We Live in Public
The girls in this video by Brad Troemel (it almost exclusively happens to females) have had someone steal their photographs and create fake accounts with their names (via.) To prove their account is the right one, they take pictures or videos with their myspace number and send it to the community managers. None is any kind of celebrity, except in the very micro-sense — everyone that goes to punk rock shows in her hometown knows who she is.
The Internet has heard enough about Emily Gould this week, still, I found the passage where she showed her therapist (who insisted “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity”) the New York magazine article that nearly everyone in the media world read last fall, was a great anecdote about the strangeness of modern microcelebrity. Although Clive Thompson said it much better in Wired last year:
You could regard this as a sad development — the whole Brand Called You meme brought to its grim apotheosis. But haven’t our lives always been a little bit public and stage-managed? Small-town living is a hotbed of bloglike gossip. Every time we get dressed — in power suits, nerdy casual wear, or goth-chick piercings — we’re broadcasting a message about ourselves. Microcelebrity simply makes the social engineering we’ve always done a little more overt — and maybe a little more honest
Naomi Campbell will never know or care if you blog smack about her, but writers and editors, even of the highest prominence, do. When I was just started out, I wrote a flippantly dismissive post about a writer I respected but found excessively self-promoting. The writer came across my website (by googling her name and the word “brilliant,” as I saw in my referral log,) and sent me an angry note. Since then I’ve curbed every impulse to best anyone else.
What made Gould’s experience unique is, with obvious repercussions on her personal and professional life, she was paid to write about her immediate circle — the creative underclass, the people who thrive on attention, but also survive on their reputations. That’s you and me and everyone else who receives the New Yorker in her studio apartment. We’re all within reach of each other, even if some of us have more google hits — I even sat behind a friend of Gould’s discussing her relationship on his cellphone, while riding on the Chinatown bus the other night.
Blogging took off because of the dot-com crash. The media types — marketing, conference planning, pr, or something else — were the first to go when the tech bubble burst. Out of work and bitter, blog software meant they could finally go back to their roots in journalism. The World Trade Center disaster only sharpened their focus, giving a sense of purpose to their writing.
The web would look a lot different without those two historic — if unfortunate — events. We might have skipped blogging and moved straight to vlogging. The end result would be fewer citizen journalists and more Julia Allisons, and we’d be all the worse for it.
New York magazine called him the “The Warhol of Web TV,” in 1999, but Josh Harris “thinks Andy Warhol was his ‘advance man,’ a John the Baptist to his dot-com Jesus,” wrote Jim Hanas in a Radar feature last winter. Harris got rich (80 million rich) off a would-be TV replacing dot-com “Pseudo,” but he’s better know for his We Live in Public experiment, soon to be revisited in a feature documentary by Ondi Timoner (director of Dig!)
We live in public trailer from RADAR on Vimeo.
You can’t buy your way into the art world, but with enough money you can create a spectacle. Footage of his previous experiment Quiet, plays out like a classic Ballardian tale, but it is We Live in Public that startup-types still reference.
In 2000, his website Pseudo (screenshot) offered 60 hours of original programming a week. Streaming video “channels” skewed toward emerging subcultures, the post-indie rock, post-Liquid Television, post-Alleged Gallery art landscape waiting for the next new thing. Each channel, not unlike like Gawker Media sites, had its own web address, for the prescient purpose of specialized advertising. (Much more on this at the fascinating blog Ghost Sites of the Web.)
Richard Metzger had a show and Gary Baddeley, publisher of Disinfo remembers the site fondly, “If you were in New York in the late ’90s and you had anything to do with that first wave of dotcom madness, [the documentary clip will] really take you back … and realize that not only did Josh throw a great party, he really was a visionary.”
He definitely made a mark on the art world. Among other things, Harris funded a 2000 prank by Austrian-collective Gelitin, ”The B-Thing,” creating a fake balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center (later “woven into the complex tapestry” of WTC conspiracy theories.) And even Alana Heiss of PS.1 and MoMA came by to inspect his experimental art project/millenium party “Quiet,” eventually calling it “one of the most extraordinary activities I’ve ever attended anywhere in the world.”
“The image I have in my mind is a concentration camp,” he says about the bunker built for the experiment. Staged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway, it was, “part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment,” as Hanas writes. A hundred “pod people” were recorded from their Japanese capsule hotel beds (each equip with a video camera,) to the dining room, to the dance floor. There was a machine gun firing range, chess tournaments. Sex was filmed, even showers and toilets were set against the wall with no partitions. Participants were interrogated in a stark white room by a team of artists known as the Bureau.
Head interrogator Ashkan Sahini, an artist in real life, would do things like pull people out of their sleep capsules and grill them about their preference for white wine over red. “I am the asshole of this event,” Sahini said with considerable pleasure. “This is a society, and we will flip the rules around.” Sahini was accompanied by someone who introduced himself as Zero Boy, his platinum-haired “bodyguard,” who was dressed in a tight-fitting Soviet colonel’s uniform and carried a megaphone. What was that all about? “I’m a mercenary,” Zero Boy explained through his megaphone. “I have my own trip.”
They’d reveal their suicide attempts and heroin addictions. A “neo-fascist temple,” Harris calls it, but it was also a party. “The innocence and fun of New York pre-9/11 is recorded there in a way that’s really poignant to look at now,” documentary director Timoner told Radar.
Nearly 100 people checked in for the 10 days leading up to the New Year—but only after completing detailed background questionnaires, enduring intense interrogations, and donning orange and gray prisoner-style uniforms.
Everything was free, as long as you gave up rights to your image, which was constantly being captured. “Some people cried, but that was Josh’s thing,” says one so-called Podwellian, photographer Donna Ferrato. “He wanted to make people hurt, and get embarrassed and scared, and fight.” By New Year’s Eve, the scene was devolving into a lethargic mélange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict, and on January 1, with no end in sight, the FDNY, NYPD, and FEMA arrived to shut it down.
It’s been said FEMA mistook it for a “suicide cult.”
The next project was WeLiveinPublic.com (the dot-com address now long gone,) by his production company “Panopticon,” collaborating with video artists The Verbal Group, including influential new media artist, Yael Kanarek. Cameras were constantly surveilling he and his girlfriend, and briefly Will Leitch, now editor of Deadspin. His girlfriend broke up with him and left, making her the Emily Gould of February 2001, (although her personal essay ran in the New York Observer, not NYT magazine.) Comparisons to The Truman Show were then inevitable, because it and some Twilight Zone episodes (and the first few seasons of the Real World) were all the references we had to go on. Survivor also premiered in 2000. Remarkable when you think about it … we’ve had an almost decade-long conversation about the ethics of reality television.
Then 9/11 happened, then the blogs, and now we are going back to Pseudo-style web programming, taking the We Live in Public idea past absurdity. You can see aspects of YouTube and Second Life in Pseudo, even micro-celebrity, “People want fame in a day-to-day basis, not over a lifetime,” Harris says in the Vimeo clip. Some of his ideas the Internet has yet to incorporate — for one thing, we’ve yet to make it easy to meet people through the ether without some degree of creepiness. Chat rooms are all but forgotten (unless we can think of Twitter as a time-delayed chat room.) I remember in high school, MTV would occasionally stream chat room discussions underneath video (yes, that was when MTV played music,) and seeing my comments on my television renewed my angsty life with a sense of purpose. I definitely wish there were a chat room to discuss the We Live in Public documentary clip as I was watching it.
It’s interesting how blogging technology now is tilting toward private applications. The blog and web 2.0 marriage is an uneasy one. Facebook was the first to gate us in communities with people we already know (it’s no surprise it started at Harvard — to keep out the plebes.) A cynical answer is Tumblr (where your friends list is actually hidden from view,) Twitter, and Vox are all to promote insider connections. But I think the move is as much for privacy. We haven’t quite figured out what to do with all the information swimming around out there.
As you can see in the clip (and do watch it!) one of the “Bureau” interrogators remarks — with the bustering confidence typical of everyone involved in the project — that some of the pod people will one day be famous and Josh Harris will have a file on them, revealing, who has “had anal sex…which of their parents they love more.” That was a little too lofty a vision. There are so many micro-celebrities no one really cares about you no matter how many personal details you confess.
Who Needs Sleep?
None of you realise it yet, but this is an advance as big as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, it’s nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives. For the first time Man will be living a full twenty four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight hour peep show of infantile erotica…
Sometimes Neill’s aggressiveness surprise him; it was almost as if he regarded sleep itself as secretly discreditable, concealed vice. What I really mean is that for better or worse, Lang, Gorrel and Avery are now stuck with themselves. They’re never going to be able to get away, not even for a couple of minutes, let along eight hours. How much of yourself can you stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get the shock of being yourself. What happens if they get fed up with themselves? - J. G. Ballard, Manhole 69
Nap or more coffee? I ask myself this question several times a day. Like everyone else, I’m in sleep debt and the interest rate is a bitch. A few months ago, University of Pennsylvania researchers published a report in Nature making a hypothesis about sleep’s real function. They studied the sleep-like state known as “lethargus” of roundworms, observing that sleep is ubiquitous in nature. It enables nervous system plasticity — better performance, better memory, physical and mental wellness. In other words, sleep defrags your hard drive. Eight hours is the 8GB RAM stick you can install every night.
But it sure becomes a bother when there is so much more to be done. My favorite short story, Manhole 69, quoted above, is about a team of scientists trying to enable a 24-hour day. Read it and you will never consider even ripping off the telephone number from coffee shop flier to volunteer for a sleep study. But if you’ve seen The Machinist, you’ve already resolved to get at least 6 hours, if not 8. Curiously, the director of that film asked Christian Bale to starve himself for the role, while in fact, sleepless people tend to grow more obese (again, due to the neural plasticity, malfunction of the “hypocretin neurons” means one’s appetite never shuts off.) Sleep depravation so rapidly affects your endocrinology, you could be in a pre-diabetic state within several days.
On 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl talked with Matthew Walker, of the University of California-Berkeley Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, who says after five days deprived sleep, lab rats started to die. She also toured a sleep lab where the volunteers, mainly college students, were shown graphic disturbing images. The control group, who rested, had minimal response in the amigdula (the part of the brain that controlls emotions,) but the sleep-deprived had hyperactive brain activity. Participants described the unclean and slow feeling, like “moving through molasses.” Skin feels tight around the mouth and dirty, even after several showers.
Yet, for about $9,000 comp for four weeks of procedures, these volunteers made out better than the sad sacks who appear in “Solitary” on the Fox Reality Channel, where as Nick Douglas says, “they couldn’t even get as famous as a Blind Date contestant,” and only one of several walks about with 50k.
The most amazing thing about sleep is that evolution actually put us in danger — interrupting our consciousness — in order for us to experience it. Still, “polyphasic sleepers” try to hack it. Claudio Stampi, founder (and sole-proprieter?) of the Newton, MA-based Chronobiology Research Institute says you can get by on 20-minute nap every four hours, but I wouldn’t trust any place with so minimal a web presence. Polyphasic sleep advice is right here, and the web communities seem almost like pro-ana.
In 1964, Randy Gardner, then a 17-year-old high school student, went 264 hours (about 11 days) without sleep. It was just a benign science fair idea that blew out of proportion. Prior to that, radio DJ Peter Tripp went 8 days without sleep inside a glass booth in Times Square. He also experienced extreme hallucinations and psychosis, but was taking drugs to keep at it. Several people, like Tony Wright last year, claim to have beat Gardner’s record, but they were not under constant, careful observation. David Blaine is considering an attempt. “The idea came to me during a sleepless night,” he said. Recently, Britney Spears went 100 hours without sleep. Now do you see why sleep is necessary? Kindly then, get some rest tonight. If not for yourself, than for the people around you.
Related links:
- The Machinist
- “Sleep Has His House” by Anna Kavan
- “The Best Short Stories” by J. G. Ballard
- “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress
- “Why We Nap” by Claudio Stampi
- Wikipedia entry for Circadian rythm sleep disorders
- MSNBC on “Graveyard Shift Linked to Cancer”
- Gizmodo on “Darpa’s sleep-replacing nasal sprary”
- Radio Lab on “Sleep”
- Io9 on TV and circadian cycles.
- Mother Jones on the reality show Solitary, with TV clips
-
A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
-
Sponsor
Good Books
