https://twitter.com/#!/textfiles/status/121436177298493440
"Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring."
"Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring."
I should note that the concern isn't without merit. If you read Howard Rheingold's "The Virtual Community" which is one of the earliest discourses on Internet and online community, the concept of "virtual suicide" isn't new.
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/1.html
In this case, someone created a tool to eradicate their online identity, then did the same in real life.
I've had this issue twice in my 16 years of running Murmurs.com. In one case, the person was in chat on a Sunday and threatened suicide before deleting all her posts. We had to track down her university police department and they found her on the lawn outside her dorm overdosing on sleeping pills.
The other was more sad. The guy disappeared and posts were removed. Only later did we find that he had left his suicide note on Flickr. He was Norwegian and we had to do a lot of digging to find more info. In the end his mom emailed me a very poorly translated English message, and it was heartbreaking.
The moral is: I don't think there was any over reaction. This pattern has precedent and not a good one. I've never felt that in my 16 years of doing online community work I've ever over-reacted when I saw this behavior transpire.
In one case we saved someone's life, and in the other we didn't.
The symptoms displayed by Mark here are very similar to some kind of "classic" pre-suicidal actions (i.e. "putting his affairs in order") so I can definitely see why suicide would be a concern among his friends.
It's not a huge stretch to follow that train of thought to the notion that his actions amounted to a somewhat obscure suicide note. And giving away your stuff/deleting accounts en masse/shutting your life down is a fairly classic behavior among suicidal individuals.