Josh Harris was the golden boy of the dot-com boom. $100 million later, he's plotting his comeback

BLOWING SMOKE? Harris thinks his next company will supplant YouTube and establish him as the great artist of the media age (Photo: Greg Endries)

Watch the We Live in Public trailer here.

This article is from the February issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here

Someday, Josh Harris would like to take over Paris's Pompidou Center. He'd like to commandeer the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art. He'd like to be remembered as one of the first great artists of the 21st century. But right now—two days after Labor Day—he needs money. The venture capitalists are off the beaches and back at their desks, and Harris is working the phones, trying to scare up funding for Operator 11, his nascent "social television network." "I was worth $80 to $100 million at one moment in time," he says, gnawing on an unlit Montecristo in the office space he rents in Los Angeles, across Santa Monica Boulevard from the Hollywood Forever cemetery. "And now I'm negative. If this fails, I've got to go work for McDonald's." He's kidding, but there is a touch of desperation in his voice.

Harris, decked out as his sinister clown alter ego, Luvvy, tried to coordinate a simultaneous orgasm for several couples copulating onstageHarris's fortune peaked along with Nasdaq in the spring of 2000. By autumn of that year, Pseudo, his Internet broadcasting company—which was backed by major investors like Intel, yet attracted an oddball coterie of artists and hangers-on—was dead. Jupiter Communications, the IT research company he had founded 15 years earlier, was in trouble as well. The massive pool of money he had relied on to fund extravagant happenings like "Quiet," a monthlong, $1.8 million bash to welcome the millennium, quickly evaporated. "By July of 2000, I knew I was fucked," he admits. "I just didn't know how fucked."

With the bursting of the Internet bubble, the company's IPO prospects quickly faded. Harris failed to unload Pseudo on "one of the bigs"—AOL/Time Warner and CBS were candidates—and existing investors declined to throw in more than the $36 million they'd already spent.

Desperate to stay in the game, he rigged his Broadway loft with surveillance cameras, enabling him and his then girlfriend, Tanya Corrin, to broadcast their lives on the Internet, a project he dubbed "We Live in Public." Harris had suggested to Corrin that footage of the couple's day-to-day existence would end up in a museum, and that the experiment would launch a thriving business, selling Big Brother–style camera setups to tap into the public's "pent-up demand for personal celebridom." "We Live in Public" was supposed to run for 100 days, but Corrin, who was so uncomfortable with the arrangement that she was afraid to use the toilet, left after 81, declaring the experience "a very public nightmare," and her relationship with Harris "empty." (He claims he threw her out.) Meanwhile, he was watching his net worth approach zero and slowly coming unglued. "I cracked," he admits. "I was with these cameras and living in public, and it cracked me." Even Corrin admits she felt sorry for him, watching him sleep alone under his own surveillance cameras during the final days of the project.

URINE FULL VIEW A "private" moment caught in his online fishbowl

Now, more than seven years later, Harris has put on some weight, and age has given his face a hard and serious look. (He could reasonably pass for Al Gore's intense younger brother.) He wears a gray work shirt silk-screened with the logo for Livingston Orchards, the 150-acre farm he bought in upstate New York after the "We Live in Public" debacle. The plan was to go from the center of the world to the fringe, to escape the insanity of Silicon Alley for a life of contemplation and physical work, where the only Macintosh he'd have to worry about was the kind people eat.

"I think Josh burned out—he lived really fast in a very short time," says Nancy Smith, a member of Harris's circle who frequently visited him upstate. "It was good that he went up to the farm to recover."

His was not a recovery in the usual sense, however. Instead of drugs, he says, he had ODed on "mediated sustenance"—seeking to intensify his own life and consciousness by making it a media event. "I was using the online watchers to see my own self, and who I was, and the part of me I needed to change," he says. "[That process] changed me in a way I'm happy with. It made me who I wanted to be."

But it was also overwhelming enough that he needed five years alone on an apple farm to pull himself back together.