Josh Harris

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Josh Harris

on interconnected futures / internet

interview by XERXES COOK
portrait by SKYLAR WILLIAMS

 

Some people consider him a savant of our interconnected futures, one of the most important people in the history of the Internet. Others see him as the “kook” who claimed to have cast a “fake girlfriend” in an experiment that saw both their lives broadcast online around the clock from a New York loft. He was born Josh Harris, and in the 1990s he founded Jupiter Research and Pseudo.com, a live-broadcasting website of two-way video, audio, and text that pre-dated YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Yet you probably would only have heard of him if you had lived in New York in the late 1990s — when his Y2K party was described by MoMA as the city’s best since Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball (naturally, it was live-streamed for the…