Josh Harris - Silicon Alley/Pseudo/'net video pioneer - profiled.
Jim Hanas (who can also be blamed for the Boring Boring parody site lo those several years ago) has written a story for RADAR about Josh "Pseudo.com" Harris, and his new project, Operator 11. Jim 'splains:
I spent all fall tracking Josh, detailing his past exploits and watching as he worked on engineering his comeback. (Which doesn't look like it's going so great at the moment.) The real bonus, however, is that Ondi Timoner (who directed DiG!) has allowed us to post a 12 minute concept trailer for We Live in Public, the unfinished documentary about Harris that she's been working on since 2000. It has lots of great footage from Pseudo and of the Silicon Alley scene.Link to story, and here's that trailer: Link.
the latest
latest episodes
Warning, the trailer is NSFW! Would be nice to note that before people click through.
Creepy. There's a fascistic undercurrent to the "Quiet" event. We Live In Public makes the whole experience look extremely unpleasant and sick. But the film seems like a fantastic document of Harris' extraordinary excess and hubris. I can't wait to see the finished documentary!
Harris seems to have been way ahead of his time in some ways, foreshadowing reality television shows like Big Brother. But he was totally wrong about the major cultural shift away from top down information and entertainment. Neither he nor anyone else in Silicon Alley seems to have groked the massive changes that were about to occur as soon as high-speed bandwidth became widely available. The extraordinary democratization of information distribution is the exact opposite of the top-down customization and control for which Harris seems to have had such a boner.