By Live-Streaming Her Suicide, Teen Set a Tragic First

By Michael Harthorne

August 31, 2017

In the final moments of Océane's life, these were some of the messages she received from humanity: "Show us your tits." "Retard." "Will you marry me?" "Kill yourself."

At 4:29pm on May 10, 2016, the French 18-year-old threw herself under a passing train, live-streaming her death on Periscope.

In doing so, she became the first person to broadcast their suicide live on social media, the Guardian reports in a thought-provoking piece by novelist Rana Dasgupta. Dasgupta addresses Océane's suicide in terms of modern celebrity ("For, as all true celebrities discover, the media image feeds parasitically on human energy, starving them and removing them, slowly, from the realm of the living") and terrorism ("Océane’s death was also intended as a kind of detonation, which would 'take out' others apart from herself").

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