Goodbye, Cruel Virtual World

If the holidays have you feeling like spending more time with offline people in face to face relationships, and you want to end it with all this online social networking, consider the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.

The Suicide Machine promises to kill your online persona(e) and delete all your friends/contacts/followers/networks and posts, leaving only your famous last words to let people know you've committed online suicide.

It currently works on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, and apparently is popular enough that you may sometimes get the disheartening message "Sorry, Machine is currently busy with killing someone else".

The Machine is free and argues for its own relevance with these stirring words:

Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped in a high resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world. We do have an healthy amount of paranoia to think that everyone should have the right to quit her 2.0-ified life by the help of automatized machines.

Check out the Memorial Pages for info on those who have committed web suicide already, with a picture of the deceased, the site(s) abandoned, the number of virtual friends left behind, and last words, if any.

I personally do not yet feel trapped in a "high resolution panoptic prison without walls" (I'm OK with my current use of social networking) but I have to say that's a very poetic way to put it, and if someone does feel thus imprisoned, this looks like a clever way to break free. Don't let ancient social networking site memberships keep you bound to an online existence that has become nothing but pain and trouble!

Sadly, this doesn't work for Friendster, which is the site I really never update. My other accounts are at least sporadically looked in upon.

Identity Woman brought this to my attention.

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