was the 9 yr. kid shooting off the big guns !!
I mean, it was a party about the FUTURE, right ? kids, future, get it ?
when all the press came out back then, and some of it was very very X rated, & over-the-top notorious, & TRUE (!!) I got called into the principal’s office to explain why I should not be sent to child protection services immediately / turns out my kid’s middle school philosophy teacher was sitting at the ‘WE LIVE IN PUBLIC’ MoMA NYC premiere, almost directly behind us, (scratch a middle school teacher, find a movie nerd), and he had also recognized Theo in the film . . (amazing what a small world NYC can be !!).
Long story, short: it was just gun props, (under Alfredo Martinez supervision, OY).
and the ‘quilts’ were in a separate area. (not) (ok, sort-of).
oh, lord how can you not love . . the NEW YORK POST.
there’s JOSH, in full-blown Luvvy the Clown persona, (in the dark shades), looking like a serial killer clown, if not worse.
right next to: OMG !! AOC / Ocasio-Cortez !!!
though they got one fact wrongo, it was $80 million !!, not $50.
but, otherwise . . it’s pretty much all Josh, all true, and all . . BAD, BAD, BAD to the bone !!!
quick, and witty – it’s a great read.
sample paragraph:
re: the Pseudo ‘tech’ offices . . .
“Pot smokers held ‘Code Green’ meetings during office hours, and at night things got even wilder. Though Harris usually stuck to whiskey and cigars, he acquired a 6-foot-high glass bong for one party, described by one eyewitness, as ‘bigger than my bathroom’.”
re: future-vision, the web & being declared the godfather of social media . . .
“And yet, despite his highly public failures, there was one thing Harris was successful at – predicting the future. As he told one interviewer in 2009, ‘We’re moving into a world where our status and value will be measured by how many people are watching us’.”
have some fun tonight, read it for yourself: ‘How Josh Harris, a dot-com party boy worth $50M lost everything in an instant’, by RON HOGAN, NEW YORK POST / MARCH 23, 2019
2. second up, is the review in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, that surfaced yesterday, FRI March 22, 2019 – on their prestigious OPINION PAGE.
and, if you google it online now – it’s at the top of their most read list. (!!)
btw: it refers to Josh’s fortune as . . “$75 million on paper”.
most remarkable features ?
the article’s title !!: “Social Media’s Patient Zero” (!!!!!!!!!)
and second, written by someone name of, WILL LEITCH . .
it is written from the point of view, of someone who 19 years ago, had been a young kid who had just caught the tail-end of the Josh Harris experience, the smoke trail / just missing out on the ‘party’ – by under 30 days !!
“I moved to New York in January 2000, fascinated by Mr. Harris even if I didn’t know him personally. At the time the tech bubble popped in April of that year, however, Mr. Harris’s company was already in tatters. His investors had pulled the plug, and he retreated into odd art projects like ‘We Live In Public,’ for which he outfitted a loft in Soho with cameras in order to document every moment of his and his then-girlfriend’s life for an online audience. Like many undertakings of that era, ‘We Live In Public’, was grander in concept than in execution, and by around Day 70 both Mr. Harris and the girl had moved out. So who lived in that apartment instead, to entertain the theoretical (but mostly non-existent) on-line audience ?
Me, actually . . .
“I had cameras on me, but I wasn’t doing anything worth watching, and no one was paying attention anyway. The audience had changed the station entirely. As we now know, they were about to tune into something much more interesting: themselves.”
read: ‘TOTALLY WIRED’ REVIEW, by WILL LEITCH, WALL STREET JOURNAL / MARCH 22, 2019
3. third is for nerds only, and/or people who want the facts, and raw details – from the source. and I mean source.
as in: sacred water / running stream / journalist meets medicine man.
‘This Guy Predicted Society’s Thirst for Internet Fame – in 1999’ / WIRED
written by the book’s, ‘TOTALLY WIRED’ . . author, ANDREW SMITH !!!
(note: classic quilt – grid / organization = riff on social networking inter-linkedin-ness)
“Josh Harris may have been the first internet millionaire in New York.
As founder of Jupiter Communications and New York’s first online media portal, Pseudo.com, he rode the web 1.0 dotcom boom to a fortune of $85 million.
But as the 1990s ramped up, his view of what the internet would do to us, darkened, and he spent his fortune on a series of lurid social experiments aiming to demonstrate what he saw. The biggest was an ambitious millennial happening called ‘Quiet’, which Andrew Smith writes about in his new book, ‘Totally Wired’.
“1999 …
“Where to start ?” . . . .
“There are similarities between ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Quiet’, but the dissimilarities are significant.
Where ‘Big Brother’ would be tightly edited, directed and as stage-managed as ‘The Truman Show’, ‘Quiet’, would be feral, unedited, and interactive, with each participant given their own Japanese-style sleeping pod, fitted with CCTV camera streamed live to their own channel . . .”
read up & . . BE AMAZED: ‘This Guy Predicted the Future’ by ANDREW SMITH, WIRED / March 15, 2019