Sarco suicide pod has turned death into a consumer experience
The Sarco death pod. Credit: Getty
As the home of Dignitas, Switzerland has long taken a benign view of euthanasia. But it seems that portable gas chambers are a step too far. On Monday, an American woman killed herself in a Sarco pod, a 3D-printed capsule which kills its inmate with nitrogen. Several people, including a photographer, have been arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting suicide.
Although its inventor likes to boast otherwise, this is not quite a world first: Alabama recently executed a murderer using the same technique. But instead of the unlovely William C. Holman Correctional Facility right off Alabama State Route 21, the death chamber in this instance was placed in a picturesque bit of forest in the Jura Mountains.
A photo taken shortly before the event shows an interior with comfortable soft furnishings and a travel pillow of the sort you buy at airports. The official description is “luxurious”; and while I would not go that far, its setup bears an uncanny resemblance to the comfy sleep pods which can now be found in university libraries and airports.
And why not? As its inventor Philip Nitschke — Newsweek: “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide”, The Economist: “the bad boy of the euthanasia movement” — explains it, he had initially built a suicide bag, with a breathing mask which pipes out carbon monoxide. But people didn’t like the “plastic bag factor”. People may want to die, but they have aesthetic expectations.
Hence the suicide pod, which allows the consumer to “choose either a dark or transparent view, so you can take the machine somewhere if you prefer a certain view”. The doctor, for the record, would pick Australia’s northern desert at sunset for his own untimely demise.
There is nothing new about the glamorisation of euthanasia. For decades, Dignitas’s stock-in-trade has been to portray its services as an occasion for a family reunion, with choice of music. Its brochure described the clinic’s setting with lines such as “beside lies a tiny lake; a little waterfall dabbles.”
And in 2022, the Canadian clothing brand Simonds ran a glossy ad which presented a woman’s decision to euthanise herself as an upscale lifestyle choice of “hard beauty”. Before she died, she even had the time to host her friends at a beach party in Tofino, on the coast of British Columbia. The fact that the woman in question only killed herself after failing to secure proper medical treatment for her Ehlers-Danlos syndrome was not mentioned.
Meanwhile, in Quebec at least one funeral home is also offering an euthanasia space, in a triumph of consumer packaging. “Do you want to watch a movie? Do you want a glass of wine? Some people want to be in groups of four or five, and we’ve had groups of up to 30 people.” You also save on a hearse, if a funeral is wanted, of course.
The Sarco pod is merely the latest consumer refinement on the principle of making death look hygge. What jars is its consumer-oriented individualism. According to early reports, only one other person was present at the scene and he did not need to be there at all, the pod being self-contained and user-operated. Nitschke followed the process via remote link, but there is no need for that either. The paperwork of death is done in advance, so that nothing is allowed to spoil the experience.
In an age where every human activity has been reduced to a consumer experience, it was always inevitable that death — in many ways the ultimate (unmissable, once-in-a-lifetime!) experience — would end up being packaged as such. We have yet to grapple with the monstrous implications of this development.
