美记者“自杀网站”成模板 21世纪绝命书令人堪忧

Martin Manley set up a website explaining every detail of his decision to kill himself. Then he killed himself. Image via martinmanleylifeanddeath.com

Suicide is, generally speaking, a tragic and hideously hurtful act. Martin Manley, a 60-year-old former sports writer and statistician for theKansas City Star, seems to have been at least vaguely aware of that. But he did it anyway—and left behind a meticulously detailed website explaining virtually every aspect of his decision.

The case is noteworthy not so much because Manley was a semi-public figure—though he was credited with popularizing the NBA’s standard efficiency rating—but because he used technology to intentionally blow open the wall of privacy that typically surrounds suicides. More than 100 people die by suicide on an average day in the United States, and a significant portion of them leave notes for their stricken friends and relatives. Some are vengeful, some apologetic, some maddeningly cryptic. Regardless, most are read only by a small circle of authorities and loved ones. For Manley, confronting friends and family with his death wasn’t enough. He wanted to confront the public at large. He wanted desperately to justify his own life and death—to the world, but perhaps above all to himself.

So, according to his website, Manley prepaid Yahoo for five years’ worth of Web hosting, built a sprawling suicide website, and put up one final post on his sports blog Thursday morning linking to it. Then, according to theKansas City Star, he killed himself in front of an Overland Park police station. It was his 60thbirthday.

On the website, which quickly began to circulate widely via social media, Manley wrote that he intended to create “the most detailed example of a suicide letter in history.” He explained:

After you die, you can be remembered by a few-line obituary for one day in a newspaper when you're too old to matter to anyone anyway... OR you can be remembered for years by a site such as this. That was my choice and I chose the obvious.

Next he began to explain the reasons for his suicide, seeking—at least initially—to portray it as the highly rational decision of a man who lived his life “content up to the last minute” and simply wanted to leave the world in his own way. “The major reasons adults commit suicide—health, legal, financial, loss of loved ones, loneliness or depression… none of those issues are relevant to me and, for the most part of my life, have never been,” he wrote. His No. 1 reason for killing himself: He was terrified to face old age.

In dozens of separate essays on the site, Manley went on to reflect on everything from religion to gun control to his romantic history to his affinity for fedoras. Some of his thoughts are profound, others mundane. I haven’t read them all. It would take hours. But I read enough to see that he was lonelier and less secure in his decision than he wanted to let on. His parents were dead, he had no children, and he didn’t want to “die alone.” A bizarre passage in which he posted what looked like GPS coordinates to a stash of gold and silver coins—setting off a macabre and ultimately fruitless treasure hunt on Thursday—reinforces the impression of a man starving for importance. Many of the pictures on his website appear to be selfies.

I won’t pass judgment on Manley’s decision to kill himself, except to say that no one should romanticize it. An evidently thoughtful and intelligent man is dead, those who knew him are almost certainly stricken with grief, and the fact that he published a website rationalizing it isn’t going to change either of those things. But I will say that his elaborate self-memorial raises a disturbing specter in the social-media age: the transformation of the suicide note from a private document into a public sensation. Without Twitter, Facebook, and a Web full of page-view-driven blogs, Manley’s writings might well have remained obscure.

Manley’s desire to say all that he wanted to say to the world before he died is understandable. But it seems clear that his ability to do so—the chance to go out with a splash and to make himself known far and wide—eased his decision to end his own life. The risk is that it will do the same for others, including many people who are not as sound of mind as Manley claimed to be. Manley notwithstanding, suicide is rarely a rational act. In a 2003New Yorkerarticle about people who commit suicide by jumping off of the Golden Gate Bridge, writer Tad Friend interviewed several people who had survived the leap and found a heartbreaking commonality: Jumpers tend to regret their decision in midair.

One of Manley’s goals in publishing a suicide website was to assure everyone that he didn’t regret his decision. Whether that changed at the moment he pulled the trigger, we’ll never know. But it’s safe to assume that at least one of his final wishes will go unfulfilled: “What I hope will happen in the long run is that my life is remembered and the suicide is just an asterisk, a footnote,” Manley wrote. Sadly, the reverse is far more likely.

UPDATE, Saturday, Aug. 17, 11:55 a.m.:On Friday night, Yahoo took down Martin Manley's website. A spokesperson told me: "After careful review, our team determined that this site violated our Terms of Service and we took it down."

Manley's site lives on, for the time being, on various mirror websites not hosted by Yahoo.

通常来说，自杀是一个悲惨伤人的行为。60岁的马丁·曼利

该案件没有得到大力关注是因为曼利是个半公众人物——他因普及NBA标准效率评级而大受赞誉——但是他用科技揭开了自杀背后的隐私。美国每天有逾100人自杀，而且大多数人会给受伤的朋友和亲戚留下遗书。留下遗书的目的也不尽相同，有的为了报复、有的为了道歉、亦或是字里行间暗藏玄机。但不管怎样，这些遗书只会被小范围权利机关和亲人看见。但对于曼利来说，只是让家人和朋友来见证他的死亡并不够。他希望将自己的死亡面向广大群众。他疯狂地向世界为自己的生命和死亡辩护，也或许只是向他自己辩护。

根据曼利的网站可知他向雅虎

通过社会媒体该网站开始广泛传播，曼利试图创作出“史上最详尽绝命书样板”。他在网站上解释称：

年纪太大了会被所有人忘记，死后只有报纸上的几行讣告总结一生……或者可以在多年以后通过像这样的网站被人记住。这就是我选择这样做的原因。

随后曼利开始解释自杀原因——对于一个“生命最后一分钟都充实”的人，曼利称只是简单地想用自己的方式来离开这个世界，而他也试图将其描绘成一个高度理智的决定。曼利在网站中写道：“成年人自杀的主要原因有健康、法律、经济、失去爱人、孤独或绝望……但是这些因素和我的生活基本不相干。”曼利自杀的首要原因是对变老感到恐惧。

在网站上10多篇独立文章中，曼利纪录了每一件事，从宗教到枪支控制再写他的浪漫历史最后又提及他对浅顶呢帽的喜爱。曼利的有些思想很具有深度，有些却又十分单调乏味。我没有全部读完他的文章，因为这毕竟要花好几个小时。不过从他的文章中我认识到其实他比他想象中要更孤独、更缺乏安全感。曼利的父母已经过世，他没有孩子，而且他不想“独自死去”。在他发布的文章中有一篇很怪异。这篇文章就像是用GPS寻找金币和银币的存放点——最终在周四进行令人毛骨悚然无意义的寻宝活动——这些表达都加强了曼利对个人重要性价值的渴求。曼利网站上的很多照片也都体现出自我的观点。

我不会对曼利选择自杀的决定作出判定，但是我想说任何人都不应该将自杀浪漫化。这位有思想的智者去世后让认识他的人悲痛不已，而曼利建网站将自杀理性化的做法并不能改变逝者已去，生者尝尽伤痛的事实。除此之外曼利个人的详尽记叙仿若将一个令人不安的幽灵带入了社会媒体时代：一份属于私人文件的绝命书一夜之间在全社会流传轰动。如果没有推特、脸书以及充满个人评论博客的网站，曼利的自杀网站可能仍鲜为人知。

曼利想在死前向全世界述说知心话的欲望可以理解。而且显然他通过成为关注点，使自己广为人知减轻了他自杀结束生命这一决定包含的伤痛。而这样做的风险即可能会引起其他人的效仿，其中包括无法像曼利一样拥有清醒头脑的人。曼利并不了解自杀也很少是理智的行为。2003年《纽约客》

曼利建立这个网站的另一目标是为了向世人保证他不会后悔自杀的决定。而他是否在扣动扳机后后悔我们也无从得知。但是我们至少可以确定他最后几个愿望中的一个是无法实现的：“我希望很久之后我仍会被人们记住，而且我的自杀可以被加注星号作为脚注。”可悲的是，他的这个愿望基本不会实现。

8月17日11:55更新报道：雅虎在周五晚关闭了曼利的网站。雅虎以发言人告诉我：“经过慎重考虑，我们团队认为这个网站违反了我们的服务条例，所以该网站会被关闭。”

曼利的网站暂时还会在各种网页上流传一段时间，当然，这些网页并不是雅虎旗下网站。