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.

PEOPLE IN GLASS HOUSES With "Quiet," Harris hoped to capture "cultural history in the making"

Jason Calacanis, founder of the Silicon Alley Reporter and the search engine start-up Mahalo, has known Harris since the early days. At a recent conference on podcasting, he flashed Harris's picture up on a screen and asked if anyone recognized him. Nobody did. "It's ironic," Calacanis says, "because a lot of what people are doing today in terms of podcasting and trying to create shows for the medium, Josh did in 1996."

"I woke up at some point and realized that I'm an artist," Harris told his dying mother via videotape. "Maybe one of the first great artists of the 21st century."During the boom, Harris was a fixture in New York media, both as darling and punching bag. New York magazine put him on its cover in late 1999, declaring him "The Warhol of Web TV," and gossip columns tracked his every move. His story had inherent appeal. Having started out as a geeky number cruncher, founding Jupiter to offer analytical services to online firms before most people knew what the Internet was, he eventually decided he wanted in on the action and convinced online provider Prodigy to let him run its chat rooms. Pseudo was the next step—a Web television network that allowed users to chat with one another while they watched. As the Internet blew up and ushered in an era of stunning excess and self-indulgence, Harris—the former wonk—became one of its flashiest and most profligate figures.

Pseudo shared a building at the corner of Broadway and Houston in SoHo with art-world titans Jeff Koons and Mark Kostabi. Various colorful characters drifted into Harris's orbit, forging a scene that produced everything from art openings to boxing matches and public orgies. In 1998, his investors became nervous about the strange goings-on and insisted on bringing in a new CEO to replace Harris. Relieved of day-to-day administrative duties, Harris quickly became a full-time patron and puppet master, spending money like "sand through the fingers of time," as he said then.

Among the young and hip tech impresarios of Manhattan's Silicon Alley, Harris emerged as a symbol of a new order, in which work would blend seamlessly into play. You could become a billionaire entrepreneur, fulfill your most profound personal aspirations, and be a media star—all at the same time. Though he began to see his various projects as a new form of art—an Internet Age version of Warhol's Factory—the art establishment never knew quite what to make of it. Smith recalls that Harris and those around him weren't overly concerned about that. "We were doing these huge parties," she says. "Who cared about the rest of the art world?"

The most epic of the parties was "Quiet," which was staged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway. It was part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment. In collaboration with dozens of artists, Harris conjured a dystopian future, complete with ubiquitous surveillance cameras, interrogations by participants trained by a former CIA specialist, and cramped communal barracks. Sculptor and Basquiat-forger Alfredo Martinez installed a full-size firing range. The guns shot only blanks, but amid their din it was easy to forget that fact.

Harris himself, decked out as his sinister clown alter ego, Luvvy, emceed a live sex show in which he tried to coordinate a simultaneous orgasm for the several couples copulating onstage. One room housed an 80-foot-long table where Harris and company served up three meals a day, and down which a nude marching band occasionally paraded. Vampires tended bar. "We documented, in a matter of days, an entire civilization being set up," says filmmaker Ondi Timoner—at the time years away from finishing her acclaimed rockumentary, Dig!—whom Harris hired to record the proceedings.

The pièce de résistance was a Japanese-style capsule hotel outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allowed each occupant to monitor the other pods. Nearly 100 people checked in for the 10 days leading up to the New Year—but only after completing detailed background questionnaires, enduring intense interrogations, and donning orange and gray prisoner-style uniforms.

Everything was free, as long as you gave up rights to your image, which was constantly being captured. "Some people cried, but that was Josh's thing," says one so-called Podwellian, photographer Donna Ferrato. "He wanted to make people hurt, and get embarrassed and scared, and fight." By New Year's Eve, the scene was devolving into a lethargic mélange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict, and on January 1, with no end in sight, the FDNY, NYPD, and FEMA arrived to shut it down. Still, as a work of art, the project was a success. Artnet's Charlie Finch called elements of "Quiet" "worthy of Warhol at his peak," while Alanna Heiss, director of New York's P.S. 1 and another Podwellian, deemed the event "one of the most extraordinary activities I've ever attended anywhere in the world."

24-HOUR POD PEOPLE Climb inside. Big Brother is watching

Sitting in his Operator 11 offices, Harris seems like a mellower version of his old persona. He speaks in an authoritative deadpan. His humor, when it appears, is knowing, dry, and almost never at his own expense. The brash visionary—who in 2000 announced to 60 Minutes' Bob Simon that he was in a race to put CBS out of business—still favors the prophetic tones he used when telling Simon that "Big Brother is happening. It's an inevitable fact."

As someone who grew up watching vast amounts of television, Harris has developed a number of theories about media's potent psychological effects. "When you watch TV, you're conditioned to idolize the thing that the camera's pointing at," he says. According to him, what we all really want is to have the camera turned on us, to become the thing that we idolize. While Warhol predicted we would all be famous for 15 minutes, Harris thinks 15 minutes a day is more like it, and that the Internet will make this possible.

To some extent, that was the idea behind Pseudo, which allowed the audience into the frame by pairing video with chat. It also informed "Quiet," which projected a future in which we would become enslaved by our own desire for media exposure. "We Live in Public" pushed the notion even further by turning Harris's own apartment into a soundstage. And the same obsession is at the root of Operator 11, a social networking site that is, at least in theory, much more dynamic than Facebook or YouTube.

FULL FRONTAL ART A "private" moment from Harris's online fishbowl

The company's free product is a combination of TV production technology and teleconferencing software. Each of Operator 11's users essentially runs his or her own broadcast channel, building shows out of video clips and live contributions from audience members. Anyone who is watching a given user's show—say, a discussion about global warming or recent celebrity antics (or both)—can start chatting with that person and request to be included. The primary user can then cut to live feeds from various audience members who want to add their two cents, much like a producer on a cable news show cuts between shots of remote guests. The line between viewer and participant is essentially erased. And what could be more addictive than a TV show starring you, your friends and family, and a global collection of interested strangers? The audience for a given program may be small, but Harris is betting you won't be able to take your eyes—or face—off it. "I've got the formula down now," he says. "I make the most compelling entertainment on the Internet today. That, I'm sure of."

Harris thinks Andy Warhol was his "advance man," a John the Baptist to his dot-com JesusIt's a heady boast—particularly for yet another social network in an already crowded field—but Harris is quite serious. He believes "Quiet" was the greatest party in the history of New York City, and that the arrival of the authorities was the greatest after-party. He thinks Andy Warhol was his "advance man," a John the Baptist to his dot-com Jesus.

And who knows? Harris's claim that Pseudo would someday challenge CBS—for years cited as a prime example of absurd new-media hubris—seems almost prescient in the post-YouTube world, as does his anticipation of the reality programming boom and his prediction that fame would become both omnipresent and cheap. "He's eccentric," says Calacanis, who is advising Harris on Operator 11. "But he's always got a couple of ideas that put him six months, a year, two years ahead of the rest of us."

The question now is, will Josh Harris be too far ahead of the curve yet again?

If nothing else, Harris knows how to create a spectacle. When he brought in Ondi Timoner to document "Quiet," he pitched it as an opportunity to capture "cultural history in the making," although Timoner says at the time it felt more like raw hedonism. "There was this feeling of desperation on the part of almost everybody there for attention, to somehow get the camera on them," she says. "It felt like people were exploiting the situation more than being there for the experience. They were going in there to see if they could get close to Josh and get him to finance their next art project. People were all over him for that, instead of regarding him as an artist in his own right, which is something I think he's always struggled with."

The footage has aged well, however—particularly since a similar event is almost unthinkable after 9/11—and Timoner (like Harris) is looking for backers so she can finish the film. "The innocence and fun of New York pre-9/11 is recorded there in a way that's really poignant to look at now," she says.

Originally planned as a meditation on the dot-com era, the movie has come to center more on Harris himself. Despite being obsessed with social networking, he leads an isolated existence. He admits he hasn't had a significant relationship in years. "There's a very lonely, lonely side to him," Timoner says.

"Something about Josh is kind of cold," agrees artist Mark Enger, who crashed at the upstate farm for a while and counts himself as one of Harris's close friends. "He's not real close to his family. He doesn't have that many friends. It's a part of him I don't get."

Timoner and Harris have had a rocky collaboration. She calls the period she spent on Harris's farm attempting to finish her edit "the most depressing few months of my life." At one point, Harris confiscated the footage. They have since reconciled, however, and Timoner has secured Harris's ongoing cooperation, plus creative control. Harris, for his part, says he doesn't care how the film—now titled (somewhat confusingly) We Live in Public—makes him look. "I don't even care if it's a success, as long as the right 10 people see it," he says, referring to the art-world elites he hopes will finally recognize his genius.

PARTY ARTY Harris's $1.8 million bash, "Quiet," drew hundreds of live-in guests

In January 2006, as his mother lay dying in California, Harris made her a videotape in which he assessed his life. "In the last 10 years, at some point I woke up and I realized that I'm an artist," he said. "Maybe one of the first great artists of the 21st century."

Last October, during a visit to New York, Harris announced that he was cutting his overhead while he awaits funding, and moving Operator 11 out of the studio on Santa Monica Boulevard and into his bungalow behind the Hollywood Bowl. Still in development, Operator 11 claims to have 6,000 users, who log on to watch shows starring a cast of characters that includes a menagerie of self-styled vampires, the L.A. rock band Killola, and a guy with a Santa Claus fetish.

A month after abandoning the studio, Harris turns over the reins to the company's president, Jason Mitura, a recent USC graduate whom he has been mentoring for several months. "All the market wants to hear is that eyeballs go into our engine and money comes out," he says. "That's working, and that's what the kid does well. It's a young man's game." Harris will retain an interest in the company—he sunk around $2 million into Operator 11 to get it off the ground—and continue to advise on corporate vision and strategy. Right now he's headed to East Africa and then Spain (where he plans to spend time in Don Quixote's hometown of La Mancha, poetically enough). During his travels he hopes to finish editing Tuna Heaven, a film about sportfishing he's been working on sporadically over the years, and write his memoirs.

As for his grand artistic vision, he's not giving up. "The endgame is to do my work," he says. "What other choice do I have?"

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