Cybersuicide

Cybersuicide
PEPE DON'T PREACH By Pepe Diokno
Saturday, March 1, 2008 (Philippine Star)

My friend wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t drunk.

But, from across an unlit suburban street, it probably looked like we were. “Every guy’s allowed one!” my friend screamed.

I chomped at a Nestle bar, b*itching louder than a Maria Sharapova grunt. And even a Maria Sharapova grunt couldn’t cheer me up.

It was the love bug. And, as my friend says, we guys are allowed just one. This was my one. Let me spare you the details and make with my dignity.

Let’s just say, I missed a boat, haven’t caught another. (And, my editor has cut eight paragraphs from here due to emo-ness not fit for print.)

This is where you “AWWW”

Anyway. You get over these things. I tend to pour over work to put everything behind me. The strategy’s effective — but, (cue The Gossip’s Standing in the Way of Control) it does only for a while.

A month later, my friend had flown back to Cali, I had one less pair of ears to b*tch to, and, one night in the middle of a club, I saw her: The chick who gave me the love bug in the arms of a scrawny (expletives deleted) other man.

Where My Balls Went

There is a time in a man’s life when he has to step up and throw punches, slug things out and take what’s his. But it surely isn’t the time when there are bouncers around.

I am a wuss.

I wallow. I let out a Maria Sharapova grunt once, I let out a Maria Sharapova grunt twice, and before anyone can say, “Serve!” I become a chick myself, running to my car, rushing home, crying, “Save me, Oprah Winfrey!”

That’s what I did.

Now, The Noose

I went home, and, deciding I did not want anything to do with the sick, social world anymore, I grabbed my laptop and clicked myself. I mean, killed myself. Online.

I started with my social networks — Facebook, Friendster, MySpace — deleted them. Then, I moved on to my blog(s). Lastly, I Googled myself, looking for every existing reference to my being that I could delete. Deleted them.

I committed cybersuicide. Today, if it weren’t for a few random mentions — and the Supreme site (http://supreme.ph) — I would be dead. On the Internet.

Cybersuicide, n.

Now, there are two definitions of cybersuicide.

The first is killing your online identity. The second type is bona fide suicide. There are actual cases: “Group of strangers come together online to plan a suicide party.” “Teenagers perform copycat suicides based on those they’ve researched on the Internet.” And, “Man uses online classifieds to find volunteer murder victims.”

I didn’t do the second type, obviously, but that night, after I erased about a year’s worth of blog entries, I realized a few things about letting go of it all. Here are the stuff I’ve learned from my brush with the click of death.

After-Life Lessons

1. It wasn’t so much about killing myself as it was about cutting contact with other people. A big part of me went, “I wonder what they’d do without me.” Maybe it was an ego thing — a show of superiority that went, “If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to at least call me up.” Or, maybe I just wanted to piss off the one or two people who looked at my Facebook profile on a daily basis.

Taking it from there, I think suicides are a form of social rebellion rather than an internal conflict. I don’t think it’s in our human system to want to hurt ourselves. But, maybe wanting to get the best of others supersedes that. We live in such a competitive world that for a few desperate people, maybe death is the ultimate form of oneupsmanship. It’s like saying, “Take that, bitchzz!” Except you die.

No One Gives A Click

2. No one on the Internet depends on you. If I got you into thinking that killing yourself online is going to affect anyone, the truth is, it won’t. Fellow Supreme writer Gino de la Paz once asked, “If a blog shuts down in the blogosphere and no one’s there to see it, does it make a sound?” The answer is, even if someone’s there to see it, it doesn’t even whimper.

When people can’t find your blog, they’ll move on to the next one. If you’re Friendster profile’s unavailable, they’ll click on the next tab. Unlike in the real world, where you have actual relationships to support, on the Internet, all other sites can do without you.

There goes your, “Take that, bitchzz!” Sorry.

Anti-It (Information Technology)

3. You’re either on or offline. It’s only when you withdraw from the Net that you realize how much communication depends on it. Party invites, cell phone number changes, essential bits of information — they’re all online. So, if you’re about to click your Netlife away, consider yourself warned.

But then again — because we’re a generation of non-conformists — if online is “It,” is offline now “anti-It?”

Hmm, I may be on the crest of a wave of peeps allergic to cyberspace. Social networks are for show-offs, anyway. For every byte of important information, there are 10 megabytes of crappy photos. Signing out may just be the new in-thing to do.

Cyberspace Debris

4. The Internet makes the world smaller. But what we need is for the world to be bigger. No one really makes friends online. Sure, you get the random invite from a person you don’t know — but that isn’t networking, it’s annoying. There comes a point where you’ve added all the “friends” you could possibly add. And you’re bound to reach a juncture in blogosphere where you know everything about everyone within six degrees of you. At this point, you’ll say, there has got to be more to life. And there is.

The day after I gave myself the Internet lethal injection, I met up with a friend — face-to-face — and she gave me the usual post-love bug, there-are-other-fish-in-the-sea spiel. I told her, “Thank you, Oprah!” and left with this little nugget of sappiness:

5. There are other fish in the sea. But, in order to see the sea, you may need to step out of the water. 

For those of you swimming in the murky waters of cyberspace, you might want to consider suicide.

Just do it to your online self, okay?