A few months ago, I saw a video of two children—cousins, 12 and 14 years old—playing with a loaded pistol. They were streaming themselves flashing the weapon and sweeping it around the room, up until one of the cousins accidentally shot the other in the head, killing him. We are informed that a few seconds later, out of frame, the girl turned the gun upon herself. The remainder of the video consists of an empty frame and the sounds of hysterical family members attempting to open the door to the room, which is blocked by two dead bodies. This is something which cannot be unseen, but more horribly seems to deny assignment of meaning. Open to causal—but closed to theodical—analysis.

The 1990s were perhaps the last decade where the concept of seeing someone actually, viscerally die on video could be considered something outside of normative human experience. Seeing the light fade from someone's eyes, seeing the inside turned outward, seeing irreversible catastrophic anatomic trauma. Rumours would be exchanged regarding whether some extra in a movie was run over by a tank, or whether the gun was really loaded, or of the existence of 'snuff films': murder filmed for entertainment and profit, perhaps later exemplified by the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs, but not unheard of in previous decades.

It was certainly possible to find perimortem imagery, however there existed the prevailing defeasible notion that some special sanction attached to these images, that it was historically and socially necessary for them to be preserved and seen. That such images could initiate a viewer into a fuller humanity, or shock the conscience in a salutary fashion, but that this was not a general property of gazing upon faces of death.

Today, every FPV drone in Ukraine is its own documentarian. Every gangbanger a temporarily embarrassed Tarantino. A GoPro for every Hamas glider. The collective mind's eye watermarked with the Axon bodycam logo. The spillover is complete and every site is now a shock-site, because the world is shocking and the Internet disintermediates. It is not a net to be surfed but—recapitulating the structure of the real world—a well to be suffered.