Taking things to an extreme.
Many people say that they'd like to erase everything they've written on forums in which they've participated, but few people are doing much about it. Blair Newman did.
Blair Newman was what would today be considered a hacker. He had a hand in numerous developing technologies, and was, by his own admission, an internet addict, spending hour upon hour of each day in the conference rooms of the pioneering online community The Well. In 1990, after about five years of intense online activity, and countless postings to the discussion forums of the Well, he used a recently developed tool available within the Well community, and removed all of his postings. Howard Rheingold, in the first chapter of his book The Virtual Community writes:
It seemed an act of intellectual suicide.
Rheingold's next sentence?:
A couple of weeks later, in real life, Blair Newman killed himself.
Most people seem to take some sort of comfort in the idea that their words, or writings, remain after their death. On the other hand, there are authors and composers who have issued instructions that their unpublished manuscripts be destroyed after their death. Perhaps Blair Newman was an artist of this sort.
Newman's story is best known known from Rheingold's book (toward the end of the first chapter). Interestingly, though he's become a rather mythic figure in internet lore, very little else is reported about him on the web. An archived New York Times article about his death (that offers a fascinating glimpse into how strange the idea of being online was back in 1990) is available. Back in 1994 someone started to build a web page about him, but it seems that after organizing a few newspaper clippings the project was aborted.
Go to: on erasing an online forum.