[second acts]

TheBubble
Boy 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

Someday, Josh Harris would like to take over
Paris's Pompidou Center. Hd:i 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 fund-
ing 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
BLOWING SMOKE? ----- rents in Los Angeles, across Santa Monica Boulevard from the
Harris thinks his next Hollywood Forever cemetery "And now I'm negative. If this
company will supplant fails, I've got to go work for McDonald's." He's kidding, but
YouTube and establish there is a touch of desperation in his voice.
Harris's fortune peaked along with Nasdaq in the spring
of 2000. By autumn of that year, Pseudo, his Internet broad-
casting 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 ex-
travagant happenings like "Quiet," a monthlong, $1.8million
bash to welcome the millennium, quickly evaporated. "By
July S1£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, Tlnya Corrin, to broadcast their lives on the In-
ternet-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 experi-
ment 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 uncomfort-
able 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 surveil-
lance calneras during the final days of the project.
Now, more than seven years later, Harris has l'ut 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 ISO-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 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 mak-
ing 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 overwhehning enough that he needed five
years 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 known
Harris since tire early days. At a recent conference on pod-
casting, 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."
During the boom, Harris was a fixture in New York me-
dia, both as darling and punching bag. New }Ork magazine
put him on its cover in late 1999,declaring him "The Warhol
ofWeb TV," and gossip columns tracked his every move. His
story had inherent appeal. Having started out as a geeky num-
ber 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 con-
vinced 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. 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,
Harris, decked
forging a scene that produced everything from art openings out as his
to boxing matches and public orgies. In 1998, his investors sinister clown
became nervous about the strange goings-on and insisted on
bringing in a new CEO to replace Harris. Relieved of day- alter ego,
to-day administrative duties, Harris quickly became a full-
time patron and puppet master, spending money like "sand
Luvvy, tried to
through the fingers of time," as he said then.
coordinate a
Among the young and hip tech impresarios of Man hat- sim.ultaneous
tan's Silicon Alley, he emerged as a symbol of a new order,
in which work would blend seamJessly into play. You could orgasm
become a billionaire entrepreneur, fulfill your most profound for several
personal aspirations, and be a media star-all at the same time.
Though he began to see his various projects as a new form couples
of art-an Internet Age version of Warhol's Factory-the art copulating
establishment never knew quite what to make of it. Smith
recalls that Harris and those around him weren't overly con-
onstage.
cerned 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 collabora-
tion with dozens of artists, Harris conjured a dystopian fu-
ture, complete with ubiquitous surveillance cameras, interro-
gations 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 alive sex show in which he tried to coordinate
a simultaneous orgasm for the several couples copulating on-
stage. One room housed an 80-foot-Iong 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 civiliza-
tion being set up," says filinmaker Ondi Timoner-at the
time 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 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 donriing 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'sEve, the scene was devolving into
a lethargic melange of sex, drugs, and interpersonal conflict,
WWW.RADARONLlNE.COM 41
[second acts]
and on January 1, with no end in sight, the FDNY, NYPD,
"I woke up at and FEMA arrived to shut it down. Still, as a work of art, the
project was a success. Artnet's Charlie Finch called elements
some point of "Quiet" "worthy of Warhol at his peak," while Alanna
and realized. Heiss, director of New York's P.S. 1 and another Podwellian,
thatI'm deemed the e~nt 'one of the most extraordinary activities
I've ever attended anywhere in the world."
an artist,"
Harris told Sitting in his Operator 11 offices, Harris seems
like a mellower version of his old persona. He speaks in an
his dying authoritative deadpan. His humor, when it appears, is know-
mother via ing, dry, and almost never at his own expense. The brash
• visionary-who in 2000 announced to 60 Minutes's Bob
videotape. Simon that he was in a race to put CBS out of business-
"Maybe one still favors the prophetic tones he used when telling Simon
of the first that "Big Brother is happening. It's an inevitable fact."
As someone who grew up watching vast amounts of
great artists television, Harris has developed a number of theories about
of the 21st media's potent psychological effects. "When you watch TV,
you're conditioned to idolize the thing that the camera'spoint-
century." ing 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 15minutes 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
his online fishbowl.
42 WWW.RADARONLlNE.COM
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 so-
cial networking site that is, at least in theory, much more
dynamic than Facebook or YouTube.
The company's free product is a co'i'nbination of TV pro-
duction technology and teleconferencing software. Each of
Operator l1's users essentially runs his or her own broadcast
channel, building shows out of video clips and live contribu-
tions 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 star-
ring 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 In-
ternet today. That, I'm sure of"
It's a heady boast-particularly for yet another social net-
work in an already crowded field-but Harris is quite seri-
ous. He believes "Quiet" was the greatest party in the his-
tory of New York City, and that the arrival of the authorities
was 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 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 ~Ise, Harris knows how to create a spec-
tacle. When he brought in Ondi Timoner to document
"Quiet," he pitched it as an opportunity to capture 'tultural
history in the making," although Timoner says at the time it
felt more like raw hedonism. "There was this feeling of des-
peration 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 allover him for that, instead of regarding
him as an artist in his own right, which is something I think
he'salways struggled with."
The footage has aged well, however-particularly since a
similar 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 Josh 2.0
there in a way that's really poignant to look at now," she says.
A few offerings from
Originally planned as a meditation on the dot-com era, the
Harris's latest Web TV
movie has come to center more on Harris himself Despite venture, Operator 11 .
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."
ERNIE'S CORNER
Timoner and Harris have had a rocky collaboration. She
An angry-looking bald
calls the period she spent on Harris's farm attempting to fin- guy from Miami, Ernie is
ish her edit "the most depressing few months of my life." At a struggling actor and
one point, Harris confiscated the footage. They have since musician who dispenses
reconciled, however, and Timoner has secured Harris's ongo- advice to struggling
ing cooperation, plus creative controL Harris, for his part, says actors and musicians.
he doesn't care how the film-now titled (somewhat confus-
ingly) 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 recog-
nize his genius.
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
MATT MCCLURE
1'm an artist," he said. "Maybe one of the first great artists of LIVE!
the 21st century." The Web's answer
to Jay Leno, this 24-
Last October, during a visit to New York, Harris year-old comic is as
announced that he was cutting his overhead while he awaits unknown as his guests.
funding, and moving Operator 11out of the studio on Santa But one day ...
Monica Boulevard and into his bungalow behind the Hol-
lywood 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 vam-
pires, 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
R.A.T. COACHING
USC graduate whom he has been mentoring for several
A self-styled life coach,
months. "All the market wants to hear is that eyeballs go into Rhonda Anthony
our engine and money comes out," he says. "That's work- Tanner, or RAT., brings
ing, and that's what the kid does welL It's a young man's her Valley girl stoner
game." Harris will retain an interest in the company-he patois to the self-
sunk around $2 million into Operator 11 to get it off tl'te improvement game.
ground-and continue to advise on corporate vision and
strategy. Right now he's headed to EastAfrica 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 sport fish-
ing 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
PENNY & PAGE
endgame is to do my work," he says. 'What other choice
Founders of the Church
do I have?":J
of Perpetual Party, these
goth-styled club kids
radaronline.com spend most of their
For an exclusive look at the trailer for We Live in free-form webcasts
Public, go to radaronline.com/joshharris gabbing with fans.
WWW.RADARONLlNE.COM 43