I wrote this a few weeks ago while riding the subway from Madrid’s airport to Paseo de Prado. Apparently someone was listening and developed the helpful Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. “Meet your Real Neighbors again!” is a great tagline, destined to become a neo-romantacist mantra.

It’s the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn’t important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it’s in Facebook. And others say, well, it’s on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it’s very hard to say it’s somewhere in my life, in my lived life.

- Frank Schirrmacher

Sometimes I wish that my computer had a “fuck it” key. I would press it and it would fuck everything up. My Facebook page: deleted; my Flickr account: gone; my Twitter feed: evaporated; my blog: what blog?

The sheer beauty of all that digital destruction. The temptation. The illusion of protection through forgetting.

“Sometimes I feel like all that is important in life is what we can stick on a 4gb USB drive,” a friend once told me. I hate that feeling. I know it well.

(And, yes, I realize that all of this contradicts what I wrote just a week ago.)