An internet pioneer presciently enacted total surveillance culture before Facebook existed
Evidence
IN 1999, YEARS BEFORE FACEBOOK WAS FOUNDED and just as Google was getting out of a garage, Josh Harris not only predicted but enacted the future of the internet in an art project he called Quiet: We Live in Public. Harris was a brilliant yet somewhat disturbed entrepreneur who made a fortune by creating platforms that integrated user content and new media in visionary ways. For Quiet, he set up an underground bunker where volunteers lived for a month in hive-like conditions, cameras recording their every moment. Room, board, and amenities were provided free of charge. The experiment, which included Stasi-style interrogations and plenty of sex, drugs, and guns, ended in near catastrophe, but not before Harris had come up with the credo for the social quantification sector, captured in the preceding quotation. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 157
Categorization
- STORYSTEM: The Quiet: We Live in Public bunker experiment — free housing in exchange for total surveillance, Stasi interrogations, ending in catastrophe — is a ready-made dystopian fiction premise and may grip a reader who wants to fictionalize surveillance economics.
- SHARE: The Josh Harris Quiet experiment detail is precisely the kind of thing to send to the one friend interested in surveillance history or We Live in Public.
- XREF: connects to: AOL monetized user data before Facebook and Google did — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 737
Broader Connections
- AOL monetized user data before Facebook and Google did
#corroborates(0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 737