I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. I’m an Internet ethnographer and reporter. This newsletter is filled with interviews, takes on current events, a sporadic advice column, Craigslist-style missed connections, Internet culture explainers, streams, a book club, predictions and forecasts… There’s a lot of stuff. I also spend maybe 20 hours a week talking to people about how they use the Internet. Consider chipping in $2 for my efforts:
Above are screenshots from Guy Bartkus’s, the 25-year-old who died when his car bomb detonated outside the American Reproductive Centers on May 17, killing him and injuring four others, profile on Sanctioned-Suicide. The FBI has called the attack an act of terrorism rooted not in traditional politics but “nihilistic ideations” — but if you’ve been a reader of this blog than you already know that.
As Always, It Was Trialed on UseNet
Sanctioned-Suicide (SaSu) is the closest heir that I know of to alt.suicide.holiday, a newsgroup that made headlines in the early ‘00s, where users traded tips on suicide methods.1
SaSu was started four days after Reddit banned r/SanctionedSuicide. Its founders—an Uruguay man named Diego Joaquín Galante (“Serge”) and American Lamarcus Small (“Marquis”)2—have described the forum as “pro-choice,” yet the tone is undeniably pro-suicide. This is not a forum geared towards recovery. The investigator, writer, and friend of the ‘Stack Bx has described as a “suicide-for-profit” site.
She writes:
The darkest of the sites in the network, Sanctioned Suicide is the only one of Small’s sites that is not exclusive to male users. People of all ages, genders and nationalities find their way to this site while looking for ways to end their lives. Immediately upon posting to the forum, members are swarmed by freshly made, bot-like accounts, many likely owned by staff members and poison dealers, who validate their suicidal ideations, urge them to go through with it and offer advice on the best suicide methods. This website connects users to sellers, individuals that peddle “suicide kits” to the most vulnerable and despairing. The contents of these kits range from poison to “exit bag” devices meant to be filled with inert gas.
Most of SaSu’s traffic pools in a “Suicide Discussion” board where users swap instructions on suicide methods. A New York Times investigation traced at least 45 deaths worldwide to the forum in 2021, though they noted that they believe the death toll is signficantly higher. A separate BBC investigation3 identified 50 fatalities in the United Kingdom alone and noted that victims often learned to buy sodium nitrite4—a meat preservative—directly from people on the forum, like Kenneth Law5. That’s what Bx means by “for-profit.” Like most things that go wrong on the Internet, the suicide space has been commercialized.
According to Bx, Galante and Small already ran a constellation of incelosphere grievance forums sites. Her reporting quotes counter-terror analyst Jade Parker, who argues that militant accelerationists—which, to be clear, are a separate phenomenon from Landian-style accelerationists—embed in such communities “to provoke them to commit acts of violence.” Bx and others have also found that the sextortion network 764 crawls self-harm spaces, seemingly benign platforms like Roblox, and vulnerable, at-risk, adolescent-rich subcultures the True Crime Community, to groom people into acts of violence, including suicide and mass shootings.
Sedentariness — Not Isolation — Is Part of Our Nihilism Epidemic
In my own interviews about heavy Internet use, I find that sedentariness — not isolation — breeds radicalization, rumination, and echo chambers. Phones have become, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, extensions of man — they are truly “private parts of our bodies,” parts of our brain that we can become trapped in. Two themes come up again and again: when people move to busy cities like New York, and they’re leaving their houses, they’re de-radicalized, for lack of a better term.
The other fix? College sports.
Must Read Background:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/apr/27/observerfocus.onlinesupplement
According to the NYT and Bx’s investigations, Smalls owns several grievance forums that are broadly situated in the incelosphere that groom young men into extreme nihilism/blackpilling. Based on Bx’s description—as well as what I’ve seen from Smalls’ behavior on social media—it’s both plausible that he gets off on this for some reason, but also that he genuinely believes it. My sense is that he’s either an op of some kind or a sadist. His posts, which if you’re a heavy X user like I am, often read as bordering on parody. To well-adjusted adults, it’s laughable. To vulnerable kids, it reads much differently.
Bartkus tested SN on himself and posted about it on SaSu
Canadian Kenneth Law became the grim emblem of SaSu’s cottage industry in lethal “exit kits.” Peel Regional Police allege that, from late 2020 onward, Law ran at least five e-commerce sites that discreetly sold sodium nitrite—legal as a meat preservative but deadly in spoonful doses—to customers who found him through pro-suicide forums. By the time he was arrested in May 2023, investigators on three continents had linked his parcels to about 120 suicides worldwide. Law, who pleads not guilty, insists he sold a “lawful product.”
I used to troll my high school chemistry professor by writing the following chemical equation on the blackboard (yes, I am dating myself):
2NaCN(s) + H2SO4(aq) -> 2HCN(g) + Na2SO4(aq)
I wouldn't have dared done that in the last 25 or so years.
Doing my SS deep dive