Elliot Rodger was 20 years old and had never kissed a girl. He said he’d been in college for more than two-and-a-half years and was still a virgin, a fact that tormented him.
He sat in the driver’s seat of his car, recording the last video of his life, before setting out on a killing spree, stabbing three men to death in his apartment before driving to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he shot two women. He then fatally shot a man in a nearby convenience store before taking his own life. The sorority house, he claimed, is the hottest sorority at UCSB. The video is titled Retribution. YouTube has since removed it, but it has resurfaced in other avenues.
In the chilling video, Rodger is calm, coherent. His final words: “I have waited a long time for this. I will give you exactly what you deserve, all of you, all you girls who rejected me, looked down on me and, you know, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men.
"All of you men, for living a better life than me — all you sexually active men — I hate you.
I hate all of you. I can’t wait to give you what you deserve: utter annihilation.” Yet again, a confessional video is central to devastating events.
Earlier this year in Shanghai, a Chinese woman Instagrammed her suicide as she jumped from an apartment building. The last documented photograph showed of a pile of belongings burning on her bed. In the one before, she dangles her legs over the edge of the building, seemingly contemplating the leap. Thousands of RIP comments were left on the photos.
The woman had posted many photos of herself in provocative poses and of conversations with her ex-boyfriend, with troubling captions about how she had been dealing with their break-up — a cry for attention or for help, which never came.
What is it about modern society that compels people to believe that everything they do needs to be seen? The nature of the two cases is not comparable, but the act of recording and broadcasting is at the heart of both events.
It’s been more than 40 years since Guy Debord theorised about the degradation of human life in The Society Of The Spectacle. Living was once associated with being, before being was transformed into having, and having translated into appearing. Published in 1967, Debord’s work, in many ways, pre-empted the impact of social media and our current perception of the world.
Now, it seems almost too late in the game to talk about the “social relationship between people that is mediated by images”. Everyone is in some way obsessed with being seen — and beyond that, being liked and approved of by the anonymous public on the web. Everyone knows and perpetuates this.
Elliot Rodger had a YouTube channel on which he posted a series of videos tracing and revealing his disturbing state of mind. These thoughts and ideas which, historically, would have been written in a diary, are now available for the world’s perusal. Yet, sadly and ironically, his pleas for intervention did not garner enough attention to prevent the tragedy.
Does the broadcasting of private thoughts to the public act as a substitute for finding and occupying a place in the world? Did the “likes” the Chinese woman received from posting her pictures offer her any sort of instant gratification? Is the idea that online comments could either save or doom totally absurd?
Absurd or not, it has also become the norm. The obsession with social media and self-representation has indeed progressed beyond a point worthy of satire.
Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana writer for Life section of the Bangkok Post.