Josh Harris was the decadent golden boy otthe dot-com boom; $100 million later,he woke up broke on an apple farm. Now he's plotting his comeback. BY JIM HANAS

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TheBubbleBoy

BLOWING SMOKE?-----

Harris thinks his next

company will supplant

YouTube and establish

Someday, Josh Harris would like to take over

Paris's Pompidou Center. Hd:i like to commandeer the entireMetropolitan Museum of Art. He'd like to be rememberedas one of the first great artists of the 21st century But right

now-two days after Labor Day-he needs money Theventure 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." "Iwas worth $80 to $100 million at one moment in time," he

says, gnawing on an unlit Montecristo in the office space herents in Los Angeles, across Santa Monica Boulevard from the

Hollywood Forever cemetery "And now I'm negative. If thisfails, I've got to go work for McDonald's." He's kidding, butthere is a touch of desperation in his voice.

Harris's fortune peaked along with Nasdaq in the springof 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 hangers­on-was dead. Jupiter Communications, the IT researchcompany he had founded 15 years earlier, was in trouble aswell. The massive pool of money he had relied on to fund ex­

travagant happenings like "Quiet," a monthlong, $1.8millionbash to welcome the millennium, quickly evaporated. "By

July S1£2000,I knew I was fucked," he admits. "I just didn'tknow how fucked."

With the bursting of the Internet bubble, the company'sIPO prospects quickly faded. Harris failed to unload Pseudoon 'one of the bigs"-AOL/Time Warner and CBS were

candidates-and existing investors declined to throw inmore than the $36 million they'd already spent.

Desperate to stay in the game, he rigged his Broadwayloft with surveillance cameras, enabling him and his then­girlfriend, Tlnya Corrin, to broadcast their lives on the In­ternet-a project he dubbed "We Live in Public." Harris hadsuggested to Corrin that footage of the couple's day-to-dayexistence would end up in a museum, and that the experi­ment would launch a thriving business, selling Big Brother­style camera setups to tap into the public's "pent-up demandfor personal celebridom." "We Live in Public" was supposedto run for 100 days, but Corrin-who was so uncomfort­

able with the arrangement that she was afraid to use thetoilet-left after 81, declaring the experience "a very publicnightmare," and her relationship with Harris 'empty." (Heclaims he threw her out.) Meanwhile, he was watching hisnet worth approach zero and slowly coming unglued. "Icracked," he admits. "I was with these cameras and living inpublic, and it cracked me." Even Corrin admits she felt sorryfor him, watching him sleep alone under his own surveil­lance calneras during the final days of the project.

Now, more than seven years later, Harris has l'ut on someweight, and age has given his face a hard and serious look. (Hecould reasonably pass for Al Gore's intense younger brother.)

He wears a gray work shirt silk-screened with the logo forLivingston Orchards, the ISO-acre farm he bought in upstateNew York after the 'We Live in Public" debacle. The planwas to go from the center of the world to the fringe, to escapethe insanity of Silicon Alley for a life of contemplation andphysical work, where the only Macintosh he'd have to worryabout was the kind people eat.

"I think Josh burned out-he lived really fast in a veryshort time," says Nancy Smith, a member of Harris's circlewho frequently visited him upstate. "It was good that hewent up to the far111to recover."

His was not a recovery in the usual sense, however. Instead

of drugs, he says, he had OD'd on "mediated sustenance"­seeking to intensify his own life and consciousness by mak­ing it a media event. "I was using the online watchers to seemy own self, and who I was, and the part of me I needed tochange," he says. "[That process] changed me in a way I'mhappy with. It made me who I wanted to be."

But it was also overwhehning enough that he needed fiveyears alone on an apple farm to pull himselfback together.

Jason Calacanis, founder of the Silicon Alley

Reporter and the search engine start-up Mahalo, has knownHarris since tire early days. At a recent conference on pod­casting, he flashed Harris's picture up on a screen and asked ifanyone recognized him. Nobody did. "It's ironic," Calacanissays,"because a lot of what people are doing today in terms ofpodcasting and trying to create shows for the medium, Joshdid in 1996."

During the boom, Harris was a fixture in New York me­

dia, both as darling and punching bag. New }Ork magazineput him on its cover in late 1999,declaring him "The WarholofWeb TV," and gossip columns tracked his every move. Hisstory 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 al­

lowed users to chat with one another while they watched. Asthe Internet blew up and ushered in an era of stunning excessand self-indulgence, Harris-the former wonk-becameone of its flashiest and most profligate figures.

Pseudo shared a building at the corner of Broadway andHouston in SoHo with art-world titans Jeff Koons and MarkKostabi. Various colorful characters drifted into Harris's orbit,

forging a scene that produced everything from art openingsto boxing matches and public orgies. In 1998, his investorsbecame nervous about the strange goings-on and insisted onbringing in a new CEO to replace Harris. Relieved of day­to-day administrative duties, Harris quickly became a full­time patron and puppet master, spending money like "sandthrough the fingers of time," as he said then.

Among the young and hip tech impresarios of Man hat­tan's Silicon Alley, he emerged as a symbol of a new order,

in which work would blend seamJessly into play. You couldbecome a billionaire entrepreneur, fulfill your most profoundpersonal aspirations, and be a media star-all at the same time.Though he began to see his various projects as a new formof art-an Internet Age version of Warhol's Factory-the artestablishment 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," shesays.'Who cared about the rest of the art world?"

The most epic of the parties was "Quiet," which wasstaged on six floors of two buildings on lower Broadway. Itwas part rave, part Stanford Prison Experiment. In collabora­

tion with dozens of artists, Harris conjured a dystopian fu­ture, complete with ubiquitous surveillance cameras, interro­

gations by participants trained by a former CIA specialist, andcramped communal barracks. Sculptor and Basquiat-forgerAlfredo Martinez installed a full-size firing range. The gunsshot only blanks, but amid their din it was easy to forget thatfact. Harris himself, decked out as his sinister clown alter ego,Luvvy, emceed alive sex show in which he tried to coordinate

a simultaneous orgasm for the several couples copulating on­stage. One room housed an 80-foot-Iong table where Harrisand company served up three meals a day, and down which anude marching band occasionally paraded. Vampires tendedbar. 'We documented, in a matter of days, an entire civiliza­tion being set up," says filinmaker Ondi Timoner-at thetime years away from finishing her acclaimed rockumentary

Dig!-whom Harris hired to record the proceedings.The piece de resistance was aJapanese-style capsule hotel

outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allowedeach occupant to monitor the other pods. Nearly 100 peoplechecked in for the 10 days leading up to the New Year-butonly after completing detailed background questionnaires,enduring intense interrogations, and donriing orange andgray prisoner-style uniforms. Everything was free, as long as

you gave up rights to your image, which was constantly beingcaptured. "Some people cried, but that was Josh's thing," saysone so-called Podwellian, photographer Donna Ferrato. "Hewanted to make people hurt, and get embarrassed and scared,

and fight." By New Year'sEve, the scene was devolving intoa lethargic melange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict,

Harris, deckedout as hissinister clownalter ego,Luvvy, tried tocoordinate asim.ultaneousorgasmfor severalcouplescopulatingonstage.

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"Iwoke up atsome pointand realized.thatI'man artist,"Harris toldhis dyingmother viavideotape."Maybe oneof the firstgreat artistsof the 21stcentury."

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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 elementsof "Quiet" "worthy of Warhol at his peak," while AlannaHeiss, director of New York's P.S. 1 and another Podwellian,

deemed the e~nt 'one of the most extraordinary activitiesI've ever attended anywhere in the world."

Sitting in his Operator 11 offices, Harris seems

like a mellower version of his old persona. He speaks in anauthoritative deadpan. His humor, when it appears, isknow­ing, dry, and almost never at his own expense. The brash

• visionary-who in 2000 announced to 60 Minutes's BobSimon that he was in a race to put CBS out of business­still favors the prophetic tones he used when telling Simonthat "Big Brother is happening. It's an inevitable fact."

As someone who grew up watching vast amounts oftelevision, Harris has developed a number of theories aboutmedia's potent psychological effects. "When you watch TV,you're conditioned to idolize the thing that the camera'spoint­ing at," he says.According to him, what we all really want isto have the camera turned on us, to become the thing that weidolize. While Warhol predicted we would all be famous for15 minutes, Harris thinks 15minutes a day is more like it, andthat 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 withchat. It also informed "Quiet," which projected a future inwhich we would become enslaved by our own desire for

his online fishbowl.

media exposure. 'We Live in Public" pushed the notion evenfurther 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 moredynamic than Facebook or YouTube.

The company's free product is a co'i'nbination of TV pro­duction technology and teleconferencing software. Each ofOperator l1's users essentially runs his or her own broadcastchannel, building shows out of video clips and live contribu­tions from audience members. Anyone who is watching agiven user's show-say, a discussion about.global warmingor recent celebrity antics (or both)-can start chatting withthat person and request to be included. The primary usercan then cut to live feeds from various audience members

who want to add their two cents, much like a producer on acable news show cuts between shots of remote guests. Theline between viewer and participant is essentially erased.And what could be more addictive than a TV show star­

ring you, your friends and family, and a global collection ofinterested strangers? The audience for a given program maybe small, but Harris is betting you won't be able to take youreyes-or face-off it. ''I've got the formula down now," hesays."I make the most compelling entertainment on the In­ternet today. That, I'm sure of"

It'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 authoritieswas the greatest after party. He thinks Andy Warhol was his

"advance man," aJohn 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 exampleof absurd new-media hubris--seems almost prescient in the

post-YouTube world, as does his anticipation of the realityprogramming boom and his prediction that fame wouldbecome both omnipresent and cheap. "He's eccentric," saysCalacanis, who is advising Harris on Operator 11."But he's

alwaysgot 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 ofthe curve yet again?

If nothing ~Ise, Harris knows how to create a spec­tacle. When he brought in Ondi Timoner to document

"Quiet," he pitched it as an opportunity to capture 'tulturalhistory in the making," although Timoner says at the time itfelt 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 likepeople were exploiting the situation more than being there

for the experience. They were going in there to see if theycould get close to Josh and get him to finance their next art

project. People were allover him for that, instead of regardinghim as an artist in his own right, which is something I thinkhe'salways struggled with."

The footage has aged well, however-particularly since asimilar event is almost unthinkable after 9/11-and Timoner

OikeHarris) is looking for backers so she can finish the film.

"The innocence and fun of New York pre-9 III 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 Despitebeing obsessed with social networking, he leads an isolated

existence. He admits he hasn't had a significant relationshipin years. "There's a very lonely, lonely side to him," Timoner

says. "Something about Josh is kind of cold," agrees artistMark Enger, who crashed at the upstate farm for a while andcounts 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 apart 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."Atone point, Harris confiscated the footage. They have sincereconciled, however, and Timoner has secured Harris's ongo­ing cooperation, plus creative controL Harris, for his part, sayshe doesn't care how the film-now titled (somewhat confus­ingly) VIleLive 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.

In January 2006, as his mother lay dying in California,Harris made her a videotape in which he assessed his life."Inthe last 10 years, at some point I woke up and I realized that1'm an artist," he said. "Maybe one of the first great artists ofthe 21st century."

Last October, during a visit to New York, Harrisannounced that he was cutting his overhead while he awaits

funding, and moving Operator 11out of the studio on SantaMonica Boulevard and into his bungalow behind the Hol­lywood BowL Still in development, Operator 11 claims tohave 6,000 users, who log on to watch shows starring a castof characters that includes a menagerie of self-styled vam­pires, the L.A. rock band Killola, and a guy with a SantaClaus fetish.

A month after abandoning the studio, Harris turns overthe reins to the company's president, Jason Mitura, a recent

USC graduate whom he has been mentoring for severalmonths. "All the market wants to hear is that eyeballs go intoour engine and money comes out," he says. "That's work­ing, and that's what the kid does welL It's a young man'sgame." Harris will retain an interest in the company-hesunk around $2 million into Operator 11 to get it off tl'teground-and continue to advise on corporate vision andstrategy. Right now he's headed to EastAfrica and then Spain(where he plans to spend time in Don Quixote's hometownof La Mancha, poetically enough). During his travels he

hopes to finish editing Tuna Heaven, a film about sport fish­ing he's been working on sporadically over the years, andwrite his memoirs. - •

As for his grand artistic vision, he's not giving up. "Theendgame is to do my work," he says. 'What other choicedo I have?":J

radaronline.comFor an exclusive look at the trailer for We Live in

Public, go to radaronline.com/joshharris

Josh 2.0A few offerings fromHarris's latest Web TV

venture, Operator 11.

ERNIE'S CORNER

An angry-looking baldguy from Miami, Ernie isa struggling actor andmusician who dispenses

advice to strugglingactors and musicians.

MATT MCCLURELIVE!

The Web's answer

to Jay Leno, this 24­year-old comic is asunknown as his guests.But one day ...

R.A.T. COACHING

A self-styled life coach,Rhonda Anthony

Tanner, or RAT., bringsher Valley girl stonerpatois to the self­improvement game.

PENNY & PAGE

Founders of the Church

of Perpetual Party, thesegoth-styled club kidsspend most of theirfree-form webcasts

gabbing with fans.

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