The Mediated Murderer
towards a new category of killer
Aegosexuality is a sexual identity that describes people who experience arousal and fantasy but feel a fundamental disconnection from the idea of participating in sex. The prefix means “without self.” Its emergence as a named category is worth examining, because it suggests that we have developed a fluency in experiences that arrive through mediation. This fluency is not only reshaping what it means to be close to another person, but what it means to destroy one.
A few days ago, I stumbled across a woman on TikTok who had made a series of videos about a girl who coerced several people she’d e-dated into committing suicide. This girl had never shared physical space with any of her victims, but she’d built enough sustained intimacy and coercive force to convince them to commit suicide.
Watching these videos – and I watched all of them – I realized I had no word for what this girl was, yet it’s a pattern we see increasingly often.
She’s not a cyberstalker nor cyberbully. She’s not a serial killer, either, really. We have names for most kinds of murderers: serial killers, spree killers, family annihilators, school shooters, etc. But the internet has produced a figure who doesn’t fit cleanly into any of these, someone whose mechanism is not broadcast, not ideological recruitment, not physical assault arranged after an online meeting. The mechanism is more granular than that: the construction of a closed psychological relationship, conducted through platforms, in which one person systematically brings another to the point of self-destruction.
The term I want to propose is mediated murderer: a perpetrator who, without physical co-presence, uses networked communication as the primary instrument by which he establishes coercive control over a specific victim and drives that victim toward death.
This is a claim about mechanism: targeted, interactive, platform-dependent coercion culminating in death without physical co-presence.
