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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.