My title of this week's article is not original. It's the name of a documentary that won last year's Sundance Film Festival

We live in public

My title of this week's article is not original. It's the name of a documentary that won last year's Sundance Film Festival (which is sort of like America's Cannes, if you can imagine all the cosmopolitan seaside Euro-film crowd transported to ski slopes in a small American town, where, legally, a man can marry three times).u00a0

The documentary follows a man attempting to be Nostradamus. The story was set in historical times ufffd in the age of dial-up modems and physical newspapers, pre- online ticket reservations, pre-broadband. In other words ufffd2001. The man, the story's fallen Caesar, was Josh Harris, an Internet entrepreneur and self-proclaimed amateur birthday clown.

In the golden age of the dot.com bubble era, our generation's flower power revolution, he did what everyone was doing at the time. He started and took Internet companies public on the NASDAQ and watched himself become a billionaire at 30 (on paper). If San Francisco and Silicon Valley were the heart of this revolution, downtown New York City, coined Silicon Alley, was its brain. Out of Soho and Chelsea lofts, ventures funded by 30 year-old Ivy leaguers and run by 20 year-old Ivy leaguers were born Ebay, Wikipedia and Amazon to name a few.

Mr Harris's venture Pseudo.com had this crazy idea that some day people would want to watch television and streaming video online.u00a0 When he said this, the founders of YouTube were seven years old.

But his plan didn't just end with saying TV and film would go to computers. That was just one step, which he referred to, as "taking NBC and News Corp and Warner Brothers and little things like that out of business". He believed that in the not too distant future, we would all live our lives in public. That privacy as we know it, would die. That the ultimate movie, the never ending story, beyond all of the entertainment the world offered at the time, would be each of our stories, told by us, online, all the time.

That some day, a performer entertaining us, an audience, would disappear. And us entertaining us, in a chain of connections that form the audience, would appear. Audience and performer would be the same person.

While most other Internet CEOs blew up their cash on girls and cars and penthouses, Mr Harris created an experiment to test his prediction. He created a state-of-the art multi-million dollar bunker in downtown New York, where, after rigorous interviews, a few hundred people were selected to live in. Everything would be paid for, every whim catered to, from the hippest parties, the best medical facility, to gourmet meals and fashionable booze, to the best leisure activities. There was one caveat ufffd the people would be filmed 24/7, doing literally everything in public (yes, those things as well), and his company owned the footage.

Initially, it was adult Disneyland; many romances, great friendships, utopia, but after a while, constant cameras drove people to hostility, fights, the verge of madness. In some months, his bunker was shut down for being illegal and he moved onto another experiment.

Him and his girlfriend decided to live their lives in public, with security cameras all over their apartment documenting them all the time on a website. The website had an audience of thousands, live chatting about the couple while watching them. Every time they fought, they rushed to their laptops to read comments. Their marital actions were guided by their online 'fans'. Eventually, his girlfriend couldn't take it anymore and Mr Harris found himself penniless and medically diagnosed insane for wasting his millions on crazy experiments. He currently teaches basketball to African orphans outside Adis-Ababa in Ethiopia but his critics say he ran away from the US to avoid American Express debts.u00a0

Ten years later, we live in Mr Harris' world. Reality television, from cooking to dancing to just living, has pretty much destroyed scripted television and instead of actors telling the camera a story, the camera has entered your home (Big Brother/ Bigg Boss/ Fear Factor being extreme, lunatic versions of that, with lunatics participating willingly). Facebook has hit 650 million users growing at 30 per cent a week.u00a0 Twitter plans to hit a billion within two years. That makes it the largest country in the world and despite Mr Nilekani's best efforts with India, they actually know every citizen by every personal detail imaginable, photos to document it and often, minute-by-minute. And this happens because we make it happen. Doomsayers say that we've created the ultimate big brother and our information can be manipulated to manipulate us into anything (I tried searching the word, "pudding", immediately extremely specific ads targeted me, including best screenplays featuring puddings, a screenwriter known as Pudding and a lady in my neighbourhood who writes plays and makes puddings).

Supporters say it's just a harmless way to stay in touch, grow fake vegetables and throw virtual animals at each other. Undeniably though, we've given away the ultimate private access ufffd the human mind ("Sonali is thinking life's a bore ufffd" etc.) which has shown us three things: 1. Thatu00a0 the human mind makes inane mediocre observations. 2. That people are nowhere near as busy as they claim to be. 3) How much time famous people spend just waiting for things (shoots, awards) or in things (cars, airports).u00a0u00a0u00a0

One's family, earlier the sacred purveyors of information, are now often, last to know of a development, perhaps after your follower @dirtyrahul678 whom you've never met. Last week, someone took a photo of Shabana Azmi's birthday cake at her private personal event and wrote an unnecessary article in a London paper about India's elite. A home, our once sacred space, is now the world.u00a0

Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.u00a0 Reach him at www.anuvabpal.com

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