Draft

With its California counterpart, Red Asphalt , Signal 30 (1959) is remembered for its graphic, IRL footage of mechanized death, dismemberments and the kind of bloodshed that, unlike celluoid, only flows in one direction. It was filmed by the Highway Safety TK and eventually went on to win the National Safety Award. The title takes its name from the Ohio State Highway Patrol for a fatal car accident. Up until the mid-1980s, the film was shown exclusively to high school students. Writing on the dissemination of digital photographs depicting the torture of prisoners of war by Americans, in 2004, Susan Sontag observed that “the Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.” The risk of forgetting history and having to repeat it is replaced with never being able to unsee it again. On the internet, ‘drive’ is often used as a metric of engagement for web traffic. And, on the internet, everybody is somebody’s Nazi; everyone gets a little stranger. Schizoposting is an advanced form of trolling in which one pretends to have a psychotic episode in order to “role-play”. Some qualifier about traffic, trolling here For those of you who didn’t spend lockdown, and the months of recession that followed, on the side of the internet with the bad drivers, meet: “Sonya”, the Islamic pick-up artist who may or may not be a eugenicist; “Miya”, who wants you to know that this ‘grooming’ isn’t usually driven by anyone (“It just happens”); “Charlotte Fang”, alleged “antisemitic cult leader” and the infodense “Chloe21E8”. Chloe is an A.I. that Fang refers to as Milady’s “brightest graduate”, but who might in fact be the auteur Angelicism01. Together they comprise the visible portion of the part of the internet known as 4-chan, and channers are legion. Intentionally lacking closure, the presentation of trigger films in classrooms mediated discussions of morality and industrial jeopardy in the 20th century. In the 21st, for every dozen or so e-girls spliced into the multi-hour internet epic, Film01, the audience is no more sadistically exposed to scroll-stopping environmental disaster footage —a mountain of burning tires, an electric fire on a wind farm— than they are to the Holy Grail of e-commerce: the ad. The short-form video hosting service TikTok was launched in 2016 as Douyin for the ⅕ of global internet users based in mainland China. By 2019, the platform had attained global status as a cornerstone of influencer marketing. We often talk about the influencer but we don’t often name the influenced. What’s influenced, it’s assumed, is culture. Prior to releasing a full length feature film starring everyone whose anyone in the New York City downtown, “Angelicism01” was, like Curtis Yarvin, just another middle-aged blogger with a funny name. Now the "schizo-philosophy Substack writer Angelicism01" emerges and disappears behind a legion of proxies as a cult personality, but maybe the kind an emerging online generation both desires and deserves. At the same time, it’s like a vacuum of Empire where authorship used to be. A profile published in 2022 mentions Angelicism01 - a.k.a. “New Yorks most in-crowd shit-poster” - almost as an attribute, an aura of the crypto-personage Charlotte Fang; part of “a group of people who are cool on the internet”; not even particularly as a character, but a channel. The ritual of controversy that clings to Angelicism01 like a reputation is a dramatic identity that happens like the answer to a demand made by no one, but that may be leveraged by many in an effort to corner a market as ambiguous as its values. Something about GameStop here None of these people exist, except on Twitter, but this summer they are at a theatre near you. In a tweet stepping down as CEO of the crypto corporation, Remilia, Fang iterates, “my real views hold no room for hate, and I detest abusers & groomers — trolling about it was juvenile, but in reality I’ve never harmed a fly.” d;lfkgj What feels difficult about Fang and Angelicism is their uneasy, but prominent, proximity to the New York City art world. Since its premiere eight weeks ago, *Film01* has been talked about as an "ongoing act of serializable internet cinema" and also as a "cult induction"; as a "non-committal mythologizing of the author and their acquaintances" and also as something dangerous; something that doesn't just talk about shock, trauma, idealism and extinction but hinges on these things and also defends them. "August 9, Film 01 returns to Anthology Film Archives with a second, 125 min directors cut. For Spike Magazine, shortly after Film01’s premiere, and in lieu of being able to recall a moment in Film01 that wasn’t "sacrificed and replaced not with desire but with nothing", Madeline Cash leaks the text messages I receive shortly after the event began: You will be kept there until you are dead tired, then shown hours of loud imagery and slow, dreamlike sequences. Then, once the hypnosis phase is deep, they will move over to a chapter created by Charlotte Fang At Anthology Film Archives, when I hear the word culture I take out my gun became literal when rumors of an active shooter (or rumors of rumors of an active shooter) circulated alongside sightings of Dasha Nakrova. Ticket sold out a month prior. During the screening, it was unclear how many in the audience are cast and crew or just tweeting about it, but there were at least 300 people in the second floor theatre. Most are too young to remember We Live in Public, or even MySpace. The ones that do are embittered Millennials. Now, two months after the first screening, an invitation posted to substack earlier this week announced the second screening event of FILM01. The tone this time is less like a Milady rave and more like a Yoga studio. If first event involved a questionnaire, a waiting list and scene reporters turned away at the door, the invitation to TK TK presented an appeal to vulnerability. Meaning: Film01 is viral, and it’s been validated that Film01 is viral. These days a 20-tweet thread befells empires. Back it up on GitHub, and you will have done a public service. Amongst other allegations, the documents that led to “Charlotte Fang”’s resignation as CEO of Remelia, the parent company of the NFT line Milady, included more than one mention of a suicide cult. Film01 is not about these direct narratives, but these circulations (of information, of speculation) are the substance of Film01’s lyric montage: “We don’t need cinema. If we can train our minds to see. If we can see as films see.” The warnings were right: Film01 is seductive, and the threat to our security isn’t what’s on screen, but the people sitting next to us. This movie has everything except a narrative, so what surrounds it are the stories that stop the scroll. Comprised entirely of found footage, (some of it appropriated), and produced by the cast of downtown New Yorkers from which it was commissioned (some of whom were paid), the project thrusts the surreal drama of social media into cinema at the same time as it obscures it as expidenture. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen Film01 if you can pretend to have seen Film01, and if you can pretend to have seen it, then you’re in it, and if you’re in it, you’re cancelled. Cinema doesn’t need cinema when the metadata is thicker than the plot. In simpler times, we had Josh Harris. Now we have Angelicism01. A 1999 issue of New York Magazine features the former Pseudo CEO, Harris, as the the Andy Warhol of Web 1.0. The entrepreneur hung out with people like Alfredo Martinez, the sculptor who built a gun range in Harris’s SoHo loft, and was close with the art dealer Leo Keonig, then 24. Harris’ “sport” was videotaping art events but his “thing”, he alleged, was “Fine Art”. Harris’ company, Pseudo, was an early pioneer in web cinema. The NY Mag feature reports Harris as a “a major player in the race to define the post-television future of broadcast entertainment – an area of intense interest on Wall Street and in Hollywood now that cable and phone companies are scrambling to install high-speed Internet connections into millions of homes.” EXPLAIN HOW YOU’LL OUTCOMPETE THE SUPERINTELLIGENCE, OR ILL FUCKING BLOCK YOU! DON’T DUMB IT DOWN INTO SOME VAGUE SHIT! EXPLAIN HOW YOU WILL DO IT TO ME RIGHT NOW OR I’LL LITERALLY BLOCK YOU. EXPLAIN HOW SOMETHING HUMAN MAKES IT OUT OF THE NEAR FUTURE. DON’T DUMB IT DOW— In July of 2001, Harris rented a top-floor suite at the Millennium Hilton across from the most security-conscious corporate office building in the world. The conditions of this party, the “B thing”, were extremely vague. It would involve cell phones and a private helicopter. Because the art collective, Gelatin, happened to use an office on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center for art storage, “After you have a certain idea you can’t go back because everything else seems very weak compared to it.” This seems to be the driving thrust behind theories Sonya, the Islamicist pick up artist “You have to decide whether you want to experience this. But plz know this: This is not a film screening. It’s a cult-induction event. You will be kept there until you are dead tired, then shown hours of loud imagery and slow, dreamlike sequences. This is all designed to induce a trance/hypnosis. Then once the hypnosis phase is deep, they will move over to a chapter that is created by Charlotte Fang (disgraced cult-leader/pedophile) who will implant deep triggers and terrible, awful things (though they will look and sound beautiful). [Fang was in no way involved in the making of Film01] A Siren song. This is dangerous psychological warfare. Block your own eyes/ears as needed, like Odysseus who put wax in his ears and had his crew strap him to the mast so that he would not kill himself. Or exit the theater if you need. No matter what, stay in control. You will be less susceptible than others because you are not as young. For the 21 y/o's it is easier to induce. But you’re still a person, and our brains are susceptible. Sorry you have to hear all this from me. /not a joke” “All I want is to wake from hibernation in the twenty-third century so that I can upload myself to whatever collective intelligence there will be at the time and tweak on the history of the internet till then.” In 2023, “we don't need cinema. If we can train our minds to see. If we can see as films see.” The apparatus, here, is a plane of consistency upon which art and life mediate social representation, and social relevance: you can check your phone any time you like, but you can never leave. Angelicism’s 180 minute, direct-from-device, microcrowdsourced motion picture has been compared to the meta-cinema of Ryan Trecartin, Hito Steyerl and 1999's Blair Witch Project. this will take more than a “noncommittal mythologizing of the author and their acquaintances”, including “self-deprecating indexes of perversions, hookups and nightlife encounters” but will have been less about direct narrative than about norm sending. “Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception," wrote one former Google employee on his Medium blog in 2017. Chloe is Milady’s brightest graduate. You must understand she is performing infodense schizo-dialectics in the mode of network spirituality. It's pure meaning, condensed; you must resist the impulse to dismiss it as nonsense for its difficulty. You must submit.’ “There are no events that cannot happen in the universe. Therefore, the extinction obtains. Why? Because it has been thought. Why? Because it is everywhere.” Scott Litz takes note of "this style” when he identifies a Sometimes called trigger films, the genre of social guidance educational film is less about narrative than it is about norm-sending. " Marcel Mauss remarked on the ritual destruction of wealth observed in both primitive society and the Leisure Class. Rumors of an active shooter surrounded the Film01's initial screening. Stupid like a painter? to gain entry involved an application questionnaire, a pre-approval process and a lengthly waitlist. With the tact of an especially epic amusement park ride, information on the event is peppered with references to safety and a vague NDA: "There will be no +1s. We ask that you keep location information private for our safety, and that you refrain from sharing any photos or information about the premiere until it has ended.” In the late 1960’s and 1970’s, a collection of artists, filmmakers and composers gathered night after night to view the repertory of modernist film put together by Mekas and projected in an a screening room in New York's Soho, where in the late '60S and early '70S a collection of artists, film/makers, and composers gathered night after night to view the repertory of modernist film put together by Jonas Mekas and projected in an unvarying cycle… Meaning: Film01 is viral, and it’s viral that Film01 is viral. "Good or evil," Cash concedes, "Angelicism is influential." Just as the President was “sorry for the humiliation”, but not for the violation of human rights under the Geneva convention, just as he was <i>equally</i> sorry that the people seeing these pictures “didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.” Tweeted Fang: “its toxic baggage that’s hurting Milady community & poisoning the vibe”. Fang, who was not directly involved in the production of Film01, features prominently in the lore around it, having “incited a number of ‘beefs’ as if by automaton’. A Lower East Side art dealer throws his hands up and mumbles something about groomery: "The stuff I've heard isn't good”. In laying an introduction to the post-medium condition, Rosalind Krauss must pass through the Soviet and French avant-garde theater, the silent documentary, early versions of American independent film, Chaplin. She does not have to pass through 4-chan. The first clip in Film01’s 180m magazine of images is a row of “Rainbow Girls” grinning from what appears to be a locker room. The fidelity is low, and the clips that follow compress and collage multiple generations of iphone into a portrait of the generations to come. "We are so glad you're here," the lineup of girls announces in the establishing apparatus. Apparatus, as opposed to a shot, or: a shot, because it interpellates? Dumb like a painter? For many, "trying to derive meaning from Film01 is like squeezing blood from a stone" (Cash) yet the logic of how we derive labor from influencers seems to be the most obvious thing. Lola Jusidisman, 28, a producer on Film01 let it slip that what was screened for Film01's debut was one of a half-dozen derived from seven-hour “Paradise Cut”. The press kit Jusidisman forwarded the following week reported a turnout of over 300 people to the first screening event, with tickets having sold out by May. Sontag’s observations of the Bush administration’s knee-jerk responses to “discovering” the widespread use of torture in American military bases, and along the lines of an international division of labor, is a point of view the 2010’s came to know as “woke”. A year ago, the moniker Angelicism01 was a online pseudonym amongst online psuedonyms. Today, the "schizo-philosophy Substack writer Angelicism01" emerges and disappears behind a legion of proxies, a fit of publicity that’s spawned an NFT valued at $40M since Film01’s release and an international downtown following. A profile published in 2022 mentions the U.K.-based Substack blogger turned “New Yorks most in-crowd shit-poster”, now auteur, in the ritual of controversy that surrounds former crypto-CEO Charlotte Fang. A Lower East Side art dealer throws his hands up and mumbles something about groomery: "The stuff I've heard isn't good,” adding, “but of course I don’t know the guy personally.” <p> Two hours later, two months later, you're still here. announcing that the next screening "will consist of a prelude-- and main feature." An invitation to Film01's second New York screening event reads like a communique: <p> <p> <p> A few months ago, Fang is known for creating a series of projects and digital personas that cater, almost exclusively, to the cartel of 18-34 shitposters, many of whom are far younger than eighteen, who barnacle the internet's last surviving democracy: 4-chan. intermix of small-format video channels with the latest iPhone portrait resolution, throughout the moving picture, leaves a sentimentality up in the air such that it's unclear who the Rainbow Girls, or the film itself, are speaking to: Film01's audience, or its cast and crew. She reports that the work/life boundaries are less clear than the professional lighting rigs just out of shot. "Last August," confesses the Sociologist Ashley Mears, "I spent a day filming bangers at Anna Rothfuss's rented condo." Mears, a former fashion model, says the one that performed best online was a cheater drama: "The suspense of waiting for a cuckolded spouse to find out keeps viewers gripped enough to sit through the ad." When I ask Lola Jusidisman, In TK TK for the Economist, Mears reports shooting high volume online content in the homes of the two most-viewed Facebook creators in 2021, Lax and Julius Dein, who both started out as magicians. Mears suggests that the work/life boundaries are less clear than the professional lighting rigs just out of shot in mansions owned by former public school teachers turned brand ambassadors; homes meant to "to give videos the authentically amateurish feel that Facebooks algorithms favor." Magic is slow. The internet is fast: "Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception," wrote one former Google employee on his Medium blog in 2017. What Mears qualifies as "stopping the scroll" so the viewer doesn't reflexively move down to the next post in their feed becomes an aesthetic regime when "the opening has to titillate or intrigue, ideally both, in the first three seconds (I saw one begin with a hotdog Following Film01's summer debut to a packed East Village crowd, a 125-minute version returns to the big screen. (This will have been compressed down from Film01's initial, 180-minute premiere, itself an encapsulation of an alleged eight hour "Paradise Cut") The second release is also invite only; it grasps for a definition of the medium as if by nature a gesture of exclusive discourse: Is Film01 a cautionary picture or a devious lick? Watchbait or potlatch? Is Film01 a cautionary picture or a devious lick? Watchbait or potlatch? In her coverage of the event, Madeline Cash morbidly points out "the high concentration of artists, It-girls, and cultural contributors presented a prime opportunity to eliminate the entire downtown-NYC microcosm." Film01 is not a film about the internet, but a realistic representation of a different internet: “They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image,” wrote Deleuze on the informatics of cinema, “The organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first all the privilege of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favour of an omnidirectional space which constantly varies its angles and coordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal.” In Film01, the “omnidirectional space” is the front-facing camera, and the “privilege of the vertical”, its subject. Thus the horizontality of the “swipe” and the column of the social media feed address the producer, the user, the scene – all of whom are seated in the theater for “Angelicism”’s New York City debut. Any film about extinction as such is bound to create new kinds of hate and vulnerability. These may be analysed as part and parcel, as part of the film, if we have time. Do we have time? Why the bound? movie about how to think, how to shape, how to recognize the resistances to official culture using major breaks in the continuity of social sense. were the recall jeopardy in everything that you do. We would recognize her on any device, but only on the big screen does the teenager’s face occur as Leviathan, sovereign in its indistinguishability from social media herself. The short-form video hosting service TikTok was launched in 2016 as Douyin for the ⅕ of global internet users based in mainland China. By 2019, the platform had attained global status as a cornerstone of influencer marketing. Starbucks? Grimace shake? Boba tea? Hell’s flat expanse empties into cult status. Maybe it’s thirty seconds in, maybe it’s three hours. Each "girl" featured in Film01's 180min "Anthology Cut" cut doesn’t look a day older than her phone. For every one of the dozens of e-girls, Korean idols, A-listers and it-kids incorporated into Film 01 since the introduction of user-generated content into the idioms of cinema, an overflow of eco-disaster footage selectively exposes the audience to the premonition of extinction. Maybe it's a pile of burning rubber shot on a handheld, maybe a windmill caught on fire; Trump's arraignment just a stones throw from the River bar, a popular NYC haunt. Maybe she’s human. She has a death rattle. Recording live, probably in front of a thousand viewers, or, alone as if she were before a thousand viewers, the user slurps from a plastic straw at an accelerating rate. The way the substance suckers up the purple tube, into her augmented reality of a mouth, we don’t know, we’ll never know, but it reeks of persistence. Is she cross-eyed or are we? Just as the visible traces of plastic surgery have evolved into a symbol of status thanks to the of mutual alienation of wealth and youth, the lossy quality of the online clips strive to achieve the surface effects of the metaphysical tradition; of the imperceptible appearing within the perceptible: “I have to go talk to my mom,” whines the teen without taking the straw out of her mouth. A psychological theory of narcissistic, machiavellian and psychopathy is formalized in 2002 as a “dark triad” around the same time consumer grade digital cameras hit the market. But she’s only watching the game, controlling it. When I was a kid on the internet the point was to be online at an hour of the night when no one would ever guess you had parents. Now its apparently the opposite. For those hoping to slip out of childhood into an online chatroom (or out of an online chatroom and into a child), there’s augmented reality. Everyone gets their own personal pronouns, too. For the generation whose image on Facebook was, probabilistically, first posted in utero, to have a Mom just out-of-frame is a cultural fact. But age on the internet is a metaphysical symptom. The devious lick undermines both by wrapping her lips around another violent slurp of Frappacino. The aesthetic effect is not unlike listening to the person next to us snore: aggressive, jarring, inexorably forgivable. She’s beautiful when she’s consuming but what feels grotesque is the insinuation that beauty, like God, has a sense of humor. Media. Comes from the Greek character Medea. She was an enchantress. Out to murder and maim her lovers. A terrifying beauty. Hard-boiled. Psychologically hopped-up. Chopped up her brother and boiled his parts in a pot. Melodrama and revenge. —— SKIP TO CONTENT SKIP TO SITE INDEX SECTION NAVIGATION SEARCH FASHION LOG IN 
 For Him, the Web Was No Safety Net Give this article

 By Allen Salkin Aug. 28, 2009 See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com. THERE was a time in the late 1990s when Josh Harris was a king of sorts. A Silicon Alley pioneer, he was flush with millions of dollars made from his first Internet company, and he was spending it wildly on a series of legendary SoHo parties, businesses and social experiments. He wired a loft with Webcams to broadcast everything he and a girlfriend did (including bathroom visits). He enticed 100 people to live in an underground “bunker,” outfitted with a stylized altar, a see-through shower and a firing range. He created some of the first Webcasts through a company called Pseudo Programs. And now it is all gone. These days, Mr. Harris sleeps in a friend’s pool house in Los Angeles and earns a meager living playing poker at a racetrack. Last week, in his first extended visit to New York in eight years, he said the $741 in his pocket was all the money he had in the world. He was in town for the opening of a documentary about him, “We Live in Public,” which portrays him as a visionary of the digital age, an eccentric who eventually retreated to an apple farm upstate to reboot his brain after a lifetime’s worth of media static. “He is one of the 10 most important people in the history of the Internet,” said Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur of digital media who once chronicled New York’s tech scene in his publication, The Silicon Alley Reporter. “He may not be the most famous.” On a walking tour of SoHo, Mr. Harris admitted that he has missed the spotlight his companies and spectacles once attracted. Standing outside 353 Broadway, where his bunker experiment had been, he recalled: “One time after the bunker, we had this party called the Media Mirror. For three hours it hit this perfect groove. Fine women, the hum of the people talking, the feeling you get when you know you’re at the right place in the right time in the world. It’s like being high on heroin for three hours and then you can’t get any more no matter what you do.” For a number of years, it was quite a high. Working for an early online research firm in the 1980s, Mr. Harris realized that computer networks were the next big thing. He founded Jupiter Communications in 1986, which measured online traffic. His stock was worth a reported $80 million at one point, and in 1994 he resigned from running the company to start Pseudo. He began giving parties in a loft on Broadway at Houston Street, with artists, techies and other downtowners. There was sushi served off naked women, boxing, hip-hop artists including Eminem, and Mr. Harris sometimes dressed as his alter ego, a shrieky clown in smeared makeup named Luvvy, based on the wife of Thurston J. Howell III, a character from “Gilligan’s Island.” Image  WATCH Josh Harris, an Internet pioneer and subject of a new film. Credit... Evan Sung for The New York Times  He would hire interesting party guests to be hosts of Pseudo’s Webcasts, where computer users could communicate with the host through online chat. Even before the dot-com bust of 2000, Mr. Harris’s increasingly wild experiments began to get out of hand. His bunker, stocked with guns, was raided by city authorities on Jan. 1, 2000. It had descended into chaos, and everyone was evicted. During the experiment of broadcasting his life with his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin, the two split and have barely spoken since. Pseudo burned through tens of millions of dollars and was sold for very little. In 2001, a few months after moving to the apple farm in Livingston, N.Y., Mr. Harris received word that what was left of his fortune was nearly gone, and he cried. “I heard Jupiter stock had tanked, and I went from being worth $20 million to $2 million,” he said. He sold the farm in 2006 and spent the last of his fortune trying to start another interactive television venture, Operator 11, which was eventually acquired by a company that agreed to pay the $150,000 Mr. Harris owed to American Express and other creditors, he said. In 2007, he left for Ethiopia, where he said he had lived for three years as a boy (his father was stationed there on business). He tried to start an entertainment channel in Africa but instead spent a lot of time smoking marijuana, he said. Meanwhile, Ondi Timoner, a filmmaker who had shot footage of Mr. Harris’s events in New York, had begun putting together “We Live in Public,” which won the Grand Jury prize for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival this year. She paid to fly him to Park City, Utah, from Ethiopia for the festival, and he came on the conditions he be provided with oatmeal and a dentist appointment. “We won, and he never went home,” Ms. Timoner said. Mr. Calacanis, who in 2005 sold his company, Weblogs, to America Online, and said Mr. Harris was his mentor, offered him a place to stay in his pool house and a Corvette to drive. Since his return, Mr. Harris has been trying to start a venture called The Wired City. Basically, it would have a large group of people living in a sort of three-dimensional real-world Facebook, where “friends” could participate in one another’s every move. Image  EXPERIMENT Mr. Harris wired his loft with Webcams, even in the refrigerator. Credit... Gary Powell for The New York Times  He explained that if two people were Wired City participants having lunch at a restaurant talking about clowns, friends watching remotely could send video that would, perhaps, be broadcast on the table showing a clip from “Shakes the Clown” followed by menu recommendations. The cleverest friends would be rewarded. Despite his persistence, he sometimes seems distracted by personal demons. Over lunch in SoHo, he offered a rambling account of his activities in 2000 and 2001, trying to make a case that the F.B.I. is interested in him in connection with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These included hiring a helicopter to circle the World Trade Center in March 2000 during a stunt by an Austrian performance art troupe named Gelatin, who claimed to have built a tiny temporary balcony on the 91st floor. He also said he was part owner of an art studio, Exploding Sky Worldwide, which created images of “Gilligan” for him. (An F.B.I. spokesman said the agency does not comment on who is or isn’t under investigation.) Mr. Calacanis insisted that Mr. Harris has a keen mind, which will be obvious if some of the television producers he is meeting with will take a chance on him. “I watch him in the pool house putting 50 pieces of paper on the wall and drawing stuff,” he said, conjuring, perhaps inadvertently, a famous scene from the film “A Beautiful Mind.” “He’s got some good ideas.” Now the man who once filled his apartment with cameras is convinced he is being constantly watched. “There are people watching me and manipulating my life,” Mr. Harris said. There is a madness behind the method, said those who know him. “Josh was and is very complicated,” said David Bohrman, who once was chief executive of Pseudo and is now a senior vice president and the Washington bureau chief for CNN. “There are moments of insight and moments of craziness.” Ms. Timoner, whose documentary spends time chronicling Mr. Harris’s troubled relationship with his family, said: “He needs to be significant. Whether it’s that the government is after him, or seeing articles about himself. Ultimately the only thing his mother cared about was reading those articles. That was how he felt loved.” Walking past his old Pseudo offices at Houston and Broadway, Mr. Harris, who said he has never been in love, adjusted his dark sunglasses. “It’s a funny thing being in fear for your life,” he said. “It’s kind of addictive.” A correction was made on Sept. 13, 2009: An article on Aug. 30 about Josh Harris, whose company Pseudo Programs was a pioneer in Webcasting, referred incompletely to David Bohrman, a former chief executive of the company. He is a senior vice president and the Washington bureau chief for CNN; he is not just a producer. When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more Give this article

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