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WE WISH THESE PEOPLE WERE FAKE SOMETIMES

A Person Who *Thought* About Bringing Back Public Lynchings, And More Of This Week's Main Character

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A Person Who *Thought* About Bringing Back Public Lynchings, And More Of This Week's Main Character
This week's characters include a person who questioned out loud if SF should publicly hang drug dealers, a man's nonsensical take about women aging gracefully, a techie who wants to robotize your family and a bigoted politician.
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Every day somebody says or does something that earns them the scorn of the internet. Here at Digg, as part of our mission to curate what the internet is talking about right now, we rounded up the main characters on Twitter from this past week and held them accountable for their actions.



This week’s characters include a person who thinks San Francisco should resort to public hangings for criminals, a politician who does not value human life equally, a techie who wants to extend human life indefinitely and an unwanted opinion from a man on the internet.


Saturday

Pratik Desai

The character: Pratik Desai, computer scientist, PhD, big fan never-ending love

The plot: Desai, a techie by trade, suggested that we start regularly recording the people we love, like our parents, because he was certain that AI would help them move on from their physical body (with your recordings fed in as its data of course) and synthesize a version of themselves to be with you forever. "This should be even possible by end of the year," he added.

Tech Twitter is a funny place. They built the goddamn website, but are probably its worst users. Both in terms of overall gimmick and quality of content. In essence this tweet makes sense. They used AI to recreate Bourdain's voice, holograms perform at festivals and what not, which makes me wonder what the point of the tweet was. Tell us something new bro.


The repercussion: Tepid takes invite tepid dunks.


Adwait Patil





Monday

Webster Barnaby

The character: Florida Republican Rep. Webster Barnaby, horrible monster, not a reader of comic books

The plot: The explanation given from Alejandra Caraballo (a writer for Slate and Wired who covers gender and law) in this tweet about Rep. Webster Barnaby will give the context needed before watching the video. In it, Barnaby uses an "X-men" analogy to deride, target and harass trans people.


The repercussion: If the Twitter hack didn't tip you off to people's (very reasonable) reaction to this man's hateful words, then the retweets and quote tweets should suffice. Trans rights are human rights, trans people are people, and anyone who wants to call them "imps," "demons" and other derogatory, hateful bullsh—t should never be heard from ever again, nor hold a position of power in any government.

And don’t get me started on his interpretation of the "X-Men." Unreal, how he is just the bad guy politician Senator Kelly from the comics. And his name, Webster Barnaby, sounds so old man already! What a stereotype, this evil clown of a man.


Jared Russo





Sunday

@ShadayaKnight

The character: @ShadayaKnight, blogger, guy with irrelevant opinions

The plot: There's nothing particularly unique about this main character — lots of men have an issue with women owning, enjoying and sharing their bodies the way they want to — but the backlash the below tweet received is too good not to include.


The repercussion: Basically people told the guy to grow up, mind his own business and stop commenting on what Halle Berry (and any other woman, for that matter) does.


Darcy Jimenenz



Sunday

Michelle Tandler

The character: Michelle Tandler, big fan of questions, thinks about public lynchings

The plot: Tandler is a recurring dilettante at this point, and you're likely to see her avatar around anything remotely related to San Francisco. Tandler is a vocal critic of SF's homeless situation, and has often chimed in on how to radically make the city better. Her latest thought experiment? "What would happen if a few meth dealers were publicly hung?" she casually asked in a Tweet thread. While it took the entire day to update the thread and say that the idea came from a book ("The Barbary Coast") she did say that she was "not advocating for public hangings."


The repercussion: San Francisco's culture wars (the NIMBYs vs YIMBYs, police defunders vs funders and so on) have always been on the fringes of national discourse, quite frankly because the city isn't all that important, but now that the SV boys have a free reign on Twitter, this timeline is going to overwhelm us all. Non-stop.


Adwait Patil



———

Read the previous edition of our One Main Character column, which included some guys — one who loves Bill Gates's style and another who thinks big headphones are a nuisance — alongside a terrible dad and a sports dude who has no idea how sports and taunting work.


Did we miss a main character from this week? Please send tips to [email protected].

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