re: YouTuber Etika Commits Suicide

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I didn’t know Desmond and barely followed his work, only really watching from afar the last year. There will be better people to pay tribute to his life than me. That isn’t what this is. Nor is it an attempt to turn his tragic death into a happening, to make this all about me like so many others have, to treat it like an event and proudly declare 'I was there' while checking the mirror to see if my crocodile tears have dried up. I wasn’t there and, because I didn’t know the man, my sense of loss isn’t personal. This won’t be an obituary. Instead, let it be a message to those who know what they did, and how they pushed and pulled a public figure to the point that he felt suicide was the only way to avoid consequences that were most likely imagined. There were few voices telling him this important truth but plenty that fed this dangerous lie. Posting the suicide hotline and saying how much you’ll miss him will not absolve you.

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And let’s just put it on the record what no-one else seems willing to say. You know what the mob wants when they come to constantly apply the pressure, to tell you that society will never forgive you for the things you did and said. Social media is a device where total strangers can make sure you’re never allowed to forget and move on from your mistakes. Instead, you must constantly answer to the faceless, nameless strangers who hold you to a moral standard from the safety of anonymity. Then comes the exaggerations and the lies. They tell your employers, they go after your partners and kids. Your mistakes tarnish anyone and everyone who stands with you. They want you to crack. That’s why they never stop. They want you to crack and maybe kill yourself. That is how they 'vote you off.' It’s just another game, a way to pass the time. Pile on and see if the words we type can erase things we don’t like from existence, even people if we try hard enough. They can feel that way because social media has reduced us down to distillations of ourselves, avatars on the world wide web that don’t have a person behind them. Words on a screen. No consequences. Oh, did they die? Did they do it? Well, they weren’t real anyway.

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Just the day after, he went on YouTube gossip program DramaAlert hosted by Daniel 'Keemstar' Keem. The content is watched by millions of people. It is news, it is content that has a valid place on the platform but the lack of editorial oversight is plain to see. Hosting an interview with someone who had a psychotic episode just 24 hours prior would be disgusting enough by itself. The content of the interview ends up somehow even worse when analyzed. In a fair world the interview would never have seen the light of day, and in doing so, might have absolved Keem of some of the guilt I would hope he feels. In the interview, Etika repeatedly says he has “become god,” that everything was predetermined and also says a lot of other things indicative of someone in mental crisis. Unprompted at the midpoint of the interview Keem offers this philosophical nugget: “The scariest thing about thinking that the world is a simulation and it’s predestined and all of that is that then there is no reason to live.” He would later add: “Then why live… Just jump off a cliff. If it’s just a simulation, who cares?” At worst, this shows a staggering lack of sensitivity but I’m honestly not even sure it can be labeled that benign. I am trying to think of the mindset it takes to bring up suicide being an action free from consequences to someone who has repeatedly threatened to commit suicide. I am trying to think of a reason someone would do that. I don’t want to articulate it.

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YouTube banned the Etika account in October 2018 after Amofah reportedly deleted the channel’s content and uploaded pornography to the platform, a violation of YouTube’s content guidelines

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