So, yesterday Channel 4 showed a documentary about dissecting the body of a young woman who died from a rare form of cancer two years prior. Apparently, the documentary was called “brilliant” and “moving,” and the pathologists cracked the skull of “Tony’s cadaver” with “huge respect.”

My family, friends and my closest milieu already know that I am a bad (rarely practicing) Eastern Orthodox Christian and, overall, not the nicest person in the universe, yet this surgical post-humanism with its delicate tweaks and polite gestures gives me shivers. I want to ask if nobody else does: what’s next–live broadcasts from a ward where euthanasia is performed, with all the necessary commercial breaks (“there is only a week left to haul your makeup gifts” etc.) and the sentimental tears of all involved (still alive, I mean) in the procedure? It wouldn’t surprise me, of course–however, I don’t want to participate in any of this, at least, not voluntarily. (You see, I am not a fan of the slightest drafts from the Overton window.)

Modern Internet culture (as unhinged as it is) strips more and more layers from what was once called privacy, claiming simultaneously (in a mildly gaslit way) that privacy is exactly what we all need. Which one then? It is common knowledge that social media shape the very idea of our lives and, what is even more peculiar, what we are supposed to remember from the past. Yet until now they sort of stayed away from the last bastion–death*. Apparently, not anymore.

I guess, we are still free to chose whether we want to take part in this ongoing vivisection experiment or not, and it’s up to us to decide. Although, it might be too late already.

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*One could argue that live streaming of suicides in the different corners of the Web isn’t a new thing at all and has existed since the very beginning of the Internet, yet what’s *really* new is that it is gradually gaining a more official, i.e. non-marginalised, status.