Andrew Smith 

Josh Harris: The Warhol of the web

He was a millionaire who lived his wild life online. Then he disappeared. Andrew Smith tracks down Josh Harris, the subject of a new documentary We Live in Public
  
  

 Josh Harris with miniature cameras that he is using to wire his loft, America - 11/10/00
Eyes on the prize … Josh Harris. Photograph: David Rentas/New York Post Photograph: David Rentas/New York Post

I couldn't have been more surprised to find Josh Harris in Ethiopia. In Manhattan in the mid-1990s, he had been "the Warhol of the Web" – one of the first internet multimillionaires, who took the $80m fortune he'd made and started to explore the possibilities and implications of this new technology, to the point of self-destruction. In the process, he became the focal point of the downtown New York scene that, for heady extravagance, rivalled anything from the 1960s or 1970s.

His Millennium Eve party, called Quiet: We Live in Public, ran for over a month, during which an ad-hoc community of human subjects lived in pods in a six-storey Broadway warehouse, each pod wired up and effectively functioning as a TV channel, streamed live to the web via Harris's online TV portal at Pseudo.com. It was 1,000 times more vital and acute than the still-nascent Big Brother. "Don't bring your money," Harris said. "Everything here is free."

Quiet featured a shooting range you could hear from the street, a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras. But more than anything, it offered its residents complete freedom. There were drugs and public sex – at one point, Harris, in the guise of a clown called Luvvy, attempted to coordinate simultaneous orgasms between three couples.

Just about anything that could happen did happen, and many people have called it an experiment. But Ondi Timoner, director of We Live in Public, a Sundance-winning documentary about Harris that opens in the UK next week, shrewdly calls it a metaphor. My feeling is that Harris wasn't saying, "This could happen" but "This will happen". This is where the technology is taking us; and what's more, it's where we want to go.

After Quiet, Josh carried on funding quirky art projects, throughout the dotcom crash and the collapse of Pseudo in September 2000. Then, at the end of that year, he announced his We Live in Public web project, for which he rigged up his opulent Broadway loft with dozens of cameras, committing himself and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin to "live in public" for 100 days.

The pressure was too much, and their relationship broke down, a blow that coincided with the last of his fortune flowing away on the stock market. He had a breakdown, and retreated to an apple farm he'd bought in upstate New York, to lick his wounds. He later returned to the web fray with a clever extension of the YouTube idea, called Operator 11; but within a year he had abandoned that, and simply disappeared. I tried every avenue I could think of, but no one knew where he was.

Then I got hold of an email address. A cautious exchange followed, including an invitation to travel to Ethiopia, his long-term home, to stay at a hotel down the road from his compound, or to sleep on his couch. I had to go. "Walking away from that last million was the hardest thing to do," Harris told me when we finally met, on the shores of Lake Awasa in the lush south of the country. "The others I didn't care about, but that one hurt."

He had asked me to bring him cigars ("my last remaining vice") and a tonne of books (Ken Follett, Tolstoy, Hemingway) along with shirts, a pair of aviator shades and loads of underpants. We developed a routine: we would get up and share breakfast, cooked by one of his three staff, then I would go off and explore, take notes for a book I wanted to write while he edited a film he had funded, about his friends going on a deep-sea fishing trip.

Then in the evening, we would share dinner, talk deep into the night, and watch one of the Muhammad Ali fights he'd asked me to bring. Outside, the hyenas, monkeys and wild dogs howled as I slept on the couch. One night a gun went off next door and the neighbourhood turned to bedlam, just as he'd been telling me that the FBI were following him, and that local gangsters were trying to tap him for money. (The last claim, at least, turned out to be true.)

Harris made his money as the founder of Jupiter Communications, the first web research firm. He told me about the day he sold part of it. He was sitting in a restaurant when $14m landed in his bank account. It was "one of the worst moments of my life". Suddenly, all he could do was worry about losing it. So he spent it on stuff he cared about, claiming to have always regarded Pseudo.com as an art project, which infuriated his former colleagues.

In fact, he spoke of Quiet as his masterwork, the event his whole life had been leading up to. "It took an essence out of your being," he said. "Everyone had a drug – the cocaine people, the pot people, the heroin people, the alcohol people, the attention people, the sex people, the relationship junkies. It's like you took the deepest part of hardcore downtown NY and you collectively blew their minds. It ran for five weeks, but it really, really worked for a week." Which week – the first? "No, the last week. It hit a groove and everyone forgot themselves. That was when we saw them."

For me, what makes Harris's story interesting is the fact that, although he was at the forefront of something big and new, he was not alone in any of this. At the start of the 1990s, New York was in deep recession. Half of the office space in Manhattan was empty. At the same time, the web was at the height of its utopian first phase, the focus of a counterculture thrilled by the idea of free, unmediated information exchange. Arts graduates – liberals, in other words – became what we would now call cyberpunks, founders of high-profile companies such as the web design consultancy Razorfish and online marketing firm Doubleclick, whose values ran to billions at the height of the dotcom mania.

The dark side of the bunker

There was a lot of money around, and it had to flow somewhere. Silicon Valley in California was dull as ditchwater, full of techies whose idea of a night out was the cafe at Fry's Electronics Superstore; but the "early true believers" of New York's Silicon Alley lived and spent colourfully. Pseudo's ever-more outlandish parties (at one point, Harris installed an entire boxing gym in his warehouse for after-hours revelling) attracted queues around the block.

Back in 1999, Timoner was a young film-maker who had heard about Harris and the scene from friends. When Harris decided he needed someone to capture Quiet on video, he called her. She admits to having mixed feelings about the darker side of what she saw in "the bunker". It was only later, when Facebook and YouTube took off, that she saw its significance.

In her film, she sees Harris as a warning of what our children might become, perpetually connected to millions but starved of intimate contact with a few. Curiously, Harris doesn't disagree with this, describing a childhood in which he drew most of his emotional sustenance from TV. Yet, for all that, I missed our evening sessions hugely when I returned from Awasa, and Timoner admits that she feels strong affection for him, too. He is what Malcolm Gladwell would call an "outlier", walking ahead in order to show us where we're going – and what we'll look like when we get there.

"Andy Warhol said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," Harris told me. "But I think he misunderstood what was happening. I think what people are demanding is 15 minutes of fame every day. And mark my words, they will get it. That's where we're heading, whether we like it or not."

• We Live in Public is out on November 13. Josh Harris will be conducting Q&As at the Odeon Panton Street, London on November 13 and 14

 

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