I met Aleksey at Yale a few months after the video had gone viral and found him to be a nice enough guy who was intelligent and interesting to talk to, though it was clear that he had serious emotional issues as even then after all the ridicule he felt compelled to boast of unlikely achievements almost as a reflex. He was not the arsehole the internet had prepared me for but a decent and troubled person and I felt desperately sorry for him.
The communities and networks we have built online have proven to be fantastically capable to creating and organising for good, whether it be raising funds for disaster relief or catapulting some deserving person to stardom, but we've all too often decided to ignore our power to tear down and destroy with frightening speed. Aleksey Vayner's video may have been silly and weird but it did not merit the public humiliation he received.
It would be too much to expect that large scale ridicule of an individual like this will never happen again, human nature is what it is and cruelty and anonymity go hand in hand. But as individuals we can at least prevent ourselves from being a part of it by pausing before we forward, retweet or share the next picture, video or meme and considering whether the person being laughed at deserves to be destroyed for our amusement.
I think it's interesting to compare this to Rebecca Black. "Friday" became viral mostly as a mockery, but she seemed to take it all in stride and make the most of it. I was actually really impressed with that. In her case, the shares/retweets/etc. weren't hurtful to her in the end.
I always thought Friday was a fantastic deconstruction of the genre, whether intentional or not. The banality of the lyrics are in truth not significantly worse than the lyrics of the average pop song. How many song lyrics boil down to the same lame refrain "we went to a club, got so drunk, danced so much, and had so much fun, yeah, partying! whoo!"? Most, but not all, songs of that genre dress up their banality in slightly more interesting turns of phrase but ultimately it's the same thing. Compare "Friday" to "Like a G6", for example.
Yea, it's the same shit, just wrapped with the money of major label marketing. Funny thing is, some of these "artists" actually take their music seriously.
The girl from the creepy ex-girlfriend meme actively capitalized on her stardom. It seems that the sociological phenomenon of involuntarily going viral is becoming more well-understood.
If you mean Overly Attached Girlfriend [1], she framed the joke intentionally, in terms of its visual look and its connotations, in exactly the form that took hold as a meme.
Contrast this with memes where a picture caught the eye of a photoshopper who then decided what joke to write on top.
It was her own sense of humor from the start. Good on her :)
Yes totally. Though didn't that girl intentionally create the creepy ex-girlfriend persona? It's a little bit different than Rebecca Black who created something in earnest but then made the best of having it taken as a mockery.
It's hard to predict the path a particular meme will take once it has gone viral. Compare say "creepy girlfriend" to "scumbag Steve".
If you can predict with good to absolute confidence where a particular meme would go, then you have something extremely valuable that any marketing dept would go for.
Remember, most of these things happened unexpectedly to the people involved. I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone that a) knew in advance what would happen and b) wanted it to do so deliberately.
Making the best of a bad situation is not understanding this sociological phenomenon.
My friend who went to Yale had a pretty bad back injury, and I heard that Aleksey actually fixed it. No idea if that's accurate, but it kind of adds a little character to the whole mythology of the guy.
I agree with your entire post except for this one clause
> cruelty and anonymity go hand in hand
Anonymity and cruelty are orthogonal concepts - there is nothing about anonymity that implies or requires cruelty, and the connection runs the other way just as often, but as human beings, we find it easier to focus on and remember the negative more so than the positive.
Unrelated concepts, maybe, but by definition they are not orthogonal in the real world, unfortunately. Statistically, I'd be willing to wager people act worse when they think nobody is looking. Anonymity just extends this effect elsewhere.
People are much less likely to be cruel when people they appreciate could be made aware of it.
This has actually been studied academically (the "online disinhibition effect"). Anonymity definitely seems to correlate with poor behavior, even if it's not a causal relationship.
Good point, but I'm not sure that forced real name is really the same as "not anonymous" (despite Randi Zuckerberg's comments on the article). I.e. there's more you get from online anonymity than simply not having your name known.
I could know someone is named John Smith for example, and that still wouldn't help me pierce his anonymity unless there were other distinguishing features (picture, phone number, etc.).
No, it doesn't. I remember an anecdote of a bagel delivery man that calculated the percent of people (donations to the bagel plate were anonymous) that screwed him up was only 15%.
So majority people are actually nice even when anonymous. And penny arcade is a comic site, not a dispenser of truth.
I remember an anecdote of a bagel delivery man that calculated
I expect it was about Paul Feldman -- it was a very interesting story -- the guy was an MIT-trained economist who, in frustration at getting nowhere at a certain point in his career, gave it up to deliver bagels, etc. to companies every day and he collected data on people's behavior when it came to leaving payments.
The following NY Times Magazine article is by the Freakonomics duo about him (the story made it into the Freakonomics book):
>Anonymity and cruelty are orthogonal concepts - there is nothing about anonymity that implies or requires cruelty
You'd be surprised. Do you have anything to validate that statement?
Because the empirical observations of anybody on this internet thing (forums, comment threads, etc) suggest otherwise.
Perhaps you start from a logical premise ("I don't see any connection between cruelty and anonymity") but forgot to take into account human psychology factors (e.g "Hmm, I can harass that guy a little harder, it's not as if he knows who I am and can get back at me").
"Anonymity and cruelty are orthogonal concepts - there is nothing about anonymity that implies or requires cruelty"
Yeah, there's only scads of research that shows that anonymity leads to bad behavior and that being reminded of yourself (mirror) and other people (photographs) watching you -- even non-human robot faces watching you! --causes people to improve for the better.
Mirrors and pictures of faces cause people to behave better -- to steal fewer "honor system" vegetables, bagels, flowers, to donate more to charity jars, to stick more closely to their diet plans, etc.
In the 60s, an anonymous student wore a black bag to class at Oregon State for a long time… the essay reporting on its effects that I read that 'The Black Bag' suffered a lot of bizarre and anti-social behavior from fellow students, so bad behavior related to anonymity cuts both ways.
You may think that the "concepts" are orthagonal, but let's be honest, aren't you just working a priori here without any evidence?
The translation of the Facebook wall post seems incorrect. It's also in Russian and not Ukrainian. Here's my go at it:
You damn egoist, pick up the phone. Who will take care of [your?] mother?! At least sell your source code and fuck off to Costa Rica. The very same paypal will give you 200-300 pieces [I think these might be pills rather than dollars]. Pick up the phone bitch!
Edit: thanks for the corrections, indeed, that would most likely be $200,000-$300,000. Although I'm a native speaker I didn't grow up in Russia so my slang and colloquial language is pretty weak :>
I should add that "egoist" in Russian is indeed literally the same word as "egoist" in English (albeit written in Cyrillic), but semantically it is closer to what "selfish" means in modern American English. I think the note should be read as "you selfish person".
As far as I understand (I'm a native Russian speaker) in English, selfishness refers more to self-gratification while egoism refers more to acting in rational self-interest.
Yeah, the translation in the OP was almost completely wrong; I'm not sure where they got the idea that there was a joke that said "kill yourself". Actually, the depressing thing is that the real comment points even more toward a suicide.
The real comment sounds like someone knows that Aleksey was suicidal, and says, in order:
"Nobody sell this guy any pills" (so he does not kill himself)
"You selfish bastard, who's going to take care of mom?" (if you kill yourself)
"You could always sell the source code and fuck off to costa rica" (an alternative to killing yourself)
"Paypal would pay you couple of hundred thousand for it" (saying that the above-mentioned source code is very valuable)
"Pick up the phone bitch" (apparently he is ignoring the phone calls from his worried friends, and they wish him to stop doing so).
What's going on is that Alexey probably something to run away from, probably monetary: hence "fuck off to Costa Rica" and references to $200,000-$300,000.
I read the article, didn't know the details, but what I now see is :
- somebody who has proofs of great achievements he did
- a backstory showing how these achievements are compatible, possible and repeatable for this young immigrant who is decided to succeess
- during the vice.com video, apparently a self-reflective decent dude, whose only mistake may have been to send a self promotion video to get the job he really really wanted.
He didn't hate. He worked on himself and was pushed my a great internal drive. He was trying to get the right to pursuit happiness applied to his situation.
I call that a success.
Then the haters showed up and hated him, for daring to pursuit dreams, his dreams, thinks that they would certainly never get to do themselves, even in their wildest dreams
These haters may have seen him as a show-off - and that's sad.
I call someone like this a beacon of hope on what we humans can achieve if we really put ourselves to work.
Pay attention - these persons are quite infrequent, sometimes fragile (Aaron). Help them if you can. But they're here on a mission to change the world.
If you are one, I advise you to HIDE the good things you do.
Poeple are jealous. Any good dead you do, any investment on yourself you make, any skill you have (breaking bricks for ex) - whatever. Consider that a dark secret of yours and wait for the day when usual humans will no longer hate, but welcome instead, humans with 'better' capacities.
RIP Aleksey, you seemed like a great man. The word unfortunately was not ready to allow access to people like you... yet.
I followed his resume story pretty closely when it broke simply for the outrageousness of it all and this is correct. I can't speak to what he achieved afterwards. The ones I remember distinctly:
- Video of him skiing in the video is stock footage he bought on craigslist.
- Video of tennis serve at 140 mph.
- Plagiarized an economics paper in his resume
- Claimed to be one of a limited number of people in Connecticut certified for nuclear waste disposal
ivygateblog.com seemed to be the biggest follower of his and may still have a lot of the articles and the paper resume.
Some of these stories such as the nuclear waste one came from stories from people who met him at Yale, and reported in the Yale campus tabloid Rumpus. Jordan Bass, an acquaintance seems to be the source for several of the outrageous ones which were told in the context of Bulldog Days, an official Yale event featuring illegal underage drinking for high school seniors that were accepted. It's pretty clear that most of what he said at this event, assuming he said it at all, was intended as a joke. After it got written up in the campus newspaper and people knew him for this it seems he continued with the joke during his time there since people obviously greatly enjoyed it.
Some of these things (charity for troubled kids, holocaust book) appear in his non-video resume which he sent to the investment banks.
In the context of a huge elaborate joke about himself, this guy is easily someone I would have liked to hang out with, purely for the entertainment factor.
I'm liable to believe it was a little bit of both.
I can not comment on things I did not see. As I said, I read the article (and the posted video), didn't know the details or the story beforehand. I'm not usually interested in gossip - but with the news, it was interesting to try and understand the reasons of what looks like another suicide.
In the video, I see him breaking bricks and lifting weights, armwrestling etc.
All this is quite possible for me, and no reason to be ridiculed against. Physical prowess is a good thing!
The rest I don't know, and considering the "media fame" and joking aspects you mention, unless the claims are directly attributed to him by verifiable sources, I would call them hearsay.
> As I said, I read the article (and the posted video), didn't know the details or the story beforehand.
I went straight to Wikipedia, which at least tends to have decent citations to follow. While it doesn't seem like anyone has a copy of his resume, the at-the-time President of Charity Navigator [1] says he literally lied on it [2]. I don't really see why Stamp would weigh in unless such a claim had actually been made, and Stamp's call for expulsion doesn't appear to have been rescinded.
> But Won Chai ’07 said that while Charity Navigator has a right to be upset with Vayner, he thinks the humor of Vayner’s resume should be appreciated.
> “I think clearly he was trying to play a practical joke or just trying to draw attention to himself,” he said. “Whether or not it was a good thing or not, I couldn’t say. People seemed to be enjoying it. I-bankers are forwarding this stuff to each other. Maybe it’s good for a laugh now and again.”
> Pieter Morgan ’09, who has lifted weights with Vayner, said he thinks Vayner often makes seemingly unbelievable claims because he genuinely believes them to be true. Morgan said he thinks Vayner is a genuine person, despite his penchant for seemingly implausible stories.
> “I think it’s like in ‘A Beautiful Mind’ with Russell Crowe,” Morgan said. “When he tells you these stories, it’s completely genuine, which is what is completely amazing. He’ll tell you with a completely straight face that he knows the Dalai Lama, and he is completely serious. I think he is fundamentally a nice guy.”
Here's his charity site which seems to only have been active in November 2006. There was a web comment that mentioned that he used these sites to get girls and was apparently quite a player.
I'm really not trying to drag Vayner through the mud any more than he already has been, but I thought I'd clarify why I think he was ridiculed.
The ridicule against Vayner wasn't because he played tennis, lifted weights, practiced karate, or ballroom danced. The ridicule existed because he compiled these accomplishments into a video resume which he sent to UBS. He was ridiculed because he thought this was the best way to present himself to a potential employer and to many, came across as egotistical and pretentious.
This video alone was enough to go viral, but add to it the fact that there was evidence that a lot of the claims in his video and resume were falsified makes the story even more outrageous.
I agree with everything here and would add that the whole story reminded me of what it was like poring over my developer resumes a decade ago trying to impart a sense of achievement and drive in as terse a way as possible (don't go over one page, don't use pronouns!) and with little hard experience.
Today, aside from the sheer chance of being in an industry with more talent demand than supply, I can point to code that I've written and my raw merit as a developer can almost instantly be understood and I can easily find a job. Github is a resume and all that.
But I often forget that it's not always so easy for people outside my discipline and it's everything a person can do to differentiate themselves and show determination and a sense of personal development. That is the tragedy of his video resume, because there is certainly a talented and proud and sincere person underneath that production and all that so many people could do was find a way to tear it down.
Swartz was in effect martyred by the US Government over an "information wants to be free" matter of idealism.
Vayner became a laughing stock because some asshat in UBS leaked Vayner's awful, awful, AWFUL video resume. And all Vayner had going for him was some athletics.
It's "The people deserve access!" versus "I can karate chop 7 bricks, hire me UBS!"
If you think people laughed at Vayner out of jealousy, you haven't seen the video resume.
Swartz was a great man? OK
Vayner? Not so much. More like an above-average guy, unfairly hounded.
ADDENDUM:
There's a lesson here, you should be very careful about what info you give to an organization, even a 'respectable' one like UBS, even in a job application, so that you don't give some bastard the chance to ruin your life... I doubt the person who did this to Vayner even loses sleep over it.
I'm so glad none of the bad judgements I made ever came back to haunt me. I'm sure we all sometimes make bad judgements. I distinctly remember doing very stupid things when I was a teenager.
When I was 14 years old, my mom took my iPod to a repair shop because it refused to turn on. In a week, when they said they fixed it, I went to this shop with my friend. Although I had the address, I couldn't locate the building, and we spent an hour searching for it in the cold. We passed an internet café and a wonderful idea popped into my head. I sent them this email:
My fingers are freezing.
Been looking for your motherfucking shop for an hour.
Barely writing. Wait for me, assholes.
Of course actually meeting the guys who fixed my iPod wasn't exactly fun—I'm glad they had some sense of humor. But they also called my mom and advised her to teach me some manners.
What came as a surprise to me is that the same minute I walked into the store I realized that sending this email—heck, even stopping to write it—was a grand silly idea. Self-WTF. I couldn't remember just why I did this. It was like I had this silly little brother who did it, but it was me who had to face the consequences. But then, just five minutes ago this seemed like a really clever and fun thing to do!
In such moments I did not just embarrass myself (and my mom) in front of people I don't know, but I also made my family extremely puzzled because I was the “smart” kid who has been learning programming by books since twelve, knew OOP and stuff, moderated a large internet forum dedicated to programming, and this kind of behavior just didn't fit together with what they knew about me.
Sometimes people do very silly things they later regret. And usually they do them because they try their best at a given moment, with all the knowledge and context they are given, and make a wrong decision. Such decisions I never regret.
But sometimes people do their worst for no apparent reason, and then they WTF at themselves. Their judgement fails them, something blinds them and they do unimaginably stupid stuff, and later they feel even more embarrassed because they don't just see how misguided they were—but that it was so painfully obvious from the start.
I think it's important to understand this distinction this before judging people in any way.
My theory is screwing up like you did with your email generally gives us the experience to avoid screwing up in the future on much more serious counts, which is why most of us are not forever haunted by serious screwups.
This is in the general case, of course. It doesn't cover how the internet sometimes makes a big deal about fairly silly things.
You got hit by your under-developed frontal lobe. Under normal circumstances, everything functions fine, but throw some stress in, and normal (for adults and non-stressed teenagers) decision making processes get hijacked.
The WWW didn't exist until I was about your age in the story so most things I did before then were not recorded in any sense. I'd like to think that this lack of evidence made such situations less important in my head, as they only exist now in the Siberia of my mind, and surely only as distorted versions of their former selves.
I am looking at his wikipedia page (in particular the "other details section [1]) and see a prolific amount and variety of "accomplishments". Coupled with HNers in this thread suggesting that many of these claims by Aleksey have been proven false, I am wondering if he suffered from Pseudologia fantastica (pathological lying) [2].
I once worked with someone in his 50's who was undoubtedly a highly intelligent with an intense attention to detail -- super productive. However, he was known for claiming, among other outrageous things, that he was (1) a former Army Ranger, (2) a former Navy Seal, (3) a former Marine, (4) former Secret Service tasked with protecting Ronald Reagan, (5) Grandson of a 4 star general, (6) Leg press 800 lbs, (7) broken 3 aluminum "forks" on bikes (the part connecting your front wheel to the frame). This really is only a tip of the iceberg of the things he claimed. After several months, I found out that "pathological lying" is an actual psychological condition. The moment I found out, I was convinced that this coworker suffered from this condition.
I wonder if Aleksey was the same. My coworker was unusually bright, physically strong, and was good soul. I couldn't understand why he would need to inflate himself through lies, given such obvious strengths of his -- until I found out about this psychological condition. Aleksey seems to have been the same way.
That's actually pretty trivial for anybody who lifts weights even semi-seriously. I could leg press 600lbs as as skinny 160lb high-school senior. Now if somebody claimed to be able to squat that much, they'd be making quite a claim, as that's possibly near world-class range depending on their weight. (At one time the world record back-squat was right around 1000lbs, but I'm pretty sure that's been broken)
(7) broken 3 aluminum "forks" on bikes (the part connecting your front wheel to the frame).
That gets another meh from me. Breaking frames and forks isn't that uncommon, at least in the mountain biking world. An XC bike that isn't designed for handling big drops might break if you ride off a 3ft drop, for example (bodyweight would also be a significant factor in this).
The other stuff though, especially taken all together, is, yeah, fairly incredible.
Agreed on both counts, when taken in isolation. It's when all these things converge, that even these independent data points become suspect.
(I myself could back squat 350lbs at my peak so I understand that leg pressing 800 lbs on a machine isn't particularly unfathomable. However, usually you don't find power lifting and road cycling -- which was the subject of the conversation at that time -- in the same person, especially riding enough miles to stress fracture three different aluminum forks [1]. I'd certainly consider switching to steel at that point.)
[1] Although I myself am a powerlifting cyclist :P
45 degree inclined leg sled: 1010# for 10 reps, when my squat was ~250#.
The press gives you a lot of mechanical advantage (1.7x), removes stabilization requirements, and subtracts out bodyweight (part of your total squat lift).
I think I can chime in on this one. While I've never faced the likes of Pete Sampras, I'd say it's not too far-fetched for an advanced amateur player to take a game from a world-class player.
After all, it takes just a few mishits to lose a game (four, to be exact) - and they can have a bad day, a momentary lapse of attention; and, just like that, the game's gone. Especially if the amateur has a decent serve.
Now, to win a match (or even a set) against Pete - that would be a life-time achievement worthy of putting on the resume :)
>I once worked with someone in his 50's who was undoubtedly a highly intelligent with an intense attention to detail -- super productive. However, he was known for claiming, among other outrageous things...
Interesting.
The type of tales told by a prior coworker of mine line up neatly with the ones you heard.
My guy claimed to be a former officer at Department of Homeland Security, former CIA agent, adopted son of a Japanese swordsmith, able to bench press 450lbs, previously owned 14 cars including all manner of exotics, killed a man for sleeping with his ex-wife, killed a man while "on-assignment" in Mexico and earned a double MS at Berkley.
Again, this was just the tip of the iceberg and when he wasn't telling stories he was affable and generally competent at his job.
I wonder if/why folks with these conditions gravitate towards a certain brand of stories?
Somewhat offtopic, but your post reminded me that in Haruki Murakami's novel, Norwegian Wood, there is a minor character who is in her early teens who is a pathological liar and conspires to ruin another character's life.
What an unkind title. Rest in peace Aleksey and thank you for the countless hours of entertainment you gave the internet. Impossible is nothing, sometimes we just need to be reminded.
I totally agree with this. Considering some of the recent threads happening around suicide, people being civil about reviewing open source code etc., I thought mocking someone who recently died was in very poor taste.
The title here originally followed the guidelines and used a slightly abbreviated version of the title on the submitted item. The mods have changed it, possibly because they, too, thought it was unkind.
It is definitely worth watching the video in the OP. He has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about what happened to him and placing it in a framework that has helped him understand it and cope with the aftermath. It seems clinical at times but also healthy (which aren't exclusive of course). It would be sad if it wasn't enough for him in the end.
It makes me wonder if there are counselors specializing in this domain and sociological research into how this kind of stuff happens and how it affects all people involved. These events are quite sad but also a bit fascinating and novel.
Long before the name change reported in the article to Alex Stone, and long before the video resume, there was an earlier name change to Aleksey Vayner from Aleksey Garber.
Before the spike in notoriety from the video resume, there was a much smaller burst of unflattering notoriety for Aleksey in the May 2002 edition of Yale's Rumpus magazine [1] by one Jordan Bass titled “Craaazy Prefrosh Lies, Is Just Weird”.
It starts out like this:
“Maybe, once, you lied about your age, or your weight, or your location the night your unfaithful boyfriend was stabbed to death. Maybe you lied about your criminal record when applying for a job, or your sexual history when donating blood. Little things. Everybody does it, right? What's the harm? Maybe your slight deviations from the truth even give you a little thrill, a mild buzz gained from subverting the truth and risking discovery. You're a badass, right?
Aleksey Garber, who has been accepted to the Yale class of '06, is not impressed. When you're a guy who tells the truth about as often, and with the same reluctance, as the average person goes to the dentist, you've got no regard for those who dabble in tall tales.”
It ends like this:
“What can you say to that, really? This is the man’s life, as he tells it. Is any of it true? Well, what is truth? [...] In the end, all we can really say is that “Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements, and if you look at it that way, then it’s all true. We who have encountered him should feel privileged that Aleksey Garber has deigned to include us in the epic adventure that is his life. I know I certainly do.”
This reminds me strangely of L. Ron Hubbard, who claimed similar superhuman achievements throughout his life that he couldn't live up to. Hubbard desperately wanted to be seen as awesome, and that alone may have contributed the larger part of the motivation for the founding of Dianetics and Scientology.
My current guess is that Vayner killed himself but not in a Swartz-like way: he simply OD'd on recreational drugs (something a lot of egoists, including Hubbard to say nothing of HN's friend John McAfee, make a hobby of).
Yeah, the article half tries to paint a story which doesn't really make sense without a cause of death.
Also, the cryptic comment is clearly in Russian. That, or some unlikely intersection of Russian and Ukrainian. More likely, they figured the guy was Ukrainian, so the comment must also be in Ukrainian.
It's pretty sad, but not because I knew him in any capacity, or actually have heard of him until now.
It's sad because he clearly had a psychiatric issue and only if people were more educated on this matter, they could've reached out to him and offered him help to get his problem under control, instead of just laughing at him.
To an uninformed, uneducated person, it's likely that this is all he was: a pathetic, over the top compulsive liar.
I presume he died because he killed himself, which is something someone would do after at least temporarily snapping out of the psychosis that made them do all of those things and realizing it wasn't something they would ever be able to take back or sweep under the rug, thanks to the 'wonders' of the internet.
I feel like Aleksey Vayner got hit by a confluence of factors.
Most of us do stupid things in our early 20s to establish ourselves. The problem for him is that he applied to jobs in investment banking. In 2006, IBD analyst programs were the destination career for 25th-percentile graduates of elite colleges. So there was this huge crowd of douchebags that wanted to be bankers and were falling over themselves to get in the door.
So when Aleksey Vayner's video resume was leaked, he was immediately typecast as a douchebag and ridiculed. People no longer saw him as a person, but just as some pathetic, arrogant pre-banker. In retrospect, it's evident that he didn't deserve that.
I have the sense that being ridiculed on the Internet is becoming "just a thing" that almost everyone goes through on the way to accomplishment. It's like being heckled for stand-up comedians. The first time it happens, it's extremely unsettling. Then you figure out a way to deal with it-- there are the Jimmy Carr, George Carlin, Louis CK, and Steve Hofstetter approaches-- but it takes some time to get good at that.
The communities and networks we have built online have proven to be fantastically capable to creating and organising for good, whether it be raising funds for disaster relief or catapulting some deserving person to stardom, but we've all too often decided to ignore our power to tear down and destroy with frightening speed. Aleksey Vayner's video may have been silly and weird but it did not merit the public humiliation he received.
It would be too much to expect that large scale ridicule of an individual like this will never happen again, human nature is what it is and cruelty and anonymity go hand in hand. But as individuals we can at least prevent ourselves from being a part of it by pausing before we forward, retweet or share the next picture, video or meme and considering whether the person being laughed at deserves to be destroyed for our amusement.