Josh Harris strongly believes that the Technological Singularity will be reached and the human being will cease to be an individual, while the machine becomes the new king of the jungle.

May 9, 2010 7:45 PM

Is Josh Harris a media stunt?

I just watched that documentary about that guy named Josh Harris, you know, the guy that invented the internet...what you didn't know? Neither did I. So Igoogled him, and it seems that the guy on the deadliest catch gets more hits. His wikipedia page came back with limited details about him, some links to his businesses state that the facts are disputed. I did however find an old 2001 post on Metafilter about him from from back in the day, so now I'm left wondering Is Josh Harris real? I want to know if there is anyone out there that met him, worked with him first hand on any of his experiments or knows someone who did. Is this his next big experiment on us all or a media hoax?

posted by brinkzilla to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Best answer: As the author of that 2001 MeFi post: I remember contemporary reporting on the rise and fall of Pseudo.com and, obviously, the meltdown that was "We Live In Public".

Was the dot-com crash that long ago? Are the online archives of that period that subject to bitrot? I suppose in retrospect you could argue that a lot of the business ventures of the period were pretty damn fake. (My Kozmo messenger bag is a testament to that.) Perhaps Josh Harris was at the far end of that, but I think it's silly revisionism to say that it was done as some giant art-hoax in the Koons or Kostabi vein. He got stupid money to do stupid things, ran out of money, fucked off, and reappeared nearly a decade later.

So, I haven't seen the documentary "We Live In Public", but if you're looking at the scuttlebutt that the entire backstory is a fabrication (which seems to be hinted in the Wikipedia talk page for Pseudo) or Harris's post facto description of the project as "conceptual art", then that's just not the case.
posted by holgate at 8:58 PM on May 9, 2010

Plus, if you look at the BoingBong thread, you'll see NYC tech/culture/art veterans like Douglas Rushkoff chip in to comment. My guess is that the documentary and the publicity around it is playing in a weak performance-artsy way with the distinctions between "real" and "hoax", but that's the extent of it.
posted by holgate at 9:15 PM on May 9, 2010

Mod note: removed a few links, please don't use AskMe to make a stand-in MeFi post
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:51 PM on May 9, 2010

Is Josh Harris real? I want to know if there is anyone out there that met him, worked with him first hand on any of his experiments or knows someone who did.

I'll say that even at the time I had my doubts that this was all as real -- or at least as big -- as claimed. But there were a lot of crazy companies around that time, and later experiments like lonelygirl15 showed that media bubbles that existed outside of the mainstream could grow quite large indeed. Reputable outlets like OJR reported on them straight-faced.

Harris is on LinkedIn, and courtesy my MeFi/blog 1st order connections, he's a 3rd order contact for me. So some MeFites probably do know people who directly know Harris.

On the other hand, there is only one other person on LinkedIn who lists Pseudo.com as a company worked for. That surprises me; I know it was infamous, but I wouldn't think it would be a resume killer, either, given the ... other crazy companies of the day. I'm a bit surprised by that -- I'd imagine that there would be at least half a dozen veterans of the debacle who would have recovered and forged ahead into web production or development careers.

Anyway, some googling turns up a profile for Jim Hall, Pseudo's "streaming media guru" (who came with zero technical background, apparently), now working for a streaming media outfit I've also never heard of. And here's Dennis Adamo, the COO or something like that, now head of a company in Russia.

Beyond that, delving into the divergence of reality and claims, seems more of an exercise in sources. The company was something real, and yet probably something less than billed -- but lots of hype does not really equal hoax or performance art.
posted by dhartung at 9:53 PM on May 9, 2010

Speaking again to the resume issue, I do find it interesting that not only are the people who went on to technical careers apparently theater folk to begin with, the only identifiable individuals who have had post-Pseudo careers are also theater folk of one stripe or another.

Maybe it's more like The Producers?
posted by dhartung at 10:13 PM on May 9, 2010

Errol Morris did a really interesting and mildly creepy interview of Josh Harris as part of his First Person series: Harvesting Me. Makes it sound pretty darn real.

IIRC Pseudo wanted to be the first internet TV station (and sort of succeeded), and they had in-house productions of at least semi-scripted shows as part of their content. So some of Pseudo's employees were actors.
posted by mneekadon at 2:59 AM on May 10, 2010

My wife worked at psuedo.com. From what she's told me, he was strange and hit and miss to work with, especially toward the end. But yes, he's real.
posted by nevercalm at 6:52 AM on May 10, 2010

I've met and interviewed Harris in Pseudo's studio for a story at a newspaper I used to work at. This was right before the whole thing went bust. I wound up not writing the story because something was off about the whole thing but I couldn't figure out what it was. The shows they put on were real, if not very good. And his then publicist still does PR for a music company now.
posted by haqspan at 12:36 PM on May 10, 2010

I've met him. Pseudo/Jupiter threw fun parties in the mid-90s.
posted by judith at 4:12 PM on May 10, 2010 [1 favorite]