The Guardian has a feature on Josh Harris, an early and eccentric internet millionaire who funnelled his profits into massive art projects. He founded a company called Jupiter Interactive and a website pseudo.com for streaming audio and video. He offered sex chat and streamed audio programs on subjects such as video games over dial-up connections, later moving up to video. The company went bankrupt in the first dot com crash in 2000.
What's more interesting is how Harris managed to spend $80m he earned from his businesses. He was obsessed with the ability of the internet to broadcast people's lives in real-time audio and video. One project of his, called We Live in Public, involved him and his girlfriend broadcasting every action from dozens of video cameras in their luxurious Manhattan apartment for 100 days. Their relationship broke down under the stress.
He was also known for wild and eccentric parties, including his event marking the end of the last millennium, Quiet: We Live in Public, which involved a group of people living for a month in a Broadway warehouse, with all their actions broadcast on pseudo.com. The premises included "a shooting range, ... a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras", as well as lots of drugs and sex. To explain this, Harris referenced his New York predecessor Warhol: "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."
Ondi Timoner has made a film, called We Live in Public, about Josh Harris. After spending the early 2000s running an apple farm in Columbia County, NY, Harris now lives in Sidamo, Ethiopia, where he is apparently CEO of an organisation called the African Entertainment Network. Pseudo.com now offers a range of music videos for online viewing.
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