It wasn’t actually that long ago that the Internet was still a nebulous, indescribable beast known only to a few government divisions and early Prodigy adopters. Back then, the “Last Man In America To Know Who Won The Super Bowl” contest would have been a whole lot easier to play. The contest began in 2008, when creator Kyle Whelliston lasted four days without gaining “the Knowledge.” It has since become a heated game in which players go to absurd lengths—like using a browser plug-in to replace every online photo with one of Nicolas Cage, just in case one might reveal the Super Bowl results—to avoid the unavoidable. One woman this year rewound a little too far on a Tivo’d Broad City episode into a commercial, and declared herself dead “by poor remote usage.”
The New Yorker has a full story of Last Man’s history, its players, and their deaths, including this one:
The unpredictability of social media made Twitter and Facebook particular danger zones; forgetting to turn off iPhone notifications was a rookie mistake. LinkedIn and Snapchat proved deadly, as did “browsing Reddit hopped up on flu meds” and “a half naked fan of the winning team on my Facebook timeline.” (Death by voyeruism?)