Two Cents: I Watched Someone Die on TikTok (Sydney Fringe)
Okay, bit misleading show title: Charlotte Otton hasn’t seen just one person die on TikTok. She’s basically been face-slammed with a convulsing tsunami of the most heinous content you’ve ever soaked your eyeballs in since she first learned how to log on. It’s almost soothing for her, now, as she enters her thirties. Along with the dopamine hits of cute shit, and the metastasising, mutating memes and trends that will always leave us feeling like misshapen dorkuses, the digital rolodex of horrors is stroking our flat brains ever flatter, it would seem. Dash cam footage of car crashes, 9/11 calls by matricidal Karens… How can you look away?
Otton enters stage left singing a TikTok karaoke of ‘A Whole New World’ while behind her strangers livestream (with casual net-speak commentary) the worst thing that’s ever happened to them. Her heaps-entertaining stage persona is a hot millennial mess of drama slut, hyperaware screen addict, and shameless oversharer. Over one hypercreative hour, she serves us a skittering presentation on our collective dystopia through powerpoints, pie charts, a poem, a live ECG reading of brain rot, a death challenge, a recreation of her chubby tween self sending horny texts in an AOL chatroom, and so, so much cursed content – taking us on a dark and demented journey through the internet generation’s tweaked up, brain-rotted brain.
It’s a full hit of fucked up. I remember maybe one hundredth of the videos shared on PACT’s screen (I don’t remember much nowadays), but I did get reacquainted with Salad Fingers, saw a silicone hotdog with a hair transplant, and watched a bacon baby eating itself. Just regular fodder from the 2025 entertainment trough, then.
You will deeply enjoy this show if you revel in the wrong (of course you do, you sickos). And you will deeply relate to it, too, if you’ve become used to feeling the greedy fingers of corporations rummaging about your thinking box, probing your most sensitive neural knobs, while you wonder where your free will and self control and the last four hours went.
Graphic, self-aware, careening, and sickeningly hilarious, I Watched Someone Die feels like an AI recreation of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’, only it’s laughing, and scrolling, and screaming, and rubbing one off, and scrolling. Frozen into eternity, with a deepening tech-neck wrinkle.
——————————
I Watched Someone Die on TikTok
By Charlotte Otton
Until 13 September at PACT
Sydney Fringe 2025
Photos are encouraged during the performance.
——————————
Postscript
Not to brag or anything, but I deleted TikTok from my phone last week (…for the fiftieth time this year). I have also though, just on Tuesday, logged off from Instagram, dramatically adding to my profile: ‘#offline 💀’. (Boy troubles, ego troubles, rejection sensitive dysphoria troubles.) This has left me with just one social relationship: a guy I’ve never met who (ALLEGEDLY) flies planes for a living in the US. I found him on Tinder in May, and we talk on Signal about twice a week. I'll rejoin the digital moshpit of social self-sabotage eventually, but right now, with my one potential catfish, I feel less lonely, less insane, and almost free.
