Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine has received a ‘Cease and Desist’ letter from a law firm acting on behalf of Facebook. Readers of Dutch and international news are likely to have heard of the controversial web site. Taking the Dutch word of the year 2009, ‘ontvrienden’ (’unfriending’) literally, it helps you to remove all your profiles and data from the social networking sites Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter. Every piece of personal information gets deleted one-by-one before the user’s eyes.

The Suicide Machine has been covered, among many others, by HP de Tijd, De Volkskrant, de Telegraaf, the BBC, the The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. It is not simply a joke, but a useful tool. Members of social networks often do not know that their personal data is profiled and marketed to third parties for marketing. Even if you decide to end your membership, your data invisibly stays on their servers.

The Suicide Machine has been programmed and designed by our alumni and tutor Gordan Savicic in collaboration with Walter Langelaar and Danja Vassiliev at the MODDR media lab of WORM in Rotterdam. The critical research behind the Suicide Machine is based on Gordan Savicic’s 2008 Master graduation project Playsureveillance. WORM/MODDR and the Piet Zwart Institute collaborate frequently on media workshops and public events.