Nowadays, most of us don’t think twice before revealing more and more personal information onto the internet. Photos, videos, relationships, whole days left out for everyone to see. But, as I’ve been told by my parents time and again, it wasn’t always like this. The internet has single handedly changed how we think about privacy.

You might think that this was just a natural byproduct of the growth of the internet. An evolutionary progression brought about simply by the web’s inherent connectedness. But it’s not. It’s because of Josh Harris. In the late ’90s, Harris was the first person to experiment with and realize the immense power of living a “public” life. And he did it better than any of us fools.

I first saw Ondi Timoner’s documentary We Live In Public at the IFC Center last year, and it totally blew my mind.  You can now watch it on Hulu, and I would highly recommend that you do. Timoner, who made the excellent music doc DiG! about Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, struck gold again with the story of Josh Harris. I honestly had not heard about this guy before seeing the movie, and now that seems unbelievable to me. The influence that this dude had on how the internet, and subsequently culture in general has evolved over the past 20 years is astounding.

Harris was part of that first wave of dotcom kids who saw the future taking place on computers. But where others gravitated towards business or technology, Harris only cared about one thing: entertainment. His first project was something called Pseudo, and was the first relatively successful internet TV station. He just got a bunch of his friends together and pretty much strongarmed them into producing mass amounts of content for him to constantly stream. Basically it was Public Access 2.0. Come to think of it, it’s actually hilarious that his movie is on Hulu, because that shit would not exist without him.

Pseudo eventually folded, apparently because people didn’t like watching buffering low-quality vids of Harris and his homies. But his next project is where shit really got bananas. He rounded up 100 influential artists and friends (including the curator of MOMA and Ms. Timoner), and locked himself and them into a giant underground space he had purchased in NYC for like 3 months. He gave them unlimited free food, alcohol, drugs, and even guns. He also subjected them to weekly Gestapo-esque questionings by trained interrogators.

He created this fucked up post-modern wonderland, and the only rule was that you could not leave. Oh, and he wired it with hundreds of cameras streaming to the internet at all times. In the bathrooms, in the showers, even above the beds. The footage in the movie from that project is some of the craziest, rawest stuff I’ve ever seen.

Honestly, I could go on and on about this movie and why Harris’ work was so important, so I’m gonna try and cut myself off. But the footage from that and his other projects, coupled with the interviews with Harris now are just so damn interesting. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, all that shit he basically predicted. I’m not gonna lie, his outlook on how all this is gonna turn out is pretty grim, but this movie isn’t, like, overwhelmingly depressing or anything. It’s just super fucking captivating. Watch it, and prepare to think about how you conduct yourself online.

- Whole Milk