"Snack girl has covered herself in peanut butter."
Psuedo.com is still online. The last post on the website was over a decade ago in 2024. The last upload to the YouTube channel at time of writing was puzzlingly about a month ago. A digital dead mall, minus the lone holdout logged into the YouTube channel trying to hustle those auntie Anne's pretzels. It is actually fairly insane to look at pseudo back in the 90's when people would boot up their Real Player and get more buffering than video, be a clear ancestor to twitch.tv. Ahead of it's time is a bit of an understatement in regards to Josh Harris in general. The documentary "We Live in Public" was released in 2009, which itself is still over a decade ago, and notably prior to social media overtaking peoples entire lives and influencing elections. Facebook was only 3 years old, far before the height of it's ubiquity and far FAR before it's current dilapidated shrimp-christ boomer-fied state. Streaming video barely functioned in 2009 when the documentary was MADE and this dude was trying to do that shit in the 90's. Not just streaming video, but an entire internet tv network, which now looks like a strange combination as I personally don't see a lot of time-blocked linear broadcast ""content"" (god i hate that word) with internet streams. Maybe there are some freaks out there running internet tv networks that broadcast 24/7 and I simply travel in the wrong circles. I sincerely hope I am and that there are, and my email inbox dearly awaits someone proving me otherwise. This sort of curation from what I have seen is no longer done by humans but is instead done by ""the algorithm""
There's a small bit in the documentary where they mention how science fiction has always had video calls in it and that while it, I guess, did exist in 2009 the interviewee, of which i cannot remember whomst, says "yeah but have you ever actually done it? do you know anybody whos actually done it?", framing video conferencing as some sort of exotic rarity, and now people will face time each other in the fucking grocery store. Why are you subjecting every poor mother fucker in this particular Aldi to your FULL VOLUME video call? Let me buy my strange off brand crackers in peace. That's also not to mention the people in the WFH laptop caste who fucking dread zoom meetings and often simply don't turn their cameras on. The people in this documentary lose their shit over the prospect of video conferencing and capitalism in its infinite wisdom, has turned it into an inconvenience.
"one day we're going to wake up and realize we are all just servants, it's captured us"
I personally really loved seeing people at fucked up looking 1990's new york parties (that josh harris threw specifically to scrape talent from) because nobody is on their fucking PHONES the whole time. I am often unfortunately a part of this problem but it's so nice to see people just like living in the moment and connecting with other people without a fucking screen in the way. The threat of instant escapism and it's consequences loom large over this entire documentary. Josh seems to me a product of escapism, with his simultaneous lack of privacy, (he had like idk 8 siblings or some shit) and isolated childhood causing him to seek refuge with the tv family of Gilligan's Isle. This definitely puts a lot of his weird ass warped views on shit into perspective for me, as I've treaded similar waters in my life dissociating into whatever media was on hand, but i digress as I am, better or worse, built fuckin different. If not josh harris's warped views, it bare minimum puts the bizzare and incredibly cold videotape he mailed to his dying mother into perspective. The tape that he mailed too late as it got there after she died, and that I think he chose to simply make a tape instead of going to visit her as another way to maintain control, which i would like to point out this is me setting up extremely subtle foreshadowing return to later in the blog post.
Which from what I've gathered they didn't really have a great relationship to begin with anyway as at one point in the documentary josh says "in my darkest hour she was not there" and that "she doesn't know how to love" and that she worked with a bunch of delinquents and would come from work and have a martini and tell the kids to fend for themselves regarding dinner. He even straight up says "I loved my mother virtually and not physically". So he's got an emotionally vacant mother and his dad was apparently phsyically vacant as he traveled a lot working for the CIA, and that fact i will not be further dwelling on ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) to avoid being found with multiple self inflicted gunshot wounds.
"the more you get to know each other the more alone you've become"
To continue my armchair psychiatrist role, I think this is where the luvvy persona comes in as well, where Josh would slip in to luvvy the clown who as his fiance??? Girlfriend??? Wife?? Idk, as she said it was a desperate attempt to connect made by someone doing everything extremely wrong. The entire luvvy character seems like the kind of mind break someone so isolated and incapable of connection would develop as they are unable to just authentically be their selves. Quiet.: We Live in Public being funded by the luvvy llc I also find apt as the post apocalypse post money fascist society experiment was also an attempt to connect but done in all the wrong ways. The novelty of watching other normal people and broadcasting your daily life was new and fresh back in 1999, so much so that in order for the pod camera system to work it had to all be done through equipment for a 75 channel TV station. Now the technology fits in the palm of your hand and also, nobody gives a shit what you're doing. This all happened prior to the writers guild strike of 2007/2008 which caused reality tv to dominate the airwaves, back when people still gave a shit about broadcast tv. The concept of being able to share raw unedited footage of yourself and view others unfiltered lives pre-youtube, pre-justin.tv (later known as twitch.tv), was clearly revelatory, and the prediction that everybody would want their daily 15 minutes of fame was worryingly correct.
I wish the part about food, booze, and rent being free came true though, but instead all we got was the fascist interrogations. Well more accurately people willingly surrender so much information about themselves to render the interrogations pointless. The documentary credits one of the people in charge of the interrogations in Quiet as an "interrogation artist" which I also find disconcerting. What the fuck is an interrogation artist?
"this is hard enviroment to be sober in"
Quiet: We Live In Public, which I will now refer to simply as Quiet, is a very interesting sort of ancestor to the current digital landscape and one who's vibe I will absolutely fail to adequately capture here. In my pretention I would often talk about buying old forgotten media from the thrift store as a form of "cultural archeology" and this is an excellent specimen of the early 2000's. It's wild to think Quiet was pre 9/11. I genuinely do not think you could get away with doing this now. The fact nothing really bad happened in the complex that had both an open bar and a gun range is a miracle already. At least if some shit went down it would've had the background of some cool aesthetics because the cult like complex looks sick as fuck. I think the 2009 sort of lower quality footage is also adding a lot of weight to the vibe. The imperfections of a medium are what people try to replicate etc etc.
Josh Harris definitely was correct that this was a much better usage of his money than to just buy some cars and a house and some other bullshit.
"i just don't want to give them anything more. they'll kill me. They'll take something from me I can't replace."
Then you know there's like another third of the documentary left where josh moves in with his girlfriend and they film the entire thing and he becomes the rat in the maze rather than the one running the experiment, they break up, he buys a farm, some other shit happens, and then he moves to Ethiopia to avoid Amex (lmao), but i suppose if you want to know more about that you should probably just watch the fucking documentary yourself. I've got to go make short form internet content to grow the clout of my influencer brand before my BLT drive goes AWOL.okay alexa play "virtual insanity" by jamiroquai.