Anyone who knows Gary knows he’s a (relatively) gentle human being. I can’t imagine him hurting a fly.
His tweets seem totally out of character compared to the Gary Tan I personally knew. Maybe he has changed?
I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Post Elon acquisition, many influential tech figures have discovered that being a provocateur on Twitter/X is more consistently successful at building an audience than genuine insight.
Vile and disgusting? Yes. Shocking? Absolutely not. Sorry that your buddy lacks empathy.
This is the kind of shitpost most people would be able to get away with, but Tan is now too important -- and will have to curate his communications more. Especially if he's going to take such a strong position against incumbent politicians cautious of their own images.
It also feels like a smart political play by his targets to discredit him. They were probably waiting for him to slip up and say something like this.
Anyways, his position is a sympathetic one - the city is not well managed. I say this as someone who frequently disagrees with Tan.
The only kind of person who’d ever go that far is someone with a very fragile ego
The fact it’s a Tupac lyric is not like common knowledge. I doubt a random poll of Twitter users would show most people would know the reference immediately.
It’s a bit rich
If anything this is healthy.
It’s an election year. People will use the tweet as they see fit. Voters will ultimately decide whether it matters or not concerning candidates who have received money from Tan. But I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about it.
A lot of people say they never thought their neighbor could hurt someone, after the fact.
This is a touch paranoid.
it was misinterpreted, he thought people would get a reference that they clearly did not
As a general matter, people should spend more time saying what they mean instead of engaging in meta-discourse of quoting cool references to each other for vibes. It's an unhealthy way to communicate; online discourse is totally irony-poisoned and (imho) this is partly why there's such a breakdown of social trust.
And really, don't you think throwing out lines like 'die slow motherfuckers' in public for cool points is a little...juvenile?
How is he important? Would a person on the street know who he is?
I guess this goes with the idea that he can wish death on people and be an asshole but that’s ok, as long as it’s hidden.
Assuming he is so critical or important should the public then know better what his thoughts or attitudes are?
“Gosh, wish someone handed him a twitter account earlier so we knew before signing a contract or something…”
On the other hand one can take a more compassionate view and say maybe he had a mental breakdown or some trauma. Not knowing or caring about his importance, I’d default to that, as I would most strangers in that situation.
Eh? Trump was never there post Elon acquisition. I don’t think that timing makes sense. The tone of Twitter has been like this for years if not the beginning.
"State subjective perspective as objective fact. Cast shame upon the OP for not pre-aligning with said belief. Put the responsibility on the OP to prove that they are not deserving of shame."
I grew up in an environment where this kind communication was sort of the default, hence why I was curious and wanted to drill down a bit and give it some thought. Of course, many people agree that Twitter is more unhealthy than healthy. But that's not entirely the point here, I think.
In literally the next sentence:
> the level of avoidable human misery caused by the dysfunction of politics [...] sickening [...] utterly enraged [...] there's a piece of your soul missing
So you'll deploy extreme emotional hyperbole, but not "violent rhetoric"? Seems like those are two rather nearby points on the same spectrum, no? Tan just slipped a bit off the edge. If you're going to deny someone's soul, it's not that big a leap to wish them dead.
It's human nature. People are social creatures and they love to join some fight as long as they have their own comrades with them.
My wife spent years on Twitter embroiled in a very long running and bitter political / rights issue. She was always thoughtful, insightful etc. She'd spend 10 minutes rewording a single tweet to make sure it got the real point across in a way that wasn't inflammatory, and that had a good chance of being persuasive. With 5k followers, I think her most popular tweets might get a few hundred likes. The one time she got drunk and angry, she got thousands of supportive reactions, and her followers increased by a large % overnight. And that scared her. She saw the way "the crowd" was pushing her. Rewarding her for the smell of blood in the water.
Audience capture is real. Chronically online people with polarised followers will play to their crowd. Inch by inch, day by day, as social creatures, we automatically and subliminally seek approval from our social group. I've seen this type of dynamic push people into the extremes.
My wife got out. First she asked me to block twitter on all of her devices. A month of cold turkey later, she quit for good ,and she's far happier for it.
Having not used twitter, is this easy one-click thing that takes no time nor thought, or is he having to switch screens and spend time on doing this?
(Technically I became a twit yesterday because nitter stopped working and there is just one person's posts that I like to check up on, so I ended up giving in and logging in... :( But I still don't know the UI well enough to answer my own question :) )
I'm vaguely aware of him, and his name and how he died are fairly well known, but I couldn't name a single track if my life dependent on it.
But even with artists "everyone" listens to, most people's listening is limited enough that assuming people know their lyrics would be stupid.
I know that was the case for me. I spent hundreds of hours of reading blog posts by intelligent, optimistic, philosophically transgressive at times but not actually rude or crass folks, all trying to grapple with how to live best in this world. I think this reshaped me to be a much better person in a whole bunch of ways. Very happy for it.
I'm a little surprised though that a tech person of Asian ethnicity would be interested in boxing, good for him for going against all the ingrained stereotypes.
I thought the idea that timeline sorting order on social media sites is deterministic or scrutable to the viewer is long dead by now - it's not been the case for at least a good decade now!
Everybody has a bad day though so I did gave him the benefit of the doubt, but I'm really not surprised by this tweet "scandal" at all and the way he's dealing with it.
Natural responses to this would be "I don't like drama" and I would say the same, unfortunately this isn't the case for most of humans.
The players and ordering has changed only.
OR
like you said, maybe he is on some behavioral or cognitive decline. Another Lee Holloway situation [1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...
I always judged people based on how they act when drunk. Always stick with people who are happy drunk never angry/violent drunk
All of those things tend to reveal truths about ourselves that we normally don't expose.
Or they can just agree with Gary that correlation is never causation.
I don't think so, no. Those two things are miles apart.
Should Gary Tan quit over this? Of course not. I think the fact that people put others on a pedestal is a mistake in the first place.
It's just that Tan forgot the rules in the heat of the moment. And so would the grandparent poster after a few drinks, I suspect.
To wit: cool the fuck down, everyone. Shitposting on the internet is a slippery slope to an accidental death threat.
They wouldn’t rant like that in real life on a bus with a captive audience.