Zolezzi, 30, hung himself this morning after posting a status update Thursday night in which he wrote his own epitaph:

... born in San Francisco, became a shooting star over everywhere, and ended his life in Brooklyn... And couldn't have asked for more.

Zolezzi's mother told the New York Daily News that she blamed drugs for her son's death:

"I would say that people get so lonely, so delusional, that all they want to do is be remembered," she said from her home near San Francisco.
"He probably wanted to be remembered in a big way, to do it dramatically - that's what drugs will do to people."

Zolezzi, who had moved from Portland, Ore. to Brooklyn last month, often used Facebook to express his emotional state. Some of his status updates:

Paul is wondering, what unspeakable act did I do in a previous life to deserve this one?
Paul is going to be the first person ever to hang himself on the way out of Portland! Everything here sucks!

This tragic use of Facebook is, sadly enough, all part of Zuckerberg's plan for Facebook to capture every little blip in our emotional state. If we put our entire life online, isn't it inevitable that we'll die there, too?

Wednesday night, after he posted a suicide note on the Web, he overdosed on pills on camera as users of Justin.tv, a lifecasting site, watched. Some posted comments egging Biggs on. When he took the pills and stopped moving, they laughed, expecting his corpse to revive and announce it was all a joke. No one called the police until hours had passed. They kept watching as officers came to the scene and verified his death. Even then, commenters wrote "OMFG" and "LOL."

NewTeeVee, an online-video industry publication, called the incident a "a striking display of the power of live video." The power, but definitely not the glory: It shows how the viewers of lifecasting devalue life. Users of sites like Justin.tv have grown accustomed to watching people mug for the camera. All the world's a stage, and all the men and women on webcams are merely players. But what happens when we're not playing around?

Justin.tv CEO Michael Seibel, in a statement, didn't comment on the video, merely noting the site's policy for removing content flagged as "objectionable." The digital record of Biggs's death is just bits on a server. What about the users who cheered Biggs on as he performed a snuff film? Can we flag them, too? There will always be teenagers who try to kill themselves in awful ways. But one would hope the audience would not applaud.