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Sometimes very smart people can seem like prophets. Especially in their area of expertise. Josh Harris is just one of those people. You probably don’t know whom he is, but you should. He knew how you’d be living today back in 1999. Ondi Timoner’s documentary delves into his predictions, as well as his personality. He began as an Internet pioneer and transformed into a Machiavellian artist.

In 1984, Harris was first exposed to what would become the Internet and knew right then and there that it was the future. He started Jupiter Research, which made wildly accurate predictions out the Net’s future, and later sold it for $80 million. Taking that money, he launched the first Internet TV site called Pseudo.com when most people were still using dial-up. He was rolling in so much dough that he also became legendary for massive Studio 54-like parties. But it was more than simple decadence, the gatherings brought in top young artists in NYC, which would become the creative lifeblood of Pseudo’s programming. Before his channel had any competition, he was telling programs like 60 MINUTES that the Internet was going to take over television.

Pseudo.com, like many dot-com firms in the late 1990s, survived on venture capital. This is when Harris began indulging in his artistic side, making a psychedelic CG animated short film called LAUNDER MY HEAD and making appearances as the twisted clown Luvvy. His behavior started scaring off investors so he was pushed out of his company. Harris just disregarded Pseudo.com as an art experiment and moved onto his next big project, Quiet.

Quiet was a massive performance-art experiment that was a disturbing mix of Big Brother and fascism. Harris created an elaborate bunker where he offered people to come and stay for a month, providing everything they needed for free. The rules were that everything they did would be filmed, they had to participate in a cruel interrogation by actors playing a psychologist and Orwellian guard, and once they came they could not leave. The participants slept in pods and could change their TV to watch people sleeping or having sex in other pods. Chaos of course ensued and the constant eye began to work on subjects’ minds. Because of his control over the entire experiment, Harris was referred to as Oz. The drugs, cult-like church display and fully stocked gun range, however, did not go unnoticed by Rudy Giuliani and his police force.

Next, Harris decided to stop playing with rats in his maze and became one himself. His next project became We Live In Public, where he and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin, literally lived in public. Their apartment was installed with cameras everywhere, including the bottom of the toilet. And that didn’t produce the ugliest footage.

Timoner, who was a resident of Quiet herself, paints Harris as a slightly mad genius. He was a boy in a large family who never got the affection from his mother that he wanted. Subsequently he was raised by the TV — GILLIGAN’S ISLAND was his favorite show. He predicted that through the Internet people would lay themselves bare before there was Facebook or YouTube. He was an innovator of chat rooms on Prodigy. He predicted how TV and Internet would combine in more interactive ways. He expressed these predictions through his businesses and artistic adventures. He was a risk-taker, passionate and extremely controlling. He saw Big Brother coming and wanted to be his Daddy.

Now Internet leaders, like MySpace creator Chris DeWolfe, don’t even know who Harris is. It’s hard to imagine where he ends up after We Live In Public, but when you see it, it makes strange sense. This is one of the best films of 2009, because it both captures the time period right before 9/11 and one prophetic man brilliantly. In they way he was raised and the advances he predicted, Josh Harris represents the entire Internet generation.

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