Seppukoo: Is There Life After Facebook?

Seppukoo.com is a social website which “liberates the digital body” by deactivating one’s Facebook profile and shaping a social experience out of it. It is meant to reflect seppuku, an ancient practice in Japan in which a samurai warrior kills himself to restore their honor.

Created by ”Linking the Invisible“, a group of European media artists (Guy McMusker, Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini), whom explore the invisible relationships between the “infosphere, neural synapsis, and real life.” In one of their projects, they have created the quintessential ‘anti-social networking’ social website. Their website capitalizes on a notable trend, namely the desire to disconnect as a way to get things done and get back to the way life used to be – before social media became so integrated into one’s identity, social life, and to escape the encroaching corporate media interests that currently drive much of the online world.

By committing this ‘online ritual suicide’, the deactivation of one’s Facebook account can become a social experience. After the Facebook account is deactivated, the user then sets up a Memorial Page and Suicidal Wall, on which friends and contacts visit and leave comments. Interestingly, your score on Seppukoo is determined by how many followers you have and the various testimonials your account brings in. So it is a highly subversive application and takes its users into a post-Facebook life. You might be relieved to know that should a user decide that deactivating their website was a mistake, the website can restore it; so it’s not a genuine ‘online suicide’ after all, but more of a tongue-in-cheek internet experiment.

While it is hard to imagine that this will grow into a bigger trend on Facebook, Seppukoo’s owners claim that over 350,000 Facebook users had received an invite to follow; entering the website link into any comment or message boxes will produce a warning that the link is ‘abusive content’. Up until now, Facebook does not recognize this group as a threat, and has not taken any action to regulate them.

[via AFP]