Fresh Egg’s Claire Stokoe has a nice summary of two programs which offer web 2.0 suicide, suicidemachine.org and seppukoo.com.
It may be important to clarify that Seppukoo is not Japanese, but Italian, the work of Les Liens invisibles aka media artists Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini.
One can see where Ms. Stokoe’s confusion comes from, since the makers of “Seppukoo” describe the name as a variation on “Seppuku” (切腹, “stomach-cutting”), the name for the form of ritual suicide practiced by ancient Japanese samurai who chose death at their own hands in the face of inevitable defeat. Though one wonders why she didn’t notice that the site offers no Japanese translation.
Its quite fitting of course that Les Liens Invisibles would appropriate the language and iconography of ancient Japan to offer “liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction to help people discover what happens after their virtual life and to rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.”
The invocation of a non-Western, ancient society, is a fitting choice for the branding of this mechanized redemption/restoration. The recourse to the ancient Other, the pre-modern primitive, certainly has a long history in the annals of European and American anti-modernism. [Elazer Barkan and Ronald Bush edited a great collection of essays on the subject called Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism]
But where suicide machine’s promise to aid users in getting “your actual life back,” is an utterly sincere sentiment, coupled with a logical sales pitch pointing to the time-saving benefit of their service, Sepukoo offers instead the replacement of Facebook with “one of the most radical chic user-experience: the vir(tu)al suicide.”
Suicide networking. Infecting the social.
As viral marketing strategies have been exploited by corporate media to make profit connecting people all over the world, Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting”social” experience.
With Seppukoo in fact it’s not important how many friends you have, but how much you may influence them. Induce your friends to commit suicide and rise up the Seppukoo Rank!
Stokoe points out the irony of Seppukoo’s afterlife component, but I think perhaps misses the joke [or the message of the art project, or something] when she says that “the fact that its a network too” makes the service “kind of pointless.” But she not alone. Facebook’s cease and desist order indicates that they, too, missed the point. Or maybe they got it.
