A: We (the guys from moddr.net, Danja Vasiliev, Walter Langelaar and Gordan Savicic) organised a Web 2.0 Suicide Night in Worm (a club venue in Rotterdam) where the idea was to collectively delete your social network profles. Just grab a drink, fill out some forms and do away with your Web 2.0 alter ego. Later, I started scripting some python scripts and made the whole process automatic. We, at moddr, are experimentalists of everyday technology and critical media thinkers with an artistic practice. Basically, our lab consists of some very geeky fine-artists.

The suicide machine is, of course, a radical solution for the by now popular term "unfriending," which became Oxford word of the year 2009. I actually noticed that I was spending lots of time reading news feeds from people I didn't know so well and sometimes I would procrastinate on Facebook for hours. Since the time I got rid of my Facebook account, I feel much more at ease about social interaction and am a lot more productive in front of my computer.

A: There are, for sure, many nice things to be said about staying connected with friends and family living abroad using facebook and similar sites, but (most of) the users are not fully aware of the privacy-tradeoffs. Those services will hold your collected information forever on their servers and use the acquired data for targeted marketing analysis or crossselling it to third-party companies.

A: There should always be space enough for technological alternatives. Nowadays, one might say that you seem suspicious without even having a Facebook account. If the “medium is the message”, then we should be more aware of the implications of centralised systems where social connectivity became a medium on its own. We advocate connectivity among people, but are more fascinated by protocols and topologies offered by peer-to-peer solutions.

A: We don't necessarily believe that these platforms should die out. We aren't conservative either but there is a common theme inside those platforms which we wanted to address with the suicide machine. We want that users should know that they are voluntarily contributing to these networks with their own personal information and the same is being stored on external servers. In other words, the software is no longer stored on the user's hard disk.

The antipode to centralised Web services is nothing new, per se. Each node is a node is your node. Usenet existed long before (1979) and offered almost all services which are now available from commercialised services. It is a distributed system not owned or controlled by anyone.

A: The machine consists of a tweaked Linux server running apache2 with python modules installed. Selenium RC Control is used to automatically launch and kill browser sessions. Each user can watch her suicide action in real-time via a VNC remote desktop session, displayed on our website via a fash applet rendered live into the client's web browser.

A: We can redirect our Web traffic through a network of proxy servers which are spread around the world. By doing so, Facebook can't track back the requests coming from Web 2.0 suicide machine that easily. After we got banned we've started a call on our page asking people to provide reliable proxy servers and we were overwhelmed by the amount of answers we've received.

A: Social marketing is not just about starting a fanpage on the Facebook. Companies have realised by now that the Internet crowd can get easily angry and backfre if their product is bad or the company treats their customers badly (United Airlines break guitars, for example). Usually company communication is happening within locked-up systems and not in publicly available social networking sites. If every employee updates their tweets throughout the day, companies would have a hard time making use of this data. There has been a growth in the technologyfor information sharing but not a commensurate increase in focus on educating users on what information they should share.

A: We are currently working on our bootable Suicide Machine release so that everyone can download a fullyworking version of the machine and launch it from their own computers. We believe in sharing knowledge and by giving away our source code for free we hope that the project will continue to live on in the Internet.