Apartment Envy: No Exit

4,000-square-foot loft. 15-foot ceilings, hardwood floors, stainless steel kitchen, Pietra Cardoza countertops. One bedroom, mini-loft, two bathrooms. Fish pond, steam room, jacuzzi. Control room, Unistrut grid system, Crestron lighting system. SoHo.

New York Today Real Estate, April 16, 2001

He keeps me waiting outside for 20 minutes and finally runs down and opens the door just as I am about to leave. He is wearing a computer chip pinned on the collar of his gray polo shirt, which looks like it doubled as sleepwear, and equally drab gray pants and gray glasses. Brown hair unkempt, white tennis shoes untied, he doesn't look like the man who was once C.E.O. of Jupiter Communications and the now-defunct entertainment Web site Pseudo.com.

But Josh Harris, 39, really was both of those things; now he is a guy who has to explain to his disgruntled guest that his buzzer doesn't work. As I stand in a pool of sunlight and scan the 4,000-square-foot loft with 15-foot ceilings and wide-plank maple floors, I forget how ironic it is that the buzzer is broken in a home from which cameras and microphones record my every move and word and broadcast them to the Web. As an idea it's ominously unsettling, but as reality (in the form of black warning signs posted around the loft) it's only innocuously -- even comically -- surreal:

"WARNING! BY ENTERING THESE PREMISES LOCATED AT 519 BROADWAY NYC, 10012 YOU AGREE TO BE RECORDED IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR MANNER (VIDEO/FILM/AUDIO). ALL DATA BECOMES THE PROPERTY OF LUVVY L.L.C. TO BE USED IN ANY MANNER THEY SEE FIT. IF YOU OBJECT TO ANY PART OF THIS DO NOT ENTER THESE PREMISES. THANK YOU, LUVVY L.L.C."

For almost six months, Harris, with the use of 32 well-placed Web cams and 70 hidden microphones, has been broadcasting his home life on the Web site www.weliveinpublic.com, which has streaming video, one-minute-old video stills, a chat room and a no-longer-updated schedule of events. Now Harris is selling the loft. Tanya Corrin, his former live-in girlfriend, has already departed and Harris, whose wealth in Jupiter stock options dwindled considerably two months before I met him, has also sold We Live in Public to Panopticon, a newly formed company owned by a former Pseudo employee. Harris, however, retains ownership of everything recorded in the loft, and he is still a 35% shareholder of Panopticon.

As Harris pulls himself together, I take my time walking through the apartment, noticing the paintings of "Gilligan's Island" characters, the state-of-the-art kitchen, the fresh daffodils and bamboo, the vinyl couches, the piles of video tapes marked "We Live in Public," the Pseudo.com logo hanging on the wall and the wall-length sign that says "We Live in Public" sitting at one end of the living area. The space feels big, not homey. I forget to look for Web cams, until I check out the guest bathroom and see one staring up at me from inside the toilet bowl.

I quickly walk past the eerie control room, outfitted with screens showing all 32 Web cam images and meet Harris in his bedroom, also filled with artwork. In the master bath, he shows me the steam room that can fit 20 people. He uses it as a shower. I open the door to see inside, but only get a cloud of mist in my face. He runs back out in the main area, and I look at the books by his bedside: the Tibetan Buddhist book "Death and the Art of Dying," "Falconer" by John Cheever, "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth: 365 Meditations," "Understanding Comics" and "Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives." I find it interesting that someone who broadcasts his private life to the world reads books on meditation and Tibetan Buddhism. Alone in his bedroom, I briefly feel conscious of the people watching me online as I check out his reading matter.

When we finally sit and talk, I ask Harris how his experiment has affected the prediction he made when he first installed the Web cams -- that in a few years, Web cams in private homes would be as pervasive as telephones and televisions are today. "I'm an even firmer believer in that," he says carefully, claiming that in the past five months, he has simply conducted an art installation. "One day people will be able to buy a piece of my life," he says, referring to the We Live in Public videos, which are stored upstate. "Or it's not my life -- I just happen to be the guy in it," he explains.

When Harris gets more personal, he is up-front about the last months -- they have been rough due to his breakup with Corrin, "a great talent" whom he dated on and off for four years, and the vanishing of a large chunk of money in stocks. "I'm kind of shaky psychologically," he says, pointing to another reason for his problems: "Maybe because of the cams, I can't sort it out." The mental disturbance his experiment has caused him resurfaces a few times in our conversation. Later on, Harris, chewing nervously on an unlit cigar says, "If I don't get out of here, I'm going to Bellevue. I don't say that lightly. I'm sick. I'm mentally ill right now."

Although he speaks seriously about the psychological effects of living in public, he still maintains a half-hearted excitement about how technology can improve our lives. He talks about someday having Web cams in the homes of all his friends and family, and projecting video of them onto a wall of his home -- "like a security console," he explains, even using the word surveillance to describe the idea. Watching them by cam would make him more likely to call them, he says. Sometimes, he still finds living in public fun -- at least for the tricks he can play on others, like at a recent party he held in the loft for "fashion kids" during Fashion Week. "I locked off the door to the master bathroom and made sure the alcohol was wet," he says laughing, "and they had to use the guest bathroom." That toilet holds the Web cam.

So, We Live in Public has been a mixed experience for Harris. He doesn't rule out living this way again in the future, but says he would make changes. "In retrospect, [the number of cams] was probably overkill." As we tour through the bedroom, he points out the infrared camera that works when the lights are out, and says of Controlled Entropy Ventures, the company that put in the Web cams and microphones, "these guys are perverts. You could whisper in someone's ear [in bed] and everyone can hear it." When I remind him that they only did what he asked them to do, he said "Yeah, but you figure you'd beat [the technology] at some point."

Harris is beating the technology -- by escaping it. Two apple orchards he bought in the fall have been drawing him upstate and renewing his appreciation for spring. Soon, he heads to Italy to work on a documentary that questions whether eating a fish after killing it elevates the flesh of the fish; called "Tuna Heaven," the movie connects Jewish ideas about death and rebirth with similar concepts in Tibetan Buddhism. After that he sojourns to India. "[Living here] opened up my consciousness more than it was designed for. You can't get in yourself at all," he says. He plans to stay in a monastery for a year or so, be celibate and "practically become a monk."

On the phone a few days later, Harris, explaining how he doesn't feel self-conscious anymore about going to the bathroom in front of the camera, says that that is what people in earlier societies used to do -- perform what we call private functions in front of others. I find the idea interesting, but the parallel imperfect. In less individualistic societies, people performed those functions in front of people they knew, such as neighbors and friends; Harris didn't know all the people he was exposing himself to, and they weren't reciprocating. Implicit in the name We Live in Public is the idea that, at least in our society, no one else does.

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