Does Facebook make you despair? Does social networking make you want to end it all? You may be ready for online ritual suicide with the aid of a new Web site that helps you kill your virtual identity.
“Impress your friends, disconnect yourself,” is the slogan on www.seppukoo.com, a site that aims to subvert Facebook by offering its millions of users a glorious end and a memorial page to match.
“Rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, ancient Japanese samurai preferred to die with honor, voluntarily plunging a sword into the abdomen and moving it left to right in a slicing motion,” the site notes.
This form of ritual suicide was known as “seppuku.”
“As the seppuku restores the samurai’s honor as a warrior, seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body,” the site says.
Today the enemy is not other bands of noble warriors, but corporate media who use viral marketing to make huge profits by connecting people across the globe.
“Seppukoo playfully attempts to subvert this mechanism by disconnecting people from each other and transforming the individual suicide experience into an exciting ‘social’ experience,” the site says.
The site, which uses its own viral marketing strategy to lure in disgruntled social networkers, is part of a protest wave that sees Facebook as a potentially dangerous entity beholden to corporate interests.
It offers ritual suicide for Facebook users in five easy steps.
Willing victims must first log in to seppukoo.com by typing in the same information they use to go on to their Facebook profile.
They then choose one of several memorial RIP page templates before writing their last words, which the site promises to send to all their Facebook friends when they have taken the final step.
Once the user has made that fatal final click, his or her Facebook profile is deactivated.
But in what might be seen as a bit of a cheat, virtual life goes on after the ritual suicide.
It comes in the form of testimonials friends can write on the memorial page or by rising in the seppukoo ranks by scoring points with former Facebook friends who follow your lead and commit hara-kari.
The top scorer in that game is currently a blond woman who uses the name Simona Lodi and who passed into the post-Facebook world on Nov. 5. On her memorial page she chose to write “piss off!” as her last words.
But seppukoo.com has some way to go before it attracts anything near the more than 300 million users Facebook currently boasts. On Wednesday it pulled in only half a dozen Facebookers ready to end it all.
Its owners — whose Web site says are an “imaginary art-group from Italy” — said by e-mail that more than 15,000 people had done the deed and more than 350,000 Facebook users had received an invite to follow suit.
Facebook did not immediately reply when asked if it saw seppukoo.com as a threat and if it planned any action to block it.
To reinforce the tongue-in-cheek approach of seppukoo.com, the group’s art director — who uses the name Guy McMusker — replied when asked if he was a Facebook user: “Of course. We’re not Luddites. We’re incoherent.”
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
RSS