This past week, Mark Pil­grim, a well-known and well-beloved pil­lar of the Python com­mu­nity, van­ished. He deleted his social accounts, his web­sites, and any email sent to him bounced. At first, peo­ple wanted to know if he was okay; Jason Scott was able to find out that the man just wants to be left alone. Once the state of his well-being was estab­lished, com­ments ranged from sad­ness to out­rage. Many peo­ple (myself included) are deeply sad­dened to see that his Cre­ative Com­mons Licensed devel­op­ment books (Dive Into Python, Dive Into Access­ablilty, Dive Into Grease­mon­key) have gone away. Code repos­i­to­ries have van­ished. Doc­u­men­ta­tion is gone. [pullquote_right]“The moral of all this is that if you want to dis­ap­pear silently, you should dis­ap­pear silently. Silently on the inter­net does not mean delet­ing your con­tent. It means leav­ing it there.” — user on Hacker News[/pullquote_right] Remov­ing your con­tent, your social iden­tity and all of your work effec­tively is killing your online self — info­s­ui­cide.  While the online com­mu­nity might respect a person’s pri­vacy if they leave their work online and van­ish qui­etly, they get down­right hos­tile if the con­tent cre­ator takes down every­thing they have ever pro­duced. Many feel the way one of my cowork­ers put it, “It’s the con­sum­mate dick move.” UPDATE: More thoughts…  Engage­ment on the Inter­net that can be tricky. There is a spec­trum run­ning from total non-participation to post­ing every­thing you do on every social net­work there is, and where you fall on that spec­trum is dri­ven by what your goals are. Those of us on the web for a decade or more, work­ing in the code or being early adopters of new ser­vices, had a ten­dency to use the web as if it were a lifestyle and not a col­lec­tion of tools. Once upon a time, one could define them­selves by what they did on the web, i.e. “I am a pod­caster.”  The web has advanced to the point where it’s not just for the early adopters anymore…no one can man­age the com­plex­ity of tools out there. Many of the cre­ative peo­ple I know are retool­ing they way they use the tools the web pro­vides them; leav­ing ser­vices they do not use, choos­ing to nar­rowly focus on one or two meth­ods of get­ting their mes­sage out. [pullquote_left]…Facebook’s bit about spy­ing on you and report­ing on what you’re doing online was it. I went in, deleted my account…I am no longer there. –Mur Lafferty[/pullquote_left]I have had the on-and-off dis­cus­sion with myself about the tools, espe­cially the social ser­vices: I feel as though I am dilut­ing my mes­sage when I use them to engage with peo­ple, but at the same time, I am unsure how to get the mes­sage out there with­out using them. I feel like an old man say­ing this, but I miss the days when blogs were the main thread of dis­cus­sion, and RSS drove the read­ing habits of my peers. Now it seems that between Twit­ter, Face­book, Google+, etc, it is easy to become dis­tracted from the work and weaken your voice, instead of con­serv­ing it for more impor­tant themes. Tak­ing your ball and going home seems extreme to me. I do not know what Mark Pil­grim is going through…I can only assume that cut­ting ties is the only way he feels he can change his life. More power to him, I wish him the best, but I can­not shake the feel­ing that nar­row­ing focus and pre­serv­ing his legacy might have been a bet­ter move in the long run. The ques­tion to coders and con­tent cre­ators is this: Is it wrong to pull all the con­tent that one cre­ates if one decides to van­ish from the Inter­net? What is the respon­si­bil­ity of a con­tent cre­ator toward their audi­ence when a per­sonal deci­sion causes them to aban­don their Inter­net life?