The first social media suicide

‘I’ve seen people die,” Océane said, during one of the online broadcasts she made just before her end. “Frankly that’s not what shocks you. A woman came in to the retirement home where I work and she lasted just two weeks. She arrived and she was fine. I have no idea what shit they gave her: the nurses shot her full of medication. By the end you couldn’t understand what she said, she was mostly dribbling. I remember she said to me, ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die.’ So I told her, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be OK, I’m here for you, if you want I’ll come and see you in your room.’ The next day I turned up at 8am and she was dead. And what annoyed me the most was they left her the entire day in the room and you had these trainees, these old girls who were like, ‘Let’s go see her, let’s go see her!’ And I said, ‘The dead aren’t a spectacle for your entertainment.’ Then the guy turned up from the morgue and I helped him carry her out.”

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Océane was oppressed by the trite and uncaring relations she observed between human beings. She poured scorn on the empty flirtation of social media, their desperate popularity theatre. She had no interest in the artificial animation of alcohol or drugs (though she constantly smoked cigarettes). The dulled existence of the Parisian suburbs, where no one seemed able to engage with anything consequential, depressed her (on the wall behind her as she made her last speech hung a poster with the words NEW YORK PARIS LONDON HONG KONG). “I’m half Turkish and half Polish,” she said, in answer to one of the questions posed by her online spectators. “I don’t understand this mania of always asking people’s nationality. People are always asking: How old are you? What’s your name? Where do you live? What are your origins? People are very very very very stupid around here.”

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She lived in a town called Égly. It is a forsaken place, which outsiders rarely visit except to use the regional garbage dump. The street signs speak of decay: the antique shop, the cemetery, the funeral home, the social centre for the homeless. The apartment blocks have white security shutters drawn down over the windows; the noticeboards are posted with instructions for dealing with a terrorist attack (take shelter behind a solid object, turn off the ringer on your phone).

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Égly dangles near the end of the Paris-region rail network – the Réseau Express Régional, or RER – which has acquired such a lugubrious grip over suburban existence that it appears constantly in French rap as an image of exclusion and confinement. It is difficult to understand how towns so close to one of the earth’s most significant urban hubs can seem remote until one comes to depend on the maddeningly infrequent trains, which take up to an hour to reach the capital. Then the bleak and denuded landscape makes some sense – and one realises why the jet-setting Parisian elite that runs French business, politics and culture seems so infuriatingly remote and smug. The car-burnings that have become such an emblem of suburban life are very precise, after all, in their symbolism: they are a revolt against the mobile mainstream – against everyone whose rhythms are not drummed out by the deadening stop-start of double-decker trains.

Océane’s relationship with her dispersed family was uneasy, so she did not have the luxury of indifference to the general world. “I don’t speak to my father anymore,” she said. “He’s a jerk.” Océane’s father was a powerful, sensuous individual who took out his moods on the judo floor and the punchbag; his extensive online life indicates a man prosaically impatient with things intangible or far away. He had daughters from two relationships – the two women were not close – but he lived alone, and worried about his fading good looks. He ran a popular nightclub where, in addition to the usual DJ fare, he featured acts such as American Borderline, a frat-boy-and-cheerleader extravaganza including – as his flyer promised – sex toys, strippers, naked teenagers in jacuzzis, strobe showers and many other such marvels, all of it filmed for the American adult media company YouPorn.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/29/the-first-social-media-suicide