He probably/hopefully/certainly also has friends and family that he interacts with on a day-to-day basis that, were he to actually-really-really disappear, would care about him and call the police. It is frankly kind of creepy/scary that a bunch of people he barely knows think it is their place to /call the police/ if he gets sick of the weird kind of attention you get from that kind of audience (and frankly reinforces the behavior of wanting to "go 410").
Jason Scott, the guy whose twitter account that is and the guy who called the police, evidently knows Mark Pilgrim well enough to verify that he was talking to Mark because they were discussing a matter "only the two of them knew about".
That doesn't sound like "creepy Internet people Mark barely knows" to me.
Firstly, let me point out that I am responding to jerrya, not Jason Scott (whom I have also interacted with on a few occasions, and is a friend-of-a-friend enough that when I heard about this mess I turned to someone else in the room and asked them about what was up).
"Mark is goddamn lucky and should be both embarrassed and grateful that he's enough of a character that a chunk of the internet cares about him"
I believe that statement belies a general mentality that I run into constantly: I myself have "disappeared" a few times, for less than 72 hours, because I decided to "take a weekend off" (attending a concert, for example), and I /did not appreciate/ that a ton of people on Twitter seemed to think that meant that I had "died", and insinuated calling the police to find me.
Regardless, to respond now to your comment regarding Jason: they apparently aren't close enough for Jason to a) call Mark directly, b) call someone in Mark's family, c) call any of Mark's friends, or d) have any clue what happened to Mark other than to "[call] his local PD for a welfare check", which to me indicates they aren't really close at all.
Seriously: having something "only the two of them knew about" isn't actually that rare: I've only talked with the man (Jason) a couple times, and yet I bet I could pass that test as well.
I think a key issue here is: it isn't any of their business. I did not promise I would be around 24 hours a day, and they have no introspection into my life to know when something is normal behavior or not.
There are tons of people who do, though: my girlfriend, the people I hang out with at my office every day, and even a few "long term allies" (as it were) I've come to know only online (and talk with on IRC). Some (in fact, many) of these people even have access to my exact location at all times via Latitude.
But the people I meet at conferences, the people who follow me on Twitter, or even the people who lurk in IRC channels I'm in? It is simply not any of their business where I am or what I am doing, and it is absolutely silly for them to expect me to tell them how long I'm going to be gone.
I do not know Mark nor have I ever read his books, but this has been an interesting phenom he pulled and it is attention getting - I came to this story through slashdot. I think it is small-minded to imagine that things are different when people all over the world have been consuming Mark's works and have relied on that material as a resource day in and day out. Pretty bizarre. Wake up to the new world that Mark blogged about... HTML is the medium for publishing in our age and maybe one of the unintended consequences of that model is celebrity. There is nothing anyone can do to remove their internet likeness from the internet which seems silly that Mark of all people would attempt it without the world reacting - isn't that referred to as naive. It would have been easier to let all the resources rot to obscurity and no attention would have been drawn to his disappearance.
Did it occur to you that disappearing in such a manner might be similar to death and cause a similar reaction in people? Maybe their is a grievance cycle going on with people with such a sudden departure from their lives. One day the site is up, the next is a 410 with no explanation. For those where Mark's works were a reality, the sudden disappearance may be experienced like death as there is no explanation as to what was important to you is no longer and never will be. Are you a psychologist or sociologist that understands what is happening? Aren't you curious as to how it became that so many people depended on Mark's reality that do not know Mark personally? Who are you to react to those that are impacted psychologically to his disappearance? Do you claim to understand these things and how profound the internet affects us? I think you presume much about things you do not know about.
