Aleksey Vayner, Whose Tale Made Him the Internet's Laughing Stock, Has Died at 29 | Motherboard

Aleksey Vayner, the Yale graduate who garnered the Internet's mistrust for a video résumé he made called “Impossible is Nothing,” has died at the age of 29.

According to IvyGate, the website that first reported on his fabrications in 2006, a spokesman for the New York Medical Examiner's office said the cause of death was pending investigation. A Facebook posting by a family member indicated that he passed away on January 17 at a hospital in New York.

Vayner, a driven athlete and entrepreneur, had become synonymous with the perils of unintended Internet fame. He had emigrated from Uzbekistan and settled in New York City at a young age with his mother, and after attending Yale, married and had been living in New York City. He had started his own company, dabbled in finance, philanthropy, and internet marketing. Last year, he reportedly changed his name to Alex Stone.

An interview by the author with Vayner, conducted in 2010 at ROFLCon

His fiasco began in 2006 with "Impossible is Nothing," a video he had made as a senior at Yale and then sent to investment banks as part of a job application. Peppered with inspirational quotes, the video may have been the "world's greatest" resume, quipped Ben McGrath, depicting him as a super-human Renaissance Man: he was a tennis and skiing star, an expert ballroom dancer, capable of bench-pressing nearly five hundred pounds and slicing bricks with his fist.

But someone at one of the banks leaked the video online. The Internet laughed hard, and harder. Once it went viral, Vayner became the target of endless barbs, parodies (including one by Michael Cera), and even death threats. When I met him a few years later, he said the backlash had been surprising, humbling, and deeply hurtful. 

“I felt kind of like that Star Wars Kid,” he said, referring to Ghyslain Raza, the Canadian who sought therapy after a video he had made in private fell into the hands of classmates, who turned him into an Internet laughing stock. “I hit rock bottom."

When we spoke in 2010 at ROFLCon, Vayner was friendly and gracious, but guarded. He had come to the meme conference to sit on a panel with Winnebago Man, whose apoplectic videos had also made him the subject of Internet ridicule. Vayner hadn't before discussed his saga in public. As his wife sat to the side in an office at the MIT Media Lab, he described his obsession with weight-lifiting, his more recent passion for martial arts, tennis, and Buddhism. He ruminated on the perils of web culture, and the backlash that would wreck him personally.

“You’re going to be in shock for a while, when you see what people have written,” Blake Boston, aka Scumbag Steve, advised in an open letter last year to another unintentionally famous web celebrity, "Annoying Facebook Girl." “But the most important and self-preserving thing you can do is know that it’s not you. You can’t take this personally. I’ll say that again, you can’t take this personally. Hell if I did… well let’s not go there.”

“The part that will suck though is that there will always be those people that somehow think YOU did this, that you made the meme, and that you could stop it if you wanted to,” writes Boston. “The internet birthed you and they’ll decide when you (the meme) will die.”

With anonymity and distance, the web accommodates fakery in a way that no other social medium ever has (see Manti Te'o). For similar reasons, it's also shown a remarkable capacity for outing fabricators, and for shaming and bullying them too. After Invisiblle Children's "Kony 2012" video raised questions about the group's credibility last year, the video’s creator, Jason Russell, lost his nerve on a San Diego street corner, leading to an altogether different kind of viral video; he ended up seeking psychological help and was later interviewed by Oprah.

That same week, a jury in New Jersey delivered a guilty verdict in the cyberbullying case of university student Tyler Clementi, who killed himself days after his roommate filmed and broadcast a web cam video of Clementi kissing another man. The roommate was found guilty for violating Clementi's privacy, and served 20 days in prison.

The threat of bullying, the old-fashioned kind, has reared its head in the aftermath of the suicide of Aaron Swartz, who was dogeddly pursued by federal prosecutors for his hacktivism. And the impassioned response to his death has demonstrated again the power of digital activism to mobilize against injustice.

Vayner's saga offers an inverse lesson, highlighting the kind of terrible pressures and venom the Internet sometimes carries too. For his video, he became a kind of anti-folk hero, the target of a baser digital impulse, of the snark of blogs and the cruel justice of 4chan, where a new kind of criminal justice system takes aim at "crimes" like fabrication and ego-boosting.

Years after the incident, Vayner was still not comfortable with the attention he garnered, but he took his notoriety in stride. He would occasionally comment on his lasting fame on his Facebook wall, alongside inspirational quotes from authors and mentors. "Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind," he wrote on Sept. 13, 2011, quoting Dr. Seuss.

A comment left by a male friend the day before his death is cryptic. "Do not, anyone, sell this idiot ANY pills!" it reads. The rest, written in Ukranian Russian, reads, Damned egoist, pick up the phone, who's going to take care of mom? [you could] sell your source code and fuck off to costa rica. [even] paypal would pay you 2-3 hundred thousand. pick up the phone, bastard." It may have been friendly banter, but it's not clear (a request to the friend for comment has not yet been returned.) At 11.16 pm that night, Vayner shot back, writing in phonetic Cyrillic: "Volodia, idi k cherty": Volodia, go to hell.

Vayner's last postings, dated January 16 and 17, were a photograph of Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, with the note "how i miss thee," and a quotation by Helen Keller:

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men experience it as a whole. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”