When French content creator Raphaël Graven died this week during a livestream lasting nearly 300 hours (almost a fortnight), the most disturbing aspect was surely that the grisly spectacle had a mainstream audience. This wasn’t a snuff film put out on social media — it was a popular stream with an active live chat.

Graven, a 46-year-old military veteran known online as “Jean Pormanove”, had built a following of over one million followers across platforms by submitting to “extreme challenges” where other streamers physically assaulted and humiliated him. His final stream showed him being beaten, choked, sprayed with paint, and subjected to sleep deprivation while viewers donated money and encouraged the abuse. When he finally lay motionless under a blanket, one of his tormentors threw a bottle at him before cutting the feed. Graven’s death is not an isolated incident. Rather, it’s an extreme example of what much modern entertainment has become.

Traditional narrative entertainment serves a specific psychological function. Stories provide what Jerome Bruner called “narrative coherence”, the human need to organize experience into meaningful sequences with beginnings, middles, and ends. In the case of fiction, we agree to care about people who don’t exist because doing so helps us understand people who do exist, including ourselves. This is also the purpose of fairy tales.

Social media has completely inverted this. Instead of fictional suffering which resolves into meaning, we now consume real suffering that offers no resolution. Reality television sped up this inversion by training audiences to consume authentic-seeming breakdown for its own sake, but streaming has perfected it, instigating a race to capture attention at any cost.

On Kick, where Graven was the fourth most-watched streamer globally, creators compete for viewers by pushing boundaries that established platforms such as Twitch prohibit. Kick’s looser content policies and 95% revenue split — compared to Twitch’s 50% — incentivize increasingly extreme content. Creators perform dangerous stunts, endure physical abuse, engage in sexual acts on camera, or stream themselves gambling for hours.

The more shocking the content, the more viewers it attracts. Some creators have committed what appear to be crimes on stream, including sexual assault and property destruction, while chat rooms filled with viewers cheer them on. In Russia, “trash streams”, similar to the stunts Graven was performing, were banned last summer after a streamer killed his girlfriend on stream.

Mukbang and extreme eating content exist in this same inverted space. Watching someone consume 10,000 calories offers no character development, no meaningful resolution, no narrative structure whatsoever. It’s pure consumption of physical discomfort and potential self-harm. These streams can last for hours, with viewers watching creators visibly struggle with nausea, pain, and exhaustion while donations pour in requesting even more extreme acts. The appeal isn’t parasocial connection or even schadenfreude: it’s following suffering for suffering’s sake, completely divorced from any story that might give it meaning.

Streaming has transformed how we consume public humiliation. Cancellations were once like modern-day public executions — devastating and occasionally unearned — but they were supposed to serve some communal purpose. We moved away from cancellations partly because the moral energy behind “wokeness” burned out, but also because the narrative structure of cancellation — with its clear beginning, middle, and resolution — is now too slow. People don’t get “cancelled”; they “crash out”. They do it to themselves.

Similarly, audiences follow “lolcows” — online personalities who are “milked” and exploited for laughs — for years, consuming every humiliation with no expectation that the story will provide meaning. The documentation continues until the person dies, disappears, or becomes too damaged to be interesting.

For streamers like Graven, the constant need to escalate content for donations creates a cycle whereby their physical and mental deterioration becomes the product. Viewers, meanwhile, develop tolerance to increasingly extreme content, requiring more shocking material to maintain interest. Constant exposure to suffering without narrative payoff creates a numbing effect that paradoxically increases appetite for more extreme content. At least porn offers physical release. This offers nothing.

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Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.

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