Dave Winer Threatens Suicide, Kinda

I think that Matthew Ingram, in Okay, now Dave is starting to scare me, is really getting the subtext of Dave Winer’s ‘I’m Going To Stop Blogging’ post.

What he’s doing is threatening suicide: either figuratively, seriously or both.

I’m feeling the stress of all the fighting, and age, and I’m satisfied that I have enough money to retire on now. Why not let me go, quietly and peacefully, I’ll stop writing my blog, I’ll stop developing new stuff, you can be me if you want, I won’t be in your way.

The guy is lamenting his age — hey, I’m 52 and you don’t hear me bitching — and how tired he is, and that he can’t rally himself for another go.

Jeez, Dave, take some time off, go to the beach, get laid, whatever. Just don’t jump off that bridge, man. There’s still good things to do. Chill out. Take up a hobby. But don’t be so absolute. And you’ve always been edgy enough for people like me to believe that you have it in you. But please don’t do it.

[Update: Scoble revisits this meme (see Link: Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger � Overwhelmed with pitches, Dave, say it isn’t so!), and says that he is not the perfect, well-oiled machine he used to be:

You might say “who cares?” And you’d be missing the point. It’s the small things on blogs that matter to me. It’s the small things that make us human. Increasingly our blogs have lost their humaness. We’ve become marketing machines.

Like I said, we need to proceed on a human footing. See The Blog Commons: What Is Uncommon?, which is actually a different take on the same issue: can human scale save us from the blogosphere’s explosion?]