The Work of Digital Cannibalism

We're all meat on the hoof for the extremely online

Armin Meiwes did the work you shouldn’t do

The Armin Meiwes case vanished from headlines years ago. The German computer repairman now sits in a reasonably clean and neat prison cell, serving life for killing and eating a willing victim he found online. Most folks remember only fragments — the classified ad, the videotaped horror, the bizarre consent. But the details deserve remembering, not because they're titillating but because they're prophetic.

In 2001, Meiwes posted an advertisement online: "looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed." Not the kind of classified you'd find in most local newspapers of the era. But on the internet, Meiwes found responses. Not just one or two, but dozens of people engaged with him. Most backed out when reality intruded on fantasy. But Bernd Brandes, a 43-year-old engineer from Berlin, followed through.

What happened next was meticulously recorded on video. Meiwes gave Brandes cough syrup and sleeping pills. He attempted to bite off Brandes' penis, then used a knife when that failed. The two men tried to eat the severed organ together. Brandes bled in a bathtub for hours while Meiwes read a Star Trek book, checking on him periodically. When Brandes collapsed trying to use the bathroom, Meiwes strung him up on a meat hook, butchered him, and stored parts of his body in the freezer, beneath pizza boxes. He would consume approximately 44 pounds of Brandes' flesh over the following months.

What stays with me isn't just the gore but what made it possible: that first online contact. The internet brought these men together. A place designed for connection facilitated consumption. This wasn't some chance encounter in a dive bar or village square. It happened because technology created the perfect hunting ground — anonymous, boundary-free, built to match supply with demand no matter how monstrous the request.

The early 2000s internet was a different beast. No algorithms guiding your hand, no infinite scroll to trap your attention. It was clunky, compartmentalized, requiring deliberate action to find anything. You had to know where to look. Meiwes found his way to a forum called "Nullo" where people shared extreme body modification fantasies. He posted more than 60 advertisements. People like "Matteo" and "Luke" considered his offer before backing out. The internet didn't push cannibalism content toward Meiwes — he had to seek it out. His dangerous kink remained his responsibility.

Twenty years later, we're all Brandes walking into Meiwes' house. Not for physical cannibalism, but something uncomfortably similar. The difference is we no longer need to seek out our own destruction in the world wide web’s darkest corners. It finds us, served up by easy-to-use and "free"¹ recommendation engines designed to maximize our consumption while we're being consumed.

The internet devours us daily. Not our flesh, but something more valuable — our attention, our time, our sense of self. Social media platforms aren't services but feeding troughs where we offer up pieces of ourselves. The transaction happens so smoothly we barely notice the consumption.²

There's a cold mechanical efficiency to it. The computer technician Meiwes took his victim apart methodically, preserving what he wanted. Today's platforms work the same way. They dismember your identity into usable parts — demographic details, emotional responses, consumption habits, political leanings — then store these pieces in digital freezers, neatly labeled for future use.

The platforms aren't particularly picky eaters. They'll consume your joy just as readily as your outrage. They'll devour your wedding photos and your cancer diagnosis with equal appetite. What matters isn't the quality of the emotion but its usefulness as fuel for its infernal engagement engine.

I've watched the feeding frenzy accelerate. What began as occasional browsing has become a constant digital meal. People sacrifice sleep to keep doomscrolling, abandon conversations mid-sentence to check notifications or start even start subtly gooning when a particularly lurid image passes along the screen. The idea of sitting alone with our thoughts now feels as foreign as dining without a screen. We've forgotten how to be undevoured.

It's not just the time loss that troubles me. It's what happens to a person constantly consumed. You change when your primary value becomes your capacity to be eaten. You learn to prepare yourself as the most tempting meal possible. You curate your life not for living but for consumption.

The most disturbing development is how we've begun to see this devouring as normal, even desirable. We measure our worth by how thoroughly we're consumed. Not enough likes? Not enough views? You must be unappetizing. Try harder. Make yourself more delectable. We've internalized the cannibal's hunger.

Now we're approaching an even more ghoulish phase. When news broke about Armin Meiwes finding a willing victim, the world recoiled. Today, hot take writers chasing contrarian narratives tell us it's perfectly healthy, or at least a-okay, to form romantic attachments to AI chatbots.³ Companies sell synthetic intimacy as a solution to loneliness, not a deepening of it. Tech publications praise creepy or otherwise-illegal deepfake pornography as an innovation rather than a violation.

What's happening isn't some neutral social development but a fundamental inversion. The machine is eating the human, and we're thanking it for its appetite.

I've watched friends disappear into this digital maw. There's the promising writer who used to scribble in notebooks at the coffee shop, who now waits for algorithm-approved slop based on whatever thinkable thoughts are circulating in the groupchats where we lurks. The artist who abandoned personal vision to chase whatever style of YouTube video gets the most engagement. The depressed teenager who deleted a perfectly good photo because it earned insufficient likes. They've become meals preparing themselves.

The most effective prisons don't need bars when the prisoners believe freedom means nothing more or less than the right to be consumed.

Nobody's driving to a remote farmhouse to be butchered, but many willingly offer themselves as daily digital sustenance. The worst part is how we celebrate this arrangement. Consider the language: We're "building a following." We're "feeding the algorithm." We're "going viral" — literally comparing popularity to disease. We piggies await the latest round of AI "slop" on our "[news]feed." Our vocabulary betrays the nature of the transaction.

The consumer becomes the consumed so gradually you might miss the transition. First you browse Facebook, then Facebook browses you. First you search Google, then Google searches through you. First you watch TikTok videos, then TikTok watches how you watch.

I'm not suggesting we abandon technology entirely. That horse has long since left the barn, trampled the farmer, and built one of those cheap condominiums on the ruins of the farm. But we might reconsider what parts of ourselves deserve protection from consumption.

There's a phrase from old cannibalism trials that haunts me. When judges asked why accused cannibals didn't stop, some mentioned the "sweet meat" — the addictive quality of human flesh that allegedly kept them returning for more. Today's digital cannibals operate on the same principle. They've engineered their platforms to be addiction machines, not tools.

The warning signs have been there for decades. Meiwes was a canary in a horrific coal mine. His crime showed the early potential of the internet to match the basest human appetites with willing providers. What we missed was how that same dynamic would scale beyond the criminal fringe into mainstream interaction.

The digital world's cannibalism has become so normalized we've created a celebrity class whose entire purpose is to be publicly consumed. They don't make anything. They don't perform any traditional service. They exist solely to be devoured by followers, who themselves hope to be consumed in turn. It's cannibals all the way down.

This arrangement creates profound emptiness. Beneath the surface pleasure of likes and follows lies a gnawing hunger that never satisfies. The machines have learned that a satiated user is a useless user. Better to keep us perpetually hungry, perpetually searching for the next digital meal.

What's the alternative? It begins with recognizing the nature of the transaction. When you understand you're the meal rather than the diner, the relationship clarifies. The platforms aren't providing services — they're providing the illusion of service while they consume you.

After his arrest, when asked why he ate Brandes, Meiwes said, "By eating him, he has become a part of my memory." He believed he'd incorporated his victim's essence, even claiming he gained better English and math skills from consuming Brandes' flesh. The platforms operate on the same principle. They consume our data, our emotions, our expressions, then claim to know us better than we know ourselves. They feed our profiles back to us as if they've captured our essence. We begin to believe their version of who we are — our selfie is our self, the words in our short bio are an entire life packaged into a digital "identity."

I ask a simple question before each digital interaction: Am I using this tool, or is it using me? The honest answer is often uncomfortable. Most platforms are designed specifically to reverse the intended relationship, to transform the user into the used.

Regaining control means establishing boundaries around what parts of yourself remain undevoured. Maybe your attention during dinner stays off-limits. Maybe your first waking thoughts belong to you rather than your smartphone. Maybe your children's childhood memories remain unpublished and unconsumed.

These small resistances matter. They preserve spaces where consumption doesn't determine value. They maintain the possibility of an undevoured self.

What would Meiwes make of our world now? I don’t plan to ask him — though he has been interviewed at length, as you’ll see below — but I wonder if he'd recognize his crime reflected back in mundane digital interactions. The willing surrender, the methodical consumption, the participants convinced they've found connection when they've actually found consumption. The parallels aren't subtle if you're willing to see them.

Meiwes took videos of his victim that no one should see. He methodically cataloged the process. Today we post our own dismemberment voluntarily, frame by frame, in an endless digital record. We hang ourselves up on hooks for public inspection. We marinate in our own humiliation for engagement. We butcher our privacy and serve it up in bite-sized content.

The solution isn't retreat but reclamation. Take back ownership of your attention. Question algorithms that determine what you see. Remember there's no biological need to check notifications. These aren't irresistible urges but carefully engineered compulsions.

I'm not suggesting this is easy. The platforms have spent billions perfecting their consumption techniques. They employ armies of psychologists and designers to create the most efficient people-eating machines possible. Breaking free requires deliberate effort.

But unlike Brandes walking into Meiwes' home, we can still walk out. We can still establish terms. We can still decide which parts of ourselves remain off the menu. The alternative is to become what we consume — processed digital products rather than people, endlessly repackaged for efficient digestion.

What happened in that German farmhouse was an unspeakable crime. What's happening in our digital spaces is akin to an actual carnival — "carne levare," a true taking away of the meat of our private selves. The butchery and barbecue continue because we keep bringing the food — ourselves, our children, our relationships, our attention.

We are all meat on the hoof now. Meat for platforms that slice us into marketable chunks. Meat for corporations that package and sell our attention. Meat for a digital machine that's learned cannibalism is the perfect business model. The old internet enabled Meiwes to find his victim, but today's internet has industrialized that process, building automated slaughterhouses of the human spirit that process billions daily.

The internet of 2025 does far more than connect cannibals with victims. It's turned us all into both — devouring each other's privacy, dignity, and humanity while offering ourselves up as the next course. We consume. We are consumed. We ask — we beg — for more.

Appendix: Selections from the 2007 Armin Meiwes Prison Interview

The following are selected translations from a 2007 German-language interview with Armin Meiwes conducted in prison. The original German text appears alongside the English translation. The emphasis, where it appears, is mine.

Early Childhood Memories

"Was ist ihre früheste Kindheitserinnerung? [...] Am deutlichsten eigentlich ist das, wo wir mit meinem Vater zusammen einkaufen waren und ein Bekannter von mir, ein guter Freund der in der Nachbarschaft gewohnt hat, war auch mit dabei. Und ja, mein Vater hat so gewisse Zauberkunststückchen immer betrieben [...] Weniger schön war natürlich hauptsächlich eben der Moment, wo mein Vater unsere Familie verlassen hatte, und vor allem was kam eigentlich aus heiterem Himmel. Ich war etwa acht Jahre alt, ja, acht Jahre, sonst war August/September 1969."

"What is your earliest childhood memory? [...] The clearest one is when we were shopping with my father, and an acquaintance of mine, a good friend who lived in the neighborhood, was with us. And yes, my father would always do certain magic tricks [...] Less pleasant, of course, was mainly the moment when my father left our family, and above all, it came completely out of the blue. I was about eight years old, yes, eight years, it was August/September 1969."

The Broken Family

"Es war ja praktisch meine gesamte heile Welt ist in dem Moment eigentlich zerbrochen und all die wichtigen Bezugspersonen, nämlich meinen Vater und mein Bruder, sind in dem Moment weg gewesen, und knappes halbes Jahr später oder auch noch nicht mal ein halbes Jahr später ist meine Großmutter dann auch noch gestorben, so dass also innerhalb von kürzester Zeit drei wichtige Bezugspersonen gefehlt haben."

"My entire intact world was practically shattered in that moment, and all the important people in my life, namely my father and my brother, were gone in that moment. And not even half a year later, my grandmother also died, so that within a very short time, three important reference people in my life were missing."

Origins of Cannibalistic Fantasies

"Ich hatte also in der Schule einen Schulfreund, der mir eigentlich gar nicht so in meiner Klasse war, sondern da war eine Klasse unter mir. Frank ist der, und den hatte ich mir immer so als Bruder vorgestellt. Und irgendwann habe ich dann eben gemerkt, dass das mit dem imaginären eben nicht so ist, das müsste irgendwie was fester was sein, und müsste ein Teil von mir werden. Und ob jetzt nun durch die Hänsel und Gretelgeschichte oder eben auch einen Robinson Crusoe Film, den ich im Fernsehen gesehen habe, dazu animiert? Ich weiß es letztendlich gar nicht mehr."

"At school, I had a school friend who wasn't actually in my class, but was in the class below mine. His name is Frank, and I always imagined him as a brother. And at some point, I realized that this imaginary relationship wasn't enough; it would have to be something more substantial, and would have to become a part of me. And whether I was inspired by the Hansel and Gretel story or by a Robinson Crusoe film that I saw on television? I ultimately don't remember anymore."

The Robinson Crusoe Connection

"Dort war so, dass also nicht wie in der eigentlichen Geschichte von Robinson Crusoe, dort praktisch die Kannibalen auf die Insel kam und die dort entsprechend zu verzehren, sondern dort sind also zwei junge Männer mit dem Boot gefahren, im Sturm gekommen, und einer ist also dabei ums Leben gekommen. Und damit er eben nicht praktisch verloren geht, sondern damit er dabei bleibt, daraufhin wollte der andere den aufessen."

"In that version, unlike in the original Robinson Crusoe story where cannibals came to the island to consume people, there were two young men who were boating, got caught in a storm, and one of them died. And so that he wouldn't be lost, but would remain with him, the other wanted to eat him."

First Online Encounters

"Gut, das war so Mitte 2000. Vorher hatte ich im Internet zwar schon die diversen Seiten angeschaut und auch teilweise Geschichten irgendwo runtergeladen, die im Internet zugänglich sind. Und ich hatte mich nach dem Tod von meiner Mutter sehr intensiv mit dem Thema Tod auseinandergesetzt. Und über diese Seiten bin ich auch irgendwo auf eine Kannibalen-Seite oder auf dem Chatforum gestoßen und da eigentlich dann das erste Mal drauf gekommen und dann auch gesehen, was es da alles gibt, und dachte zunächst, es ist Fantasie. Aber auch wie die Anzeigen gestaltet waren, es war so, dass man es eigentlich gar nicht glauben konnte, nein, dass sich Leute also tatsächlich anbieten, sich selbst verspeisen zu lassen und andere entsprechend entsprechend Leute zu suchen."

"It was around mid-2000. Before that, I had already looked at various sites on the internet and also downloaded stories that were accessible online. And after my mother's death, I dealt very intensively with the subject of death. And through these sites, I somehow came across a cannibal site or chat forum, and that's when I first encountered it and saw what was available there. At first, I thought it was fantasy. But the way the advertisements were designed, it was such that you could hardly believe that people actually offered themselves to be eaten and others were looking for appropriate people."

The Effect of Internet Immersion

"Na ja, vielleicht finde ich ja jemand, mit dem ich einfach so darüber sprechen kann. Aber es war eigentlich so, dass man sich dann gegenseitig hochgeschaukelt hat und dann eigentlich vollkommen im Blick der Realität verloren hat. Und das ist natürlich eben auch die Gefahr von dem Internet. Wenn man redet darüber und steigert sich eigentlich so sehr da hinein, dass das eben dann eigentlich zu Normalität wird. Und dann denkt man natürlich garantiert nicht mehr dran, dass man irgendwie einen Psychiater bräuchte oder irgendwas."

"Well, maybe I'll find someone I can simply talk to about it. But what actually happened was that we wound each other up and completely lost sight of reality. And that is, of course, the danger of the internet. When you talk about it and get so deeply involved that it actually becomes normal. And then, of course, you definitely no longer think that you might need a psychiatrist or something."

Bernd Brandes' First Message

"Ich hatte mich auf eine Anzeige, die er ins Internet gestellt hatte, gemeldet. Bei ihm war überschrieben mit 'Dinner' oder 'Your Dinner', und der Text war: 'Ich biete mich an, mich von euch bei lebendigen Leib verspeisen zu lassen. Wer ist wirklich will, braucht ein echtes Opfer.'"

"I responded to an advertisement that he had posted on the internet. His was titled 'Dinner' or 'Your Dinner,' and the text was: 'I offer myself to be eaten by you while still alive. Anyone who really wants this needs a real sacrifice.'"

After the Arrest

"Nach diesem Gespräch bin ich in eine sogenannte Zugangszelle gekommen, ein Raum der sehr klein, dreckig, schmutzig ist. Und ich habe dahinter den Gittern gesessen und habe Rotz und Wasser geheult und habe mich so frei gefühlt wie mein ganzes Leben zuvor nie. Und dieser Moment, der war so gewaltig, dass ich jeden nur raten kann: Wer solche Dinge vielleicht planen oder Fantasien - egal welche Art es sind - suchen Sie jemanden, der unbefangen darüber spricht. Denn sprechen hilft sehr viel und kann eine Befreiung geben, wie man sie nie zuvor gespürt hat."

"After this conversation, I was put in a so-called admission cell, a room that is very small, dirty, and filthy. And I sat behind the bars and cried my eyes out and felt freer than I had ever felt in my entire life before. And this moment was so powerful that I can only advise everyone: Anyone who might be planning such things or has fantasies - no matter what kind they are - find someone who will talk about it without prejudice. Because talking helps a great deal and can provide a liberation like you've never felt before."

On Finding Others Like Him

"Es gibt viele tausend Menschen im Internet, die sich für dieses Thema faszinieren, die dort Menschen suchen, entweder um aufgegessen zu werden oder um entsprechend Menschen zu essen. Weltweit hat die Polizei ermittelt, die Zahl allein in Deutschland, glaube ich, 10.000, weltweit im Millionenbereich. Und wenn auch nur einer davon den Mut hat, das nicht zu tun, dann ist es schon mal ein großer Erfolg."

"There are many thousands of people on the internet who are fascinated by this topic, who are looking for people there, either to be eaten or to eat people accordingly. The police have investigated worldwide; I believe the number in Germany alone is 10,000, and worldwide it's in the millions. And if even just one of them has the courage not to do it, then that's already a great success."

Final Reflection

"Beim Ausleben der Fantasie wird man niemals die Erfüllung erleben. Und diesen Satz habe ich mir sehr zu Herzen genommen, denn was auch immer man sich vorstellt, es ist in der Realität grundsätzlich immer anders. Und von daher, warum soll ich etwas machen, von dem ich weiß, dass es nie so ist, wie ich es mir vorstelle?"

"By acting out the fantasy, you will never experience fulfillment. And I've taken this sentence very much to heart, because whatever you imagine, it is fundamentally always different in reality. And therefore, why should I do something that I know will never be the way I imagine it?"

1. The cost? Only your immortal soul, alas and alack.

2. Read all about it here.

3. Spoiler alert: It isn’t. It’s sad and pathetic, like so much of the extremely online. No matter how we try to dress it up for a little of that do re mi — and believe me, I’ve done my part (many such cases, and a few are even good people) — this shit is lame!