You need to find a job that will hire you without I-9 verification, pay cash, and not withhold taxes or report your employment to the IRS. You need to sublet for cash (without the landlord's knowledge, so he doesn't generate any records like a lease) and not have your name on the apartment or any utility accounts.<p>The banking system is loaded with KYC rules; you will need to steer clear of it. Do not get an ID at all unless the photo no longer resembles you and the address listed on it checked out at the time but is no longer considered a threat (remember that your old neighbors might sit with a sketch artist or remember a comment in passing about where you might be headed next). Obviously no car registration or driving. Switch transit fare cards frequently; be careful of the CCTV cameras on the farecard vending machines.<p>Use distinct prepaid device for each call. Make your way to a pseudorandom location (the locations of all your calls plotted on a map should not let anyone infer the general vicinity of your home, workplace, or where you might surface next). Make the call over a unique Signal account, be brief, and securely destroy the phone.<p>Obviously no flying, and especially no crossing international borders. You most certainly cannot do anything predictable like show up at your parents' house at Christmas.<p>If you must use email, use Tails, use a different email address and PGP key for every message, come up on secondhand laptops over Tor on public wifi at places that can't individually identify laptop users mechanically, and places too busy to remember the faces of specific laptop users.<p>Obviously, social media of any form, any sort of communication (even letter-writing) with people who won't apply this tradecraft as carefully as you every single time with no exceptions ever, legitimate employment, anything licensed, and anything related to the banking system are totally out of the question.<p>... by now it should be clear that "dropping off the grid" is almost certainly not what you want to do, and that 95% of what you have to fear from "the grid" has been here long before social media and doesn't care that you deleted your Facebook account, because it is integral to every part of life.<p>The relation name ~ face ~ residence ~ phone ~ email ~ occupation ~ employer ~ financials is <i>probably</i> not something you <i>actually</i> want to "erase" or keep secret, unless you are willing to go to extreme lengths. And at that point, the government's "someone is using tradecraft" senses will likely go off, and they'll likely come at you with some old fashioned human intelligence work that your Hacker News sensibilities won't protect you against.<p>You might want to think more deliberately about which pieces of information you're trying to <i>disassociate</i> from that relation, because that's a much more tenable project.