Biggs' online teenage suicide a forerunner to snuff movies and dirty bombs?

A 19-year-old teenager from Florida, USA, Abraham K Biggs, elected to commit suicide before an online forum carrying an estimated audience of 1 500 viewers. With his webcam rolling he took an overdose of tablets and lay down on a bed.

As always there those who did not take him seriously and actively encouraged him to do it, while others just ignored his performance as some sort of stunt designed to draw attention to himself. Apparently this was not the first time that this youngster had threatened to kill himself.

As it turned out they were wrong and by the time they did raise the alarm several hours later he was dead.

This online incident is well documented and by Googling “Abraham K Biggs” you will be able to find out all the gory details of what is unfortunately becoming all too commonplace online.

While the internet is an immensely powerful vehicle for positive change and progress, it is also the centre for much of what is wrong with society in the 21st century.

On the one hand you have a tool with which citizens of oppressive regimes can inform each other and the rest of the world of their plight, while on the other you have a “theatre” for child pornography, suicides and mass killings in schools. Education for those who live far from centres as opposed to outlets for spreading hatred and bigotry.

As we saw in the case of our own “Koekemoer”, any item which somehow attracts interest can develop into a cult-like following bringing instant fame and recognition to people who may otherwise have been overlooked.

In Wales recently there was a spate of teenage suicides following the popularity of one website. School shootings with online warnings have also become “fashionable” with posthumous notoriety for the killers.

Now Biggs.

The problem for me is that even suicide is not guaranteed to get you your 15 minutes of fame and that requires your demise, which means you miss out on all the attention that you crave. This means that people are going to have to get bolder and braver in order to achieve “recognition” from an often sick and depraved world that seeks instant gratification.

It’s either fast and in your face or people get bored. Why do you think cricket’s Twenty/20 has taken off?

We want action now or we turn to something else.

How soon do you think it will be, if it hasn’t already happened, before we start having snuff movies online?

People killing other people and recording it, or even doing it live online.

Worse, with winning “hearts and minds” uppermost in the thinking of the military and terrorist organisations, how long do you think it will be before we see the first dirty bomb exploded live on the internet? If you want to grab people’s attention that is certainly going to do it. Saddam’s execution went around the world within minutes of it having been carried out.

Of course the fact that many of our computer wunderkinde are children or very young adults means that we have a deadly combination. On the one hand a brilliant mind which can manipulate technology in ways that most of us can’t even contemplate, on the other immature, self absorbed, aloof and cut off from social interaction with friends and family. People are considered to be, in the main, those things you talk to in chat rooms or see on webcams. This social immaturity allied to immense technological capability is a disaster waiting to happen.

Ongoing isolation breeding a type of psycopathy, which together with their view of human beings being primarily artificially acquired and thereby distorted, resulting in a total lack of regard for human life but the capability to destroy it in ways we daren’t even think about.

The only way that we are ever going to be able to harness the power of the internet for good and prevent this ever darker side of human nature from taking us to the edge of the abyss is to somehow regulate it.

If we don’t we will pay a very heavy price sooner rather than later because instant gratification doesn’t like to be kept waiting.