The “blue whale”, if we believe the etymology of the moral panic it caused, was an online challenge game for teenagers, in which the goal for the “players” was to complete 50 missions within 50 days. It is alleged that the “game” was linked to dozens of deaths around the world, but despite the shock it caused and its extensive coverage, it ultimately appears that little of what was said – by terrified parents, overzealous psychologists, demonic detectives, and revelatory journalists – had anything to do with reality.
According to mythic accounts, the game’s early missions were relatively harmless: “wake up in the middle of the night” or “watch a horror movie.” But day by day, the missions became increasingly darker. “Stand on the edge of an apartment building’s rooftop” or “draw a whale on your arm.” The final mission? A challenge for the player to end their own life…
It is alleged that the game originated in Russia, but soon testimonies began to emerge from every corner of the planet: Ukraine, India, the USA at first, and later almost everywhere. Hundreds of deaths were attributed to this diabolical suicide game. But what started to surface much later, after the panic had faded and the issue had receded from the headlines, was somewhat different. To begin with, the “game,” as it had at least been initially described, seems never to have existed at all, but was instead a mythic construct. In its place emerged another dark reality, ignored and marginalized, yet one that is amplified in the digital universe. A reality that interweaves the depressive qualities of cyberspace, the hysterical rhetoric of classical myths, adult failure in relation to their children, and transforms teenage melancholy into suicidal ideation.
Everything started with Lina Paleyekova. On November 22, 2015, Lina, a teenager living in the outskirts of southeastern Russia, posted a selfie. The photograph shows her standing somewhere outside. A black scarf is wrapped around her neck and covers her mouth and nose. She has raised her middle finger towards the camera, which appears to be covered with dried blood. Under the photograph there are two lone words: “Nya bye”. The next day she committed suicide, falling onto the train tracks.
Paleyekova’s suicide became a topic of discussion in a specific type of chat room hosted by Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte. These are forums where teenagers meet digitally and discuss issues of their daily lives, related to school, relationships, but also more difficult issues: deadlocks, loneliness, depression, suicide…
One of the most common topics of these discussions are horror stories. The more realistic they are, the more frightening they become, and in order to achieve the greatest possible realism, there is systematic use of doctored photographs and tampered videos. This is the equivalent claim of old horror movies, that they “are based on true events”; the horror is greater when the possibility that something actually happened is implied.
It was within such discussion groups, where the boundary between reality and fantasy is often blurred, that messages about Rina began to proliferate. In some of them, their authors applauded her decision to take her life. In others, videos were published allegedly showing her final moments.
Although the online discussion around Rina intensified, absolutely nothing was known about her life, the reasons that drove her to her final act, or the circumstances under which it occurred. This heavy yet equally murky discourse soon led to Rina’s story merging with other stories of teenage suicides.
On December 25, 2015, a 12-year-old girl committed suicide in the Russian city of Ryazan. Almost two weeks later, another teenager did the same in the same city. When the parents investigated the girls’ online accounts, they discovered they had something in common: both were members of the same online groups. In these groups’ discussions, photographs and sketches of Palenkova were very common, along with posts themed around suicide. Also abundant were references to blue whales.
But why the blue whale? Many theories have been put forward regarding how the image of the whale has become associated with suicide in teenage chat rooms. Some claim it has to do with the numerous cases of whales that voluntarily headed ashore, beached themselves, and ended up dying—a behavior that researchers have found inexplicable. Others say it refers to the lyrics of a Russian band named Lumen.
It is difficult to logically explain and objectively document how an image acquires particular symbolic weight. The blue whale is a solitary creature—and visually, its solitude emits sadness. Moreover, it is such a distinctive and characteristic figure that it makes excellent material for creating memes; caricatures that spread rapidly across the internet. One of the most widely shared images in chat rooms is that of a whale flying over a city at night. It is an image that captures the spirit of these electronic groups: melancholy with a touch of surrealism.
Until May 2016, the issue continued to be an online phenomenon, when a newspaper, Novaya Gazeta (of the “investigative / exposé” journalism category), raised the alarm and caused panic, initially in Russia. According to the newspaper’s “investigation,” within certain online groups, some of which have enigmatic names such as “ocean whales” and “f57,” a game is being played. In this game, the “organizers” set 50 missions for the players within a period of 50 days. On the final day, the instructions to the players are to take their own lives.
The newspaper’s investigation concluded that 130 children had committed suicide in Russia between November 2015 and April 2016 due to their participation in such online groups. It was based on these reports that the name “blue whale” became globally established for this game.
The story had all the ingredients to cause hysteria. Indicatively, the governor of Ulyanovsk, a region in western Russia, made a televised announcement comparing the Blue Whale to the Islamic State. Soon, the panic spread beyond Russia. In Georgia, USA, a 16-year-old girl had committed suicide. Afterwards, her family learned about the Blue Whale and then realized the significance of a large painting she had finished at school shortly before she died. Its theme was blue whales.
Soon, other similar incidents began to emerge. A boy in the USA, another in India, two more girls in Russia. One of them had posted on her instagram account a few days before she died the image of a blue whale.
As every horror story has its “monster,” so does this one. In November 2016, 21-year-old Philipp Budeikin was arrested, accused of pushing teenagers toward suicide. He had previously publicly admitted that he was the one who created the game. Speaking to a Russian channel, he had said, among other things: “There are people. And then there are those who are biologically waste. What I did was cleanse our society of such individuals. Sometimes I thought this was wrong, but in the end, I felt I was doing the right thing.” Racist rants from a fascist? Exactly…
Budeikin was a former psychology student and a hardened music producer in the “witch house” scene, a genre of electronic music with references to the occult and mysticism and motifs reminiscent of horror. The media, for their part, did whatever they could to portray him as a computer expert who used high-level manipulation tactics to lead teenagers to their deaths. According to his own account, he created the game in 2013, naming it “f57” by combining the sound of the beginning of his name and the last two digits of his mobile phone number. In the trial that followed, he confessed his guilt and was sentenced to three years in prison.
The mystery seemed to have been cleared up in a way ideal for the insatiable public: children (the most innocent of creatures) dragged into death, a “boogeyman” with terrorist plans, a technological social network that, the more it escapes adult attention, the more it is categorized as a “tool of the devil,” anxious parents playing detective, journalists uncovering electronic webs, and ultimately the villain is caught. The end. Truthfully, the end?
After Budeikin’s arrest, a few people attempted to substantiate with evidence the conclusions that had been served. The thread of the story seemed to go back even further than the newspaper Novaya Gazeta and its “revelations.” It began with a family’s grief and the parents’ desire to politicize the circumstances that led their daughter to suicide. The Pestovs were the parents of one of the two girls who ended their lives in December 2015. After their daughter’s death, they created a foundation named “Save Children from Cybercrime.” The foundation’s main work was publishing and distributing a brochure that claimed foreign secret services were behind their daughter’s death and that agents were destroying Russian youth, pushing children toward suicide.
As was revealed, Pestov was the main, if not the sole, source used by the newspaper for its “investigation.” Pestov, for his part, had resorted to simple internet searches, collecting dozens of cases from across Russia and assuming that all were interconnected, arbitrarily bundled them together and concluded that 130 deaths were due to the relationships of teenage girls and boys with chat rooms where suicide was discussed. This is precisely how the number 130 emerged, which became the cornerstone of the newspaper’s speculations and was later reproduced uncontrollably by prophets around the world. In a story that from the outset was rife with myths, the “130 suicides due to the blue whale” came to be considered an unshakable “fact.”
The newspaper, for its part, when it needed to prove the validity of its investigation, claimed that it was not only Pestov’s data that were used, but more than 200 interviews with parents of children who had committed suicide. The problem, however, was that these were parents who saw nothing but their lost child “stuck to a screen,” had already come into contact with Pestov’s conspiracy theories, and confirmed as “fact” a convenient interpretation for themselves. The newspaper even claimed that the suicides might be many more than 130, because after all, how exactly can the specific cause behind a suicide be objectively documented? That is precisely the crucial point: despite extensive coverage, numerous investigations, and thorough analyses around the globe, not a single suicide case so far has been proven to be connected to these online groups. It doesn’t matter! The case had already crossed the boundary between fabrication and reality, to the extent that public opinion had been “convinced”: in Russia alone, the online readers of the newspaper’s reports numbered more than five hundred thousand, already within the first days.
After the initial panic and once the “responsible party” had been condemned, the social studies department of the Russian State University for the Humanities launched an investigation into the “blue whale.” When researchers began participating themselves in online groups where intense interest was expressed for this particular game, they discovered something strange. All the alleged organizers (the game’s “moms” who theoretically assigned the missions) turned out to be children aged 12 to 14. Far from being adult manipulators with malicious plans, they were cases of children who had heard or read about the game. Moreover, the research showed that the game didn’t even exist, not even in a similar or rudimentary form, before Novaya Gazeta’s reports were published. In all the online groups studied, the “players” were eagerly awaiting the start of the game, but the game never began… All the “players” encountered by the research team in chat rooms and forums did nothing but copy step-by-step the game’s procedure as it had been described in detail by the media. But the dark curator who would give the command for the missions and ultimately the suicide never made an appearance…
But if the “blue whale” game was nothing but a pathetic construct of the media, then what was Philipp Budeikin, the alleged perpetrator? Obviously scum, but the purposes behind his actions and statements were not aimed at driving children to suicide. What he did was post “shocking” content on forums where he participated, surrounding Rina Palenkova and the topic of suicide, in order to gain as many followers as possible – and then advertise his music. It’s a pathetic practice, which however happens systematically on social media, where various opportunists post provocative content, in order to grab attention and then advertise or sell something. Even his public “taking of responsibility” aimed at that. To provoke and grab attention. The guy didn’t come up with anything else but a dirty publicity campaign. That’s why, moreover, when he was arrested, the charges brought against him were fifteen. But in the following months, one after the other were withdrawn and he was finally convicted for a single one (cruelty? misanthropy?).
The story of the blue whale could have been just another tragicomic case of teenage gullibility, if it didn’t involve real pain and real lives at risk at its core. This ridiculous and pathetic caricature of adult interest in teenage life, staged in terms of spectacle as a “suicide game,” has a side effect infinitely more significant: it made the world that teenagers and young people create for themselves in cyberspace even darker and more remote. It also revealed the pathetic failure of adults, especially parents, to understand their children’s melancholy; as well as their desire to rid themselves of any responsibility. The unfortunate victims found themselves powerless against superior “dark forces”! For some, in the same way that “rock kills,” now the internet kills.
However, experience from previous youth subcultures can hardly help here, to the extent that virtual reality can acquire dimensions of universality. It’s not about retreating into some “marginal” culture, if we’re to speak in terms of classical sociology, but about migration Elsewhere, to another world of generalized digital mediation. It’s not paradoxical, but a consequence of the Paradigm Shift: where the rest of humanity is dragged (by force, wherever and whenever necessary), some are already there. Only that the young male and female protagonists of the digital universe are building a world with toxic materials. They are the first generation (and we’re obviously talking exclusively about the “privileged” parts of the planet) born with the promise that this world belongs to them and they can become whatever they desire, as long as they want it. They were born as royalty, only to suddenly discover bitter reality: this world not only won’t offer them anything worthy of their expectations, but is completely indifferent to their fate. Moreover, it’s a miserable world where the only explicit certainty is that it will become even more miserable. This condition runs through, emphatically or implicitly, the entire digital experience of adolescence; therefore, that these “ideal yet unworthy” heroes of cyberspace are fascinated by the idea of being hurt and harming themselves is absolutely explainable. These are attempts to negatively understand the position that was promised to them, from which they have however been excluded. To finally become protagonists of a story with substance. But in the cold universe of algorithms and virtuality – without direct, tangible references to real relationships with real people – boundaries are difficult to establish. In the strictly private microcosm formed by the square of fingers-keyboard-gaze-screen, the distance between the Palenquova image and the etching of hands ends up being just a breath. After all, cyberspace, no matter how much social pluralism it displays, remains a machine. And as a machine, it has no mercy. If the user’s desires are watered by melancholy and pain, the machine can become that too: a generator of suicidal feelings.
Harry Tuttle
cyborg #14 – 2/2019