From time to time, people decide to commit “Internet Suicide,” deleting their blog posts, essays, public libraries, photos, everything.

Many people feel this is deplorable, especially if their writing and open source is useful. Value has been removed from the Universe.

There’s plenty of spirited back-and-forth on the subject, as you might expect when one man does something of his own free will without making a commitment or agreement of any kind, and another man would rather he do something else.

The word “selfish” enters into such conversations, and truly it cuts both ways. Aren’t I selfish when I remove my code fromt he world? Aren’t you selfish for wanting me to leave it there?

Anyhow, I have nothing much to say about removing words and code from the Internet. Think of it this way: What would happen if every single one of Alan Turing’s writings were to vanish suddenly?

Well, we would have a historical disaster. Those writings are milestones in mathematics and computer science. We would lose forever the ability to readthe great man’s thoughts in his own words. Why, we’d have to rename the Turing Bird!

Let’s go further. Let’s erase ever time he was quoted or his name was mentioned. Everything, gone! As if some great superpower decided that eveolution was just a theory and homosexuals should not be part of any teaching curriculum.

One day, a century from now, we might even forget who he was. But would computers stop working? No, they would still work. The Allies may have forgotten who helped them win the great war, but they still would have won it.

The thing is, we didn’t just read Turing, we built on his ideas. We can erase every single bit he emitted in his lifetime, but the ripple effect of those bits on other minds, other ideas, will still be here.

Today, there is a lot of writing on the Internet. There are a lot of free libraries. And it is inconvenient if someone yanks some of them away, erasing their bits.

But the effect of those bits is still with us! Everyone who reads a blog post or essay, who thinks long and hard about it, has been changed. The bits representing their brain have been affected whether they agree or disagree with its proposition.

Everyone who uses a library has been changed by more than just saving themselves the effort of writing it themselves, they have been affected by the library’s design. If we yanked JQuery off the Internet, we’d still have Katy happily making CoffeeScript and JavaScript programs more “fluent,” because I liked JQuery and Combinatory Logic enough to make JQuery Combinators and I liked that enough to make Katy.

There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people doing exactly the same thing every day. They aren’t historians or librarians. They don’t make a note of an article or a library and “remember where it is in case they want to read it later,” they read it now. They build upon it, they extend it, they push back against it by building something in opposition to it, they are changed by what they encounter.

Such people are “active consumers,” they don’t just consume, they act. And those actions mean that every bit of information they encounter ripples forward, living on. You can remove the original essay, you can take down the original blog, you can pull the library they used, but their fork still exists, their derivative ideas still exist, their newly discovered opinions and taste for ideas carries on without the original bits.

How actively do you consume ideas? I know there’s plenty of room for me to be more active. I need to do more than skim articles, I need to throw myself into them. I can’t settle for “Get the gist of it and come back later if I need it.” I need to open myself up to change more than I do.

I have a certain optimism that I could take everything I write down tomorrow and the world would still be wonderful place, thanks to the active consumers out there reading and writing my words, reading my code and writing their own, building, growing, extending, and even discarding my ideas. This is a very good thing.

So, yes, it’s sad when someone pulls their work. But never fear, their ideas have evolved and are still with us, and always will be, as long as there are active consumers to read, think, and then write.