Yorick Wilks

In many jurisdictions, such as the UK, you are free to kill yourself (without prosecution if you survive unexpectedly!) but not to help others commit suicide.
This may well be a wise position, and the distinction seems to be reemerging on the social web. You can, laboriously, defriend everyone you know on Facebook or you can poke around and find the Deactivate and Delete facilities so as to leave Facebook temporarily or permanently. But it seems you will get into trouble if you encourage others to do so, to commit “web suicde”.

Facebook is consulting their learned friends about new sites like suicidemachine.org which actively encourage users to leave all their social networks and to post on that very network how many friends they are cutting off by leaving the internet and giving their own last words on the web. Facebook’s spokesman said severely:

“Users rely on us to protect their data and enforce the privacy decisions they’ve made,” said Simon Axten, the company’s policy and security officer. “We take this trust seriously and work aggressively to protect it.”

There are many paradoxes and ironies here: former users of the social web advertising their own web suicide ON A WEB SITE; Facebook wanting to stop an organized but consenting deletion of data by claiming to be protecting that very data. Protecting the data for whom? Not presumably the would-be suicide? For the friends who cannot bear to lose you, for the Government, for advertisers who will be able to find you under Facebook’s new relaxation of privacy conventions?

In case you think this last is paranoia, check this blog from a tea-party-sort-of-person:

“shane farmer wrote:
All you little people sat at home typing to each other instead of meeting up for a night out, i know its not always possible but you type instead of. My wife thinks that the goverment loves the fact they know were most peopole are all the time, ie sat at home watching TV or typing bull to each other, while paying a mortgage on a hen hutch they can’t afford, its called house arrest in our new world communist country.”

This blog followed the Times article on the suicidemachine site: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999245.ece
and has the authentic and widespread sentiments that are pulling down Obama’s ratings.

A much stranger competitor to suicide machine is Seppukoo.com, which not only cuts you off from the web but gives you scores depending on how many of your friends you have persuaded to commit suicide themselves; it explicitly lists those of your friends who have left and those who are still on the social web, see:

http://www.seppukoo.com/how-it-works

and
“Top 100 suicidal users
Open your mind to a new meaning of popularity: with Seppukoo it’s not important how many friends you have, but how much you may influence them. A friend who follows you in Seppukoo Experience is a friend you can absolutely trust!”

Seppukoo is more a suicide cult, where you get to design an elaborate memorial site for your self and, strangest of all, encourages you to add to memorial sites it has set up for famous real world suicides (i.e. not web suicides) from Virginia Woolf to Jim Morrisson. Here the circle is complete: you are encouraged to leave the social web and bring your friends with you, but then to set up an alternative “afterlife” website where you and your (old? new?) friends add shrine-like comments —of the kind even Facebook now allows for the really dead—–congratulating you and celebrating their new afterlife. Or is it Purgatory? Or is it a very subtle recruiting ploy to undermine existing social sites but start all over again? As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages: “A triumph of hope over experience”.