Scream At The TV: August 2009

Sunday, August 30, 2009

For a Digital Pioneer, the Web Was No Safety Net

THERE was a time in the late 1990s when Josh Harris was a king of sorts. A Silicon Alley pioneer, he was flush with millions of dollars made from his first Internet company, and he was spending it wildly on a series of legendary SoHo parties, businesses and social experiments.

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EXPERIMENT Mr. Harris wired his loft with Webcams, even in the refrigerator.

He wired a loft with Webcams to broadcast everything he and a girlfriend did (including bathroom visits). He enticed 100 people to live in an underground “bunker,” outfitted with a stylized altar, a see-through shower and a firing range. He created some of the first Webcasts through a company called Pseudo Programs.
And now it is all gone.
These days, Mr. Harris sleeps in a friend’s pool house in Los Angeles and earns a meager living playing poker at a racetrack.
Last week, in his first extended visit to New York in eight years, he said the $741 in his pocket was all the money he had in the world. He was in town for the opening of a documentary about him, “We Live in Public,” which portrays him as a visionary of the digital age, an eccentric who eventually retreated to an apple farm upstate to reboot his brain after a lifetime’s worth of media static.
“He is one of the 10 most important people in the history of the Internet,” said Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur of digital media who once chronicled New York’s tech scene in his publication, The Silicon Alley Reporter. “He may not be the most famous.”
On a walking tour of SoHo, Mr. Harris admitted that he has missed the spotlight his companies and spectacles once attracted. Standing outside 353 Broadway, where his bunker experiment had been, he recalled: “One time after the bunker, we had this party called the Media Mirror. For three hours it hit this perfect groove. Fine women, the hum of the people talking, the feeling you get when you know you’re at the right place in the right time in the world. It’s like being high on heroin for three hours and then you can’t get any more no matter what you do.”
For a number of years, it was quite a high. Working for an early online research firm in the 1980s, Mr. Harris realized that computer networks were the next big thing. He founded Jupiter Communications in 1986, which measured online traffic. His stock was worth a reported $80 million at one point, and in 1994 he resigned from running the company to start Pseudo.
He began giving parties in a loft on Broadway at Houston Street, with artists, techies and other downtowners. There was sushi served off naked women, boxing, hip-hop artists including Eminem, and Mr. Harris sometimes dressed as his alter ego, a shrieky clown in smeared makeup named Luvvy, based on the wife of Thurston J. Howell III, a character from “Gilligan’s Island.”
He would hire interesting party guests to be hosts of Pseudo’s Webcasts, where computer users could communicate with the host through online chat.
Even before the dot-com bust of 2000, Mr. Harris’s increasingly wild experiments began to get out of hand. His bunker, stocked with guns, was raided by city authorities on Jan. 1, 2000. It had descended into chaos, and everyone was evicted.
During the experiment of broadcasting his life with his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin, the two split and have barely spoken since.
Pseudo burned through tens of millions of dollars and was sold for very little.
In 2001, a few months after moving to the apple farm in Livingston, N.Y., Mr. Harris received word that what was left of his fortune was nearly gone, and he cried. “I heard Jupiter stock had tanked, and I went from being worth $20 million to $2 million,” he said.
He sold the farm in 2006 and spent the last of his fortune trying to start another interactive television venture, Operator 11, which was eventually acquired by a company that agreed to pay the $150,000 Mr. Harris owed to American Express and other creditors, he said.
In 2007, he left for Ethiopia, where he said he had lived for three years as a boy (his father was stationed there on business). He tried to start an entertainment channel in Africa but instead spent a lot of time smoking marijuana, he said.
Meanwhile, Ondi Timoner, a filmmaker who had shot footage of Mr. Harris’s events in New York, had begun putting together “We Live in Public,” which won the Grand Jury prize for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival this year. She paid to fly him to Park City, Utah, from Ethiopia for the festival, and he came on the conditions he be provided with oatmeal and a dentist appointment.
“We won, and he never went home,” Ms. Timoner said.
Mr. Calacanis, who in 2005 sold his company, Weblogs, to America Online, and said Mr. Harris was his mentor, offered him a place to stay in his pool house and a Corvette to drive.
Since his return, Mr. Harris has been trying to start a venture called The Wired City. Basically, it would have a large group of people living in a sort of three-dimensional real-world Facebook, where “friends” could participate in one another’s every move.
He explained that if two people were Wired City participants having lunch at a restaurant talking about clowns, friends watching remotely could send video that would, perhaps, be broadcast on the table showing a clip from “Shakes the Clown” followed by menu recommendations. The cleverest friends would be rewarded.
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Recommend Next Article in Fashion & Style (2 of 23) » A version of this article appeared in print on August 30, 2009, on page ST1 of the New York edition.