Josh Harris, the merry prankster of Silicon Alley circa 1999, has emerged from hiding, and launched a new web startup—this time in Los Angeles. Operator11.com, a "social television network," is like a mashup of YouTube and MySpace that allows users to collaborate on the creation of video webcasts. It's also a little like Harris's legendary dot-bomb, Pseudo, but with user-generated content. The site launched in May without fanfare—except for a jeering mention from Valleywag, after an unsuspecting visitor to the site was greeted with live footage of a gentleman whacking off. ("Good publicity," Harris says.) Otherwise, the site has been flying low, an altitude that doesn't come naturally to a serial provocateur once worth as much as $40 million.

It was Harris's Pseudo-era bashes in SoHo that first caught the eye of the press in the late '90s. His festivities culminated in a month-long millennium celebration called Quiet that combined Warholian spectacle with 24/7 surveillance. Think the Exploding Plastic Inevitable meets Big Brother. Harris maintains it was "the greatest party in the history of New York City," and a film about it, directed by Ondi Timoner (the filmmaker behind the 2004 rock doc DiG!), is perpetually in the works.

But Harris wasn't just an art house darling. He boasted to 60 Minutes II that Pseudo would put CBS out of business, but it was he who would go belly up in 2000. (YouTube, of course, planned something similar six years later, with better results.) Harris made his curtain call with "We Live in Public," an online experiment in which he and "girlfriend" Tanya Corrin (he now says the relationship was a ruse) lived under the gaze of 32 webcams for nearly 100 days. And then he was gone.

"I cracked," he admits. "I was with these cameras and living in public with a fake girlfriend and it cracked me. I was alone for five years on an apple farm, badly farming apples, just to find my sanity." He has since sold the farm in Livingston, New York, and cast his lot in Hollywood, where, he says, "I'm all in. If this doesn't work, I'm broke. Beyond broke. I'm in debt."

Meanwhile, he can be found on Operator11, a little pudgier, perhaps, chomping on an unlit cigar, using the handle "luvy," a reference to his clown alter ego, who often made appearances at Pseudo's bashes.

Will such events continue on the West Coast? "I'm doing the same thing here," he promises. "I'm under construction, making this scene in Hollywood. I'm hoping that New York City will sit back and enjoy the ride, all the more because they've seen my act, and now they'll have fun watching me do it to someone else."