A few minutes later, two of DotComGuy's friends show up with a bag of food -- although the picture is grainy and dim on my computer monitor, I think I can make out french fries. The three sit in silence. They are watching "Seinfeld" reruns.

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Is there any cause worthy enough that you'd voluntarily commit to house arrest, putting yourself under 24-hour scrutiny by a global audience? What impetus would you require to allow your conversations to be recorded, your activities monitored, to live like a guppy in a fishbowl so that anyone who stumbled onto the Internet could tune in to ogle your every move?

Would you do it, as the contestants on "Big Brother" have, for money? Or as a kind of grand social experiment, a personal-growth process writ large, like Jenni Ringley of JenniCam? Would you do it in pursuit of fame? Or would you submit to this torture in hopes of raising public consciousness about a topic of great importance -- like the late gay activist Pedro Zamora, who several years ago went on MTV's "The Real World" to promote AIDS awareness?

Would you subject yourself to this total invasion of privacy to promote the widespread adoption of e-commerce?

On Jan. 1, amid much fanfare, a 26-year-old systems manager moved into a house in North Dallas, Texas, where he announced that he would spend the next 365 days under total webcam surveillance. In a selfless effort to encourage the use of online shopping, he would subsist entirely on items he could buy on the Web, never leaving his home (although he would be allowed visitors). He lined up a roster of impressive sponsors, hooked up 20 cameras and signed some paperwork officially changing his name to DotComGuy. Visitors to his Web site could tune in and watch him any hour of the day; only the toilet was sacred. If he made it through the year, he'd take home $98,000.

The resulting media frenzy sent hordes to DotComGuy.com, with the site logging 10 million hits on its first day. How very millennial, how very dot-com! the newspapers and radio DJs and TV hosts gushed. Seven months later, he's still getting press. It makes great copy, even if the resulting DotComGuy show, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is possibly the dullest entertainment ever conceived. It's a PG-rated nightmare of utter mundanity, playing to our collective fascination with all things dot-com. DotComGuy is the conflation of all our most despicable millennial obsessions -- voyeurism, Internet hype and consumerism -- wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow, brought to you by our esteemed new economy sponsors.

We should have expected this. When Jenni of JenniCam turned herself into a public icon by turning a video camera on her bedroom, there was something experimental, Webby, guileless about her decision. When the members of "Big Brother" turned themselves into manipulated guinea pigs for the sake of half a million dollars, the results gave way to drama, greed and the intrigue inherent in frank human relationships.

But DotComGuy was conceived during the year that venture capitalists poured billions into portals hawking pet food, capri pants, customized face lotion; a year when also-ran Web sites with inflated marketing budgets like Epidemic.com and OurBeginning.com coughed up millions for long-forgotten Super Bowl ads. Scroll back to the days before the April mini-crash that soured dot-com mania and you'll find DotComGuy an astute man of the times, hawking himself to the biggest sponsor; offering up his very life as a unique marketing opportunity that no company wanting to rub shoulders with our Internet obsession could refuse. He could give a damn about the cameras robbing him of anything revealing, intimate, human in his life; he has a higher purpose.

"I want to help people realize the possibilities of e-commerce," he says.

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