Even When It’s Tough, DotComGuy Lives by the Cyber House Rules

Somewhere in Dallas, a guy who sold his own life--whose journals are posted online, whose everyday speech is riddled with endorsements, whose movements even in sleep are scrutinized by millions of viewers--walks into the only room in his house where there’s no camera and shuts the door.

The video picture is idle. The audience waits. Come back, DotComGuy! We’re bored without you. You’re our voyeuristic treat. Your existence is our 24-7 Internet entertainment.

Halfway through this grand experiment of living an entire year on the Internet, DotComGuy’s life has flattened into a routine. He cooks and works out with a personal trainer. He fixes the garbage disposal. He types at his computer with DotComDog, a beagle-basset mix, on his lap.

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And with every movement he creates an odd sort of celebrity: one known simply for being known, every minute, every second of the day. One who is rather popular for an Internet figure, considering he doesn’t do orgies.

Odd celebrity. For his site, dotcomguy.com, isn’t about the individual once known as Mitch Maddox, 26: former computer systems manager for a paging company, former political science major at the University of North Texas. It’s about DotComGuy, who changed his name from Mitch Maddox, who has one of 24 cameras trained on him at almost all times, whose every movement is tracked by 1.5 million people a day.

DotComGuy: who is attempting to live a year without leaving his house and tiny backyard, who must order all his goods and services over the Internet to demonstrate that humankind can survive on e-commerce alone.

DotComGuy: whose life is a series of advertisements. “3Com camera giveaway!” he promises the audience. “I got my couch from FurnitureOnline.com; my dishes from Target.com; groceries from Peapod,” he writes in his journal.

DotComGuy: who will draw a salary of nearly $100,000 for this one-year experiment.

DotComGuy: who has somehow managed to subsume the human instinct for privacy, to act as if living his most intimate moments online is normal.

“I’m not in this to make any name for myself. It’s about the Web site; it’s about the community. I’m nobody if nobody’s watching, and if people are watching, I’m just DotComGuy,” he explains over the phone.

So what has our argonaut into unknown e-commerce discovered?

For one, it’s hard to buy shoes over the Internet.

Because really, what is a size 9 other than a concept, unless you’ve tried it on and wriggled your toes and stepped to see if your heel slips out? DotComGuy hasn’t bought shoes since February. But that’s OK, because he doesn’t walk far.

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Did you know you can rent a tuxedo online? The tux was for one of the many events that take place at the “DotCompound,” our Guy’s house in Dallas. He can’t go out, but visitors often come in--production staff, the personal trainer, Japanese news crews. It’s part of the company’s effort to make one ordinary life perpetually interesting.

And people find it so. They’re apparently captivated by DotComGuy’s activities, though the audience has leveled off as the hype has. (About 4.7 million people a day watched in the beginning, the company says.) Stephanie Germeraad, DotComGuy Inc.’s public relations consultant, says the average session for logging onto the Web cast is 27 minutes.

DotComGuy spends his days at the computer. He surfs, chats online, takes phone interviews. You conclude: Without the scripted humiliations of CBS’ “Survivor” or the temperamental roommates of MTV’s “Real World,” real-time voyeurism is nearly as boring as your own life.

Today is a bad day. A friend of the family has died. DotComGuy’s parents are going to the funeral. If DotComGuy weren’t DotComGuy--if he were Mitch Maddox--he would go too. But he isn’t, and he can’t. If he goes, explains press person Germeraad, “the media will hound him because it will have been something that got him to leave the house.”

So DotComGuy stays and seems sad. Sometimes he takes the phone into the bathroom for long stretches.

Someone on the production crew helpfully stretches these words across the bottom of the live video: “DotComGuy is in the bathroom. It is easier for him to talk on the phone in there.”

Mitch grieves alone.