When I first saw this documentary several years ago, I was shocked at how accurate and mostly terrifying the reality of the “social” life may really become. The story follows the life of Josh Harris, a cross between Mark Zuckerburg and Andy Warhol, and his wild success as a pre-dot-com entrepreneur, dot-com entrepreneur and through the experimental phase of “Quiet: We Live in Public” and later his relational broadcast of weliveinpublic.com.

Both of these experiments explore the human response to endless publication of their lives on television/film and later on the Internet. It would be easy to largely dismiss the contents of this documentary under the title: “Psychoanalysis of a narcissist, egomaniac–Josh Harris,” but that would miss some of the chilling foreshadowing of the experiments on our modern social sphere.

At one point, Harris says of the Quiet experiment in a chilling Faustian tone:

“Everything is free… except the video that we capture of you. THAT we own.”

Those words have an ominous echo throughout the film. The participants in the experience were afforded all of the accouterments of hedonism in exchange for their images, their reactions…their lives recorded and catalogued–not too dissimilar from our current photos, posts, and shares.

What intrigues me most, and obviously was at the heart the documentarian Ondi Timoner‘s quest into Josh Harris’s life: what did these experiments tell us about our social sphere today?

As we thumb through our Facebook timelines, we see people “freely” sharing intimate details about their lives. Sometimes we peer deep beyond the image of our friends into the very telling observations that they make about the world as we see their check-ins, step-outs, break-ups, and make-ups. In fact, we’ve even seen the very public RU-486 abortion of Angie Jackson shared to the whole world.

So, without the contrived mounting of hundreds of cameras throughout our homes (as Harris did in the weliveinpublic.com experiment), we do carry our own broadcast studios in our pockets that can, with seconds notice, publish every secret detail of our lives.

All of this sharing is in the name of “social” media is much like the presumption of “social” in Harris’s public house. However, the harsh reality is that Harris seems like an Antarctic pioneer–alone, cold and lost.

While my experience with social has far different results, most of my “virtual” relationships have resulted in rich, real human interactions. The fear lingers that some may find themselves adrift on that Antarctic shore of social desolation.

We do increasingly live in public.