In her film, she sees Harris as a warning of what our children might become, perpetually connected to millions but starved of intimate contact with a few. Curiously, Harris doesn't disagree with this, describing a childhood in which he drew most of his emotional sustenance from TV. Yet, for all that, I missed our evening sessions hugely when I returned from Awasa, and Timoner admits that she feels strong affection for him, too. He is what Malcolm Gladwell would call an "outlier", walking ahead in order to show us where we're going – and what we'll look like when we get there.

"Andy Warhol said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," Harris told me. "But I think he misunderstood what was happening. 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."

His Millennium Eve party, called Quiet: We Live in Public, ran for over a month, during which an ad-hoc community of human subjects lived in pods in a six-storey Broadway warehouse, each pod wired up and effectively functioning as a TV channel, streamed live to the web via Harris’s online TV portal at Pseudo.com. It was 1,000 times more vital and acute than the still-nascent Big Brother. “Don’t bring your money,” Harris said. “Everything here is free.”

Quiet featured a shooting range you could hear from the street, a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras. But more than anything, it offered its residents complete freedom. There were drugs and public sex — at one point, Harris, in the guise of a clown called Luvvy, attempted to coordinate simultaneous orgasms between three couples.