If Al Gore invented the Internet, dot-com millionaire Josh Harris embodied it. As a lonely child, his personality was shaped by TV — he loved Gilligan more than his mother. “I’ve been programmed by someone else’s dream,” he says, and the ’90s web boom gave him the cash, power and audience to share his public isolation. Before ‘Survivor’, he crammed 100 extroverts into a Manhattan warehouse and recorded the chaos; he celebrated his first girlfriend by lining their loft with cameras and streaming their life online. Broke and humiliated by 2001, he eventually unplugged his web cams and vanished.

Director Ondi Timoner uses Harris’ astonishing rise and crash to plug into the white noise of communal voyeurism that Harris predicted a decade before Twitter. When nothing is private, nothing is special — a lesson Timoner learned firsthand in a Harris experiment which ended in guns, tears, and rote orgies. This disturbing documentary argues that, like Harris, we’re headed for a breakdown on a mass scale as we realize his warning that “Big Brother isn’t a person. It’s a collective consciousness.”

(LAFF)