It’s been five years since _why a lucky stiff committed “infocide,” deleting his Twitter account, all of his websites, and his GitHub account containing all of his code projects.
There have been countless debates about the relative ethics of infocide, and I don’t have anything to add. But can I ever relate. There are days that I want to delete my Twitter accounts, my Tumblr accounts, yank my noise albums off the web and, of course nuke this very blog. There’s over 14 years of material here, dating back to when I was 18 years old. Much of it is merely embarrassing, some of it is out right shameful. It would be nice to flush it all down the memory hole and, like the band said, rip it up and start again. Create a new persona, a new blog, a new Twitter account.
Or not. Really, what I fantasize about most is just unplugging entirely. Many people thoughts, good and bad, about this whole unplugging thing. And again, I have nothing to add except: geez whiz it sounds like it would be nice not just to unplug for a day or a month or, like that lucky bastard Paul Miller, an entire year, but to be done with this whole internet thing once and for all. To get a newspaper subscription, dig my library card out of whatever creased recess of my wallet it’s been banished to and just get on with life and pretend that the web was just weird dream that spanned nearly two decades of my life.
Of course, it’s not so simple. I have a job to do, and it requires the web. There’s not many living jobs out there any more, and there are even fewer that I’m qualified for. Most of them require using the internet. And the internet is where my friends are. And I know the newspapers would pile up, the library books would slip go overdue before I read ’em, and any new blog or Twitter account I created would become just unwieldy as the last.
So I’ll stick around. But a fellow can dream, can’t he? Well, here’s to you, _why. Hope you’re making the best of it.
