Agency 404 Delete Yourself

This video sketch, created in 2017 on the edge of sarcasm in the format of an advertisement, presents a service that is clearly likely to be in demand in the near future: the removal of personal information from the internet. The irony lies in the fact that a technologically advanced society still relies on the aesthetics of cheap provincial advertising to promote its services.
Another aesthetic reference points to advertisements for funeral agencies, which among other things offer to create an archive of memory for a deceased person. Here, the situation is reversed: instead of preserving memory, the person’s presence is erased from the digital archive of the internet.
A further irony emerges from the implication, made clear in the video, that in Russia the collection of personal information continues to be carried out by the Federal Security Service.

Concept

We are in the near future, where technologies for deleting human digital traces have become so widespread that they have reached even provincial towns. Every self-respecting town now has an agency of this kind. Their popularity has grown in response to hacking, data theft, state surveillance, the persecution of activists, and the cynical calculations of corporations selling customer data for targeted advertising.

But in order to completely erase their traces from the internet, a person has to provide the agency with comprehensive information about themselves. The agency’s speech is so sweet and its promises so confident that the client does not notice that this information could be collected for entirely different purposes.

MP4, video with subtitles,

00:06:17, 2017