I'm obviously self-aware of the aesthetics of this post and the rancid vibes about making content about a corpse. Believe me, I have no shortage of other things I'd like to talk about on this account, but I also feel morally obligated to talk about them now because I knew them, and I do think that there's a lesson to be taken here about their life and their death that's relevant to me and probably relevant to other people that grew up on the internet.
I was probably within the top 20 people that knew them, maybe even the top 10, and even then, I really didn't know them at all. I was not their friend; I tried many times to be their friend over the years and failed every time. I invited them to visit the community I'm building here in St. Pete, and they considered it briefly before making up some excuse about how the Tampa airport was sketchy. Those were the last things we said to each other. Meeting with them was like pulling teeth; they said they were too busy watching vtubers alone in their room to hang out, even though I was specifically in the area to meet up with them. Beyond this meeting and some DMs before and after, this was the extent to which I personally knew them.
So again, I wasn't their friend; I'm not reflecting on this from the perspective of their friend. I don't know if they had any friends—it doesn't seem like they did. They told them many times the importance of having people in your life that love and understand you, and many times they brushed that off. I don't think they ever let anyone in; I don't think they ever let themself let anyone in, and the few people they did seem to try to let in had such deeply traumatic and troubling experiences with them that I don't think they knew how to let people in.
They told me during my interview with them that they were mute in high school, that they basically didn't know how to talk, didn't talk to anybody when they started posting online, which again was when they were a teenager with a developing brain. They found a way of feeling understood and finding a market for the way in which they were deeply strange—the way in which they were strange seemed to find an audience, and that strange pattern of behavior was encouraged both financially and socially. It made them fairly rich; it made them fairly well respected, but through it all, they were who they always were: a deeply strange and uncomfortable person with not a lot of self-awareness.
I also know that they were on pharmaceutical medication, that they were on a very high dose of SSRIs, and that they did an insane amount of drugs. I don't even know how you do $30,000 worth of cocaine in a year, but those drugs are ultimately what killed them. I believed they must have some sort of schizo-adjacent brain back in 2021. I don't really care to diagnose them, although I am pretty sure they had autism or schizophrenia or one of those things. I encouraged them to make an effort to correct their health, avoid stimulants and psychedelics, and do some things that work for me, like fasting.
I also considered them to be an exceptionally isolated and atomized individual and kind of the archetypal example of someone so surrounded in copes that they view their own atomization as a good thing. This was especially prevalent near the end of their life, where they started identifying as the Joker from Batman, who was this trolling genius three steps ahead of everybody who had a master plan that nobody else knew of. Of course, this grandmaster plan manifested in them overdosing while watching Hololive alone in their room, dying as they lived.
When the controversy around them began, they told me that their father had started smoking again after a long time of having quit because the dad was so stressed about seeing them embroiled in random drama—if only because of their family being Mexican immigrants. I do allow myself to feel sad about this. If you follow me and the themes I explore on my other alt, it's not a great mystery why I decided to go forward with this post.
I don't think they deserve to be dead; that's my hot take for today—my hot take about a corpse.
I love being an internet character; maybe this post is a bad idea. I'm making it in the emotional state of simultaneously thinking I really do not need to talk about this and thinking I really should talk about it while it's fresh. I'm just taking some notes and trying to make sense of it—that's really all I can do.
Maybe there are no lessons to be learned; maybe they were just a deeply troubled individual that ultimately got what they deserved. However, I also think there are forces in play that we really should be aware of when talking about this. I do really feel right now, at least, like the internet killed them. It gave an awkward teenage enbie a false sense of being understood and a false sense of purpose. It gave them opportunities and social and financial power, all of which they abused. At some point, it encouraged them to lean into their eccentricities until the person they were offline and the person they were online were no longer distinguishable. It hollowed out their mind to the point where their video responding to the allegations about them was them complaining that it didn't get enough views on YouTube. It gave them an endless stream of stimulation that allowed them to stay atomized and alone and content in their room, and then it provided them pathways to drugs, which ultimately killed them.
I can hear myself rattle off the same platitudes that I've been rattling off on the Discord for years: Have homies, have love; don't spend 14 hours a day on the computer; don't think you're too good to know people; don't think you're too good to love people; don't become too warped into the character you play online.
I don't think they knew how to be a real person; I don't think they ever had to learn.
The only thing I really do want to say is, over the last few years, I've started talking to more and more people who are strange in some way—autistic or schizophrenic or something—and when I talk to them and when I listen to them, what really stands out is how grateful they are that somebody is taking the time to understand them beyond just viewing them as a nuisance. And I don't think being a nuisance on the internet warrants a death sentence, and I don't think that's a good enough reason to celebrate someone's death. I don't know how they would have wanted to have been remembered; they were a deeply nihilistic person and didn't believe in anything besides themselves. It's ultimately up to you as to what you think the lesson here is, if there's any lesson at all, and because I don't have a conclusion, I also don't know how to end this post so uhhh I’m so irony pilled I want to fuck the IKEA shark.
The designers of this giant eldritch tangle knew, they always knew what the utility of their propaganda machines needed to be to insulate them from revolution as we all blindly search the transparent plastic boundaries of our ant farm.
Text from Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener (1948)
In connection with the effective amount of communal information, one of the most surprising facts about the body politic is its extreme lack of efficient homeostatic processes. There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory. The market is a game, which has indeed received a simulacrum in the family game of Monopoly. It is thus strictly subject to the general theory of games, developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. This theory is based on the assumption that each player, at every stage, in view of the information then available to him, plays in accordance with a completely intelligent policy, which will in the end assure him of the greatest possible expectation of reward. It is thus the market game as played between perfectly intelligent, perfectly ruthless operators. Even in the case of two players, the theory is complicated, although it often leads to the choice of a definite line of play. In many cases, however, where there are three players, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, when the number of players is large, the result is one of extreme indeterminacy and instability. The individual players are compelled by their own cupidity to form coalitions; but these coalitions do not generally establish themselves in any single, determinate way, and usually terminate in a welter of betrayal, turncoatism, and deception, which is only too true a picture of the higher business life, or the closely related lives of politics, diplomacy, and war. In the long run, even the most brilliant and unprincipled huckster must expect ruin; but let the hucksters become tired of this and agree to live in peace with one another, and the great rewards are reserved for the one who watches for an opportune time to break his agreement and betray his companions. There is no homeostasis whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses, which are so real a feature of modern times.Naturally, von Neumann’s picture of the player as a completely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudoscience will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings.
Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way. This is because no man is either all fool or all knave. The average man is quite reasonably intelligent concerning subjects which come to his direct attention and quite reasonably altruistic in matters of public benefit or private suffering which are brought before his own eyes. In a small country community which has been running long enough to have developed somewhat uniform levels of intelligence and behavior, there is a very respectable standard of care for the unfortunate, of administration of roads and other public facilities, of tolerance for those who have offended once or twice against society. After all, these people are there, and the rest of the community must continue to live with them. On the other hand, in such a community, it does not do for a man to have the habit of overreaching his neighbors. There are ways of making him feel the weight of public opinion. After a while, he will find it so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, so restricting and oppressing that he will have to leave the community in self-defense.
Thus small, closely knit communities have a very considerable measure of homeostasis; and this, whether they are highly literate communities in a civilized country or villages of primitive savages. Strange and even repugnant as the customs of many barbarians may seem to us, they generally have a very definite homeostatic value, which it is part of the function of anthropologists to interpret. It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important.
One of the lessons of the present book is that any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information. In a society too large for the direct contact of its members, these means are the press, both as it concerns books and as it concerns newspapers, the radio, the telephone system, the telegraph, the posts, the theater, the movies, the schools, and the church. Besides their intrinsic importance as means of communication, each of these serves other, secondary functions. The newspaper is a vehicle for advertisement and an instrument for the monetary gain of its proprietor, as are also the movies and the radio. The school and the church are not merely refuges for the scholar and the saint: they are also the home of the Great Educator and the Bishop. The book that does not earn money for its publisher probably does not get printed and certainly does not get reprinted.
In a society like ours, avowedly based on buying and selling, in which all natural and human resources are regarded as the absolute property of the first business man enterprising enough to exploit them, these secondary aspects of the means of communication tend to encroach further and further on the primary ones. This is aided by the very elaboration and the consequent expense of the means themselves.
I am not a rat in a maze, a bug in a terrarium, and neither are you. But to the bourgeoisie we are. Media, school, church, all of it is designed to constrict the boundaries of your intelligence and imagination into acceptable forms. These acceptable forms grant power to their designers and take away yours. I'm sure your friend isn't the only person you've met who couldn't even properly conceive of their own humanity. I don't think most people in the west can.
Some workers are moulded into parts for this great machine while others end up as slag. The particular niche this person found was a way for slag to recycle itself, but it wasn't enough for them to forget the designers threw them into the scrap pile to begin with. Self-medication was their salve for this alienation.
The designers know and they don't care.
They were a sacrifice to the gods of profit, for the hyper-accumulation of the few. They didn't deserve to die. The falling rate of profit will come for others, it'll slow down the mindmolding refineries, more will become slag. More will become homeless, more will be jailed for no reason, more will grind second jobs, more will find a sliver of meaning by selling their friendship for money.
You are right on the mark in everything you said. Hold onto this and don't lose it. More than likely all of us will encounter similar situations as the collapse of the west drags on and it's important to not only remember the lives lost but also to learn from them.