The Lonely City

by Olivia Laing

  What I am trying to say is that Harris predicted the internet’s social function, and that he did so in part by intuiting the power of loneliness as a driving force. He understood the strength of people’s longing for contact and attention and he also grasped the counterweight of their fear of intimacy, their need for screens of every kind. As he put it in the documentary We Live in Public: ‘If I’m in a certain mood and stuck with my family or friends, the alleviation to that are virtual worlds’ – a statement that seems obvious now but that in the 1990s was met with amused bafflement, if not outright ridicule.

  It seems he knew all this not just instinctively, but because his own early experiences had shaped him into an exceptionally ideal tenant of unreal spaces. There are at present two documentaries about Harris’s strange and turbulent life: We Live in Public, which was directed by Harris’s long-term collaborator Ondi Timoner, and Harvesting Me, an episode of Errol Morris’s First Person series. There is also a book, Totally Wired by Andrew Smith, which charts the rise and fall of the dotcom bubble by way of a wonderfully forensic account of Harris’s exploits over the years. All of these works contain scenes in which Harris describes his childhood, in characteristically aphoristic (also confusing, paranoid and unfinished) sentences, as notably unpeopled and friendless, his emotional support provided more by television sets than human beings.

  He grew up in California, though there was also a stint in Ethiopia: the youngest child in a family of seven, his brothers already well into high school while he toiled through elementary. His father often disappeared, once for so long that the family home was repossessed. His mother worked with delinquent children, drank heavily and was not, by his own or his siblings’ accounts, a nourishing, warm or even very present presence. He grew up semi-feral, foraging for himself and spending most of his time alone, glued to the TV, Gilligan’s Island a particular fixation. ‘I think,’ he said in We Live in Public:

  . . . that I love my mother virtually and not physically. I was bred by her to sit in front of a TV set for hours on end. That’s how I’ve been trained. You know the most important friend to me growing up was in fact the television . . . My emotionality is not derived from other humans . . . I was emotionally neglected but virtually I could absorb the electronic calories from the world inside the television.

  It’s the sort of thing you can imagine Warhol saying – not so much the neglect, but the sense of kinship with machines, the craving for electronic calories, the desire to enter into an artificial, looking-glass world. Both men maybe saw it as something like an equation, in which the need for intimacy and the fear of it create a stalemate, paralysis, and that rather than struggling in this lonely maze one might simply co-opt devices – cameras, tape recorders, televisions – using them as shields, distractions, safe zones.

  In fact, the two were frequently compared. In the 1990s, the press dubbed Harris the Warhol of the Web, though at the time this was more to do with his penchant for throwing parties and surrounding himself with downtown characters, particularly performance artists, than because he actually produced art himself. All the same, the lineaments of his childhood meant that, like Warhol, he understood the weirdly protective quality of screens, the sense that participating in virtual spaces might be a way of medicating a sense of isolation, a feeling of being left out or going unregarded, without requiring the subtle social skills necessary for IRL interactions. And after all, what better antidote to being alone, all one, than entering the replication machine of the internet, by which the virtues of celebrity could be made available to all.

  Harris established Pseudo along the now-familiar lines of social media corporations, with their breakout zones and cheerfully infantile, play-inducing furnishings. It was based in a loft at 600 Broadway, a space that a wry New York Magazine profile from 1999 described as being large enough to park a fleet of double-decker buses. Inside, Harris built himself a private apartment, making a personal enclave in what was otherwise a non-stop 24/7 zone of sociability, a frenetic combination of television studio and happening.

  Pseudo was conceived and run as a participatory domain, though as with Warhol’s Factory, it was always the same person who settled the bills. The door to the street was left open day and night, and there were endless parties, many of them filmed and uploaded on the station, blurring the distinctions between work and play, meat and cyberspace. Gamers playing Doom, The Matrix projected on to a wall, a queue of models and pop stars snaking down the street: the stuff of dreams, assuming the dreamer had been a nerdy friendless kid in Ventura with his nose to the tube.

  Towards the end of the 1990s, Harris’s interest in Pseudo began to wane in favour of an ambitious new project, which might be described as a month-long party, a psychology experiment, an art installation, a durational performance, a hedonistic prison camp or a coercive human zoo. Quiet was conceived as an investigation into surveillance and group living: an experiment designed to test the effects of the oncoming collapse of boundaries between the public and the private that Harris was convinced the internet would bring about. ‘Andy Warhol was wrong,’ he informed a journalist. ‘People don’t want fifteen minutes of fame in their lifetime, they want it every night. The audience want to be the show.’

  In the winter of 1999, he rented a dilapidated empty warehouse in Tribeca and set about transforming it into an Orwellian chamber of enchantment, helped by a team of artists, chefs, curators, designers and builders and backed by a seemingly unlimited budget of personal funds. The idea was that sixty people would spend the final month of the millennium living in a communal pod hotel he’d built in the basement. They would be unable to leave, though the public would be free to come and go, enjoying a bountiful libidinal playpen, in which all urges could be gratified, be it guzzling unlimited liquor at the free bar, dancing in a nightclub called Hell or discharging one’s aggression in a shooting range in the basement that was stocked with submachine guns and live ammo.

  Like Pseudo, Quiet was open to all-comers. Over the month of December, the bunker was a honeypot for the fin de siècle downtown scene, drawing queues right down the block. The novelist Jonathan Ames was among the crowd and in his ‘City Slicker’ column for New York Press he described his adventures there. ‘People,’ he wrote, ‘gathered night after night to drink, smoke pot, grab one another and see strange performances. It was like the Beat generation meets the Internet. Not the best combination perhaps, but amusing and unusually vital, though there was the sense of great waste; I think the Beat generation cultivated their madness on a much lower budget, which seems more virtuous, but that’s only because I have a poor man’s prejudice and snobbery when it comes to money.’

  All the beds in the pod hotel were rapidly filled, despite the exacting conditions of entry, which included the necessity of dressing in grey shirts and orange trousers – a uniform that is now disturbingly reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay. The space in which the new citizens of Quiet were confined offered no privacy whatsoever. The bunks were crammed into a single subterranean dormitory, army style. There was only one shower. It had glass walls, and was situated in full view of the dining hall, where elaborate gourmet meals were served free of charge three times a day.

  In fact, everything at Quiet was free. The price of entry into the bunker wasn’t money, but rather a willingness to surrender control over one’s identity. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, even in the toilets, streaming to the web. Furthermore, each of the sleeping pods was fitted with a two-way audio-visual system, a camera plus television set. These devices converted Quiet into a panopticon and its citizens into both prisoners and jailers, at once the subject and the object of scrutiny.

  They could look as much as they liked, flicking through the channels, settling on this or that pod, watching people eating or defecating or having sex. They could gorge themselves on feasts of the eye, but they couldn’t hide. They could watch whatever face or body took their fancy, but they could not protect themselves from being regarded by the camera�
�s unstinting gaze, though they could work to generate an audience, to acquire the glitter that comes from being regarded by multiple eyes, the high wattage sheen lent by mass attention. Quiet wasn’t just a metaphor for the internet. It was the thing itself, enacted by real bodies in real rooms; its feedback loops of voyeurism and exposure.

  Like the internet, what seemed transient was actually permanent, and what seemed free had already been bought. In his understanding of this, Harris was notably prescient, something that can be seen when one contrasts Quiet with an essay written the same year by the critic Bruce Benderson about cybersex and the effect of the internet on communities and cities, entitled ‘Sex and Isolation’. In it, he writes: ‘We are very much alone. Nothing leaves a mark. Today’s texts and images may look like real carvings – but in the end they are erasable, only a temporary blockage of all-invasive light. No matter how long the words and pictures stay on our screens, there will be no encrustation; all will be reversible.’ This statement captures the anxieties of the web 1.0, its now painful innocence, and fails to foresee what Josh did: the grim permanence of the web to come, where data has consequences and nothing is ever lost, not arrest logs, not embarrassing photos, not Google searches, not the torture logs of entire nations.

  On arrival, the citizens of Quiet signed away the rights to their own data, just as we do when we persist in treating corporate spaces of the web as private diaries or zones of conversation. Everything recorded was owned by Harris, including information gathered by way of increasingly brutal and intrusive interrogations, apparently carried out by a genuine former CIA operative. These interrogations form one of the most distressing aspects of the documentary We Live in Public. Over and over, clearly vulnerable people are grilled by uniformed guards about their sexual proclivities and mental health, with one weeping woman asked to demonstrate exactly how she’d cut her wrists, the speed and angle of the blade.

  It sounds like hell, and the footage looks like hell, the uniformed people fucking in their kennels, as a rattled-sounding Josh says on camera: ‘There’s all these people around you at close quarters and the more you get to know each other the more alone you become. That’s what this environment is doing to me.’ And yet most people seem on balance to have relished their time in Quiet, or at least to have been glad they’d been through it, though they also attested to increasing fights, as drug use and proximity and lack of privacy ate away at the inmates.

  The party came screeching to a halt in the early hours of the new millennium, when Quiet was raided and shut down by the police and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, apparently because of concerns that it was a millennial cult (the noise of guns being discharged, audible from the street outside, cannot have helped). The bust was part of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s clamp down on licentiousness and crime, his attempt to clean and order the city by way of what was known euphemistically as the Quality of Life Task Force, the same mechanism responsible for the sanitisation and desexing of Times Square. As dawn broke over Manhattan, as the twenty-first century began, the citizens of Quiet were thrown out into the street, the machinery of closeness abruptly shut off.

  The sadism that makes Quiet appalling as a viewing spectacle also clouds its purpose. It reveals people’s greed for attention, yes, but the message of danger is diminished by the suspicion that a single person is manipulating the situation, ratcheting up the stakes. Watching the footage of interrogations, or of a group of orange-clad people ogling two strangers having athletic sex inside a shower, one has the sense that someone invisible is yanking the strings: someone who will do anything to generate effects, create drama, keep the viewer hooked. On some level, Harris must have grasped this, because his next project was simpler, more self-exposing and far more declarative.

  In We Live in Public (the documentary takes its name from the work), Harris turned the cameras on himself and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin, a former employee and his first serious relationship. Having exposed people’s desire for participation, their frantic need to be witnessed, he now wished to assess the cost of this kind of surveillance, to see the human effects of collapsing whatever boundaries exist between the public and the private, the real and the virtual. Again, let me restate that this is in 2000, three years before MySpace was founded and four years before the launch of Facebook, when social media had not yet begun, let alone become entrenched enough to generate the kind of anxiety that is familiar today. The television show Big Brother had recently begun on television, but that simply put people into a decreasingly comfortably appointed prison and let unseen viewers vote them out. What Harris wanted to do was open the channels, to let audience and show bleed into one.

  That fall, he filled his apartment with sophisticated recording equipment, including dozens of automated cameras. For 100 days, he and Tanya would live entirely in public, come what may. The footage harvested was streamed on to the project’s website, where it appeared on a split screen, the other half of which was dedicated to discussion by a shifting online community, who not only watched but also responded and engaged. At the project’s height, thousands of people were logging on, watching Josh and Tanya eating, showering, sleeping, having sex.

  At first, the relationship bloomed under these artificial lights, but as the scrutiny intensified cracks began to form. From the beginning, the watchers commented on what they saw, a relentless chorus, a talking mirror, by turns flattering and savage. What was being said? Better check, the two of them in separate rooms, assessing their feedback, comparing their popularity, tweaking their behaviour in accordance with demands. When they fought, the watchers took sides, generally Tanya’s, advising her on ways of handling Josh, telling her to make him sleep on the couch, telling her to force him to move out.

  Under this kind of barrage, this seeping of the virtual into the actual, Josh became progressively more isolated and embittered, not helped by the fact that his fortune was leaking away, the millions vanishing as swiftly as they’d materialised. 2000: the year of the stock market crash, the bursting of the dotcom bubble. Eventually Tanya left, a humiliating public separation, and he stayed on in the loft alone with a hostile crowd of spectators, trapped in a malicious room of knowing ghosts. Then the audience too began to dwindle, and as they melted away Josh felt the elements of his personality disappearing with them. Without the attention, without the scrolling responses, did he even exist? An abstract question, Philosophy 101, until you look at the footage of him moving between rooms, spooked and bloated, something blank about his face, like a man who has suffered a blow to the head.

  *

  I first saw the documentary We Live in Public in a way that would have been unthinkable ten years before. A friend I knew from Twitter, Sherri Wasserman, inaugurated a film festival designed for the internet. At first, the idea was to watch films about isolation while physically isolated but technologically connected. Over time, the focus shifted to prisons both real and imagined, among them the two designed by Harris.

  There were six of us at the first Co-Present festival, scattered across America and Europe, watching on our laptops and talking via Gchat. We got to We Live in Public last, after a triple bill of Into the Abyss, Escape from New York and Tokyo Drifter, which is to say blindsided by images, by hours and hours spent immersed in the glowing innards of our computers. All those films were beautiful and disturbing, relevant in different ways, but We Live in Public felt like confronting something personal, something ugly and increasingly uncomfortable. Looking at the chatlog now, we all sound stunned. SW: this increasingly looks like the cocky internet startup mogul’s version of the Stanford Experiment. ST: I feel like I’m going crazy. AS: it’s seriously fucked.

  I can’t speak for the others, but I was frightened by what I saw, and frightened by what it meant for me. Somehow, I’d woken up in the future. I think we’re all in Josh’s room now. I think the salient point about the new world we’ve been drifting into is that all the walls are falling down, everything blurring into everyone else. In this atmosp
here of perpetual contact, perpetual surveillance, intimacy falters. Hardly any wonder Josh fled the city the day after We Live in Public ended, spending the next few years hiding out on an apple farm upstate, recovering or recalibrating his sense of boundaries, drawing his self back into the outer casing of his skin.

  Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying. In conversation after a screening of We Live in Public at the MoMA, the director Ondi Timoner said of Quiet that though it was in many ways a totalitarian space, ‘it didn’t matter . . . It was more important to get the attention of the camera if at all possible, and there were 110 of them, so it was like a candy store for people who wanted to feel that they were part of something’, adding emphatically: ‘What I did not realise at the time was that this was what the internet would become.’ She saw the film explicitly as a warning, saying: ‘I think we have to be conscious of what we’re after when we’re posting our photo. I think we all have a desire not to feel alone and to feel connected and that’s a basic desire, but in our society celebrity has become the golden lamb . . . if I can get that, I won’t feel alone and will always feel loved.’

  Love without risk. Love that is simply the dissemination of one’s own face, its incessant replication. In the Errol Morris documentary Harvesting Me, Harris muses on his life in a way that implicitly conflates identity with the experience of being watched. ‘My only friend was the tube . . . I’m a celebrity. There are people who watch me . . . I’ve got this Greek chorus watching me me me.’ It’s as if each extra set of eyes enlarges and reinforces the object of the gaze, that fragile, swollen me, though they are also capable of tearing it to pieces.