The movie follows Josh Harris, an internet pioneer from the ninties who turns into a performance artist after making millions with his first dot com. He creates a society called "quiet" which documents every waking moment of a society of trapped and manipulated volunteers. He goes onto creating a Truman-show-esque living situation with his girlfriend of which they document thier entire lives, culimating into the end of the only meaningful relationship in his life.
You watch his disturbing, attention grubbing, needy, inner most self come out when he is his most successful, an his true innovative genius come out when he is the most down emotionally and financially. The movie also speculates on how the relationship with his mother may have contributed to his mental instability later on, a journalistic speculation that I wasn't entirely convinced with.
Josh Harris believed that soon technology would become us. Our deep lonliness would eat us up inside, creating exposure that would not show the true us as we would hope, but rather an us that is manipulated by our need for other people. Okay, fine. I can see how someone so lonely would make that prediction about the world. My problem was that they made a connection to blogs, all technology. I don't know about him, but my use of this blog and technology is about self expansion and learning. In no way is it the brainwashing self destruction that Josh Harris illustrated with his social experiments.
On another note, this Josh Harris fellow went to my alma mater. I choked on my chips when I saw him sporting a UCSD sweatshirt during one of his video interviews. In this article, he notes that UCSD gave him some of the ideas he had for his social experiments. He used UCSD as inspiration for his sick, brilliant, insensitive social experiments. I can't be suprised. UCSD has such an essence that breeds isolation. They built this campus in the sixties to segregate students groups in order to dissuade riots and protests. The atmosphere has evolved into a breeding ground for lonliness, culimating into at least one brilliant mentally ill man to create societies of hyper connected people that are, at the end of the day, alone.