Q: what’s more terrifying than holding a 1.5 inch thick encyclopaedia in front of your chest and telling your girlfriend to shoot you at point blank range?

A: Living an ordinary life where you never achieve celebrity status on social media and where your ‘views’ struggle to hit the 100 mark.

This may sound stark, even bleak, but more and more people, particularly young folk whose brains haven’t yet reached maturity (it takes about 25 years for the average brain to be fully wired up), are prepared to risk life and limb to achieve instant celebrity and riches via the live lottery of exposure on social media (YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook).

It’s an unashamed and compulsive striving to achieve notoriety and big bucks by filming pranks and stunts and posting them online. It’s huge business, with top YouTubers earning millions of dollars per year from advertising revenue and product endorsement. Worldwide, the mega-earners such as PewDiePie, Roman Atwood, Jake Paul, Dude Perfect rake in upwards of $5 million each per year with billions of views on YouTube. And they all started with little more than a fistful of aspirations and a camera phone.

There are legions of wannabe YouTube megastars but only a minuscule amount actually make enough money to live on. Still, it doesn’t stop folk from trying. As the going gets tough and the competition intensifies, pranksters and video bloggers push their imaginations and their stunts to the outer limits of absurdity, sanity and safety. Predictably, it can end in tears. Or death.

This week, 20 year-old Monalisa Perez was found guilty at a court in Minnesota of second-degree manslaughter for the shooting of her boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz (22) in a live YouTube stunt that went gruesomely wrong. The shooting happened in June 2017 when Perez was aged 19 years and was witnessed by the couple’s three-year-old daughter and filmed by two cameras. The victim, Ruiz, had apparently practised the stunt beforehand and was convinced the encyclopaedia he was holding in front of him would prevent injury. He was killed more or less instantly when the bullet penetrated his chest. Perez was jailed for a term of six months, to be served in nine stints of ten days in prison and the remaining three months to be served in confinement at her home. This is due to the fact that Perez was four months pregnant at the time of the shooting in June 2017 and now has a baby to look after. This second child, along with the couple’s now four-year-old daughter, will grow up without a father. The sentencing judge in the case also stipulated that Perez should never be allowed to achieve any financial gain from the tragic events.

It’s not difficult to spot the dramatic irony in this parable for our times: their YouTube audience sky rocketed as a result of Ruiz’s death and, in this respect, they got what they wished for (but without the advertising revenue). Even more disturbing, though, was the very mundaneness of this young couple’s day to day existence prior to the fatal stunt. We see them laid bare on social media platforms, rolling out the minutiae of their quotidian rituals for all the world to see: how they’re going to afford their bills that month, trips to the park, their excitement about the upcoming birth of their baby. Wondering what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives. And some fairly puerile pranks like lacing each other’s sandwiches with ultra-hot chilli peppers. There’s nothing to augur the dark, sobering events that will curtail the life of one of them and catastrophically impact on the life of the other (and their children). There is, though, a persistent thread in their social media presence where they express a strong desire to become famous and rich from their YouTube channel. It is this ambition that opens up the fatal gateway to their ‘death-defying’ stunt. Maybe they were just really bored that week? Maybe the expenses for the impending birth were beginning to worry them? In reality, it was probably a cocktail of many different thoughts, feelings and desires that led them to the moment where Perez was persuaded to fire the gun. Maybe they themselves didn’t really understand what they were doing. One thing is certain, though, without the audience presence on social media platforms, virtually no-one would be bothered to take selfies on the top of a moving train, hanging off the ledge of a 500-feet skyscraper, or set their clothes on fire as they film themselves leaping off from the ninth floor of an apartment block into a pile of snow. These days, without the audience, nothing is any good. Without audience, nothing is real.