“When did America get this cruel?”
This lament was printed in last weekend’s Chicago Tribune, in a piece credited to the outlet’s Editorial Board. It could have been prompted by any number of things: Maybe the debilitating cuts to USAID that were a first order of business for the new administration in January and have already resulted in an estimated 300,000 preventable deaths. Or by the splashy, slapdash opening of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Florida immigrant-detention center from which alarming reports have already emerged. Or possibly by the fact that roughly 17 million Americans will lose their health care thanks to the Medicaid cuts that were just one feature of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” passed this month.
Nope. The cruelty referenced in the editorial was that social-media users found it very funny that an allegedly cheating couple had been exposed by the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Mass. — and then found it even funnier when the couple was identified as Andy Byron, the CEO of data-operations tech company Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the company’s “Chief People Officer” (that’s head of HR, for those unfamiliar with cutesy startup jargon).
That social media reacts with morbid humor to the rare moments when oligarchs face actual consequences should definitely not be surprising.
Few of the demonstrably cruel actions carried out at scale since the start of the second Trump administration have yet prompted such intense scolding from the Tribune’s Editorial Board. Not the uninformed, unelected havoc caused by DOGE, not the paramilitary cosplay of masked ICE agents, and not the open white nationalism of Trump 2.0. The internet’s schadenfreude about two people seemingly betraying their vows in public, however? That’s where the Trib draws the line:
“The Coldplay public humiliation is a cautionary tale of atrophied American privacy. It’s also an indictment of the tech-induced loss of human discretion and the warping of common decency by the thirst for an attention-getting and sometimes monetizable post.” The editorial then went on to question whether the canoodling of the CEO and his HR director was even evidence of an affair — a point that might have been germane had Byron and Cabot not reacted to being on the kiss cam exactly like people who are having an affair.
This full-tilt outrage was echoed elsewhere over the weekend: The Washington Post weighed in with a finger-wagging headline (“An awkward Coldplay kiss cam went viral. Cue the morality police”) and a scoop of cloying sympathy (“Byron is out of a job, and no one knows the ongoing impact on his family or Cabot.”) The Free Press, meanwhile, left it all on the field with an op-ed titled “The Coldplay Couple Did Something Bad. The Internet Did Something Worse.” Oh my stars and garters!
Reactions like these stood out to me because online public shaming has been a phenomenon for at least 15 years: chronicled in books, explained in TED Talks and analyzed in academic papers. (Relatedly, I have some very bad news for the Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board about when America “got this cruel.”) Anyone working in media is aware that social-media outrages flare up regularly and viciously — and, it’s true, sometimes unfairly. What was notable about these outlets’ pearl-clutching takes was an attitude of affront and an implicit defense of people familiar to them, in type if not in fact. These weren’t just any rich white people; these were rich white people of their general class and cohort. And their responses took the tone of a royal family unsettled that the rabble dares to approach their castle walls.
The glee that followed the kiss-cam kerfuffle is less about who Byron and Cabot are, but about what they represent.
Maybe they should be. Most Americans, even if they admire billionaires and even if they voted for Donald Trump, don’t want to live in an oligarchy. As more people recognize that the nation’s biggest divide isn’t between right and left but between the one percent and the masses, they aren’t thrilled. There’s a reason that Cybertrucks are relentlessly dunked on, defaced and covered in cheese; there’s a reason that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez arrived in Venice to massive protests of their ostentatious wedding. When people are rooting for the orcas who attack yachts to attack more yachts, it’s a good time to read the room.
That social media reacts with morbid humor to the rare moments when oligarchs face actual consequences should definitely not be surprising. Recall that when Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, was gunned down on a New York City street last December, his LinkedIn page filled with high-fives and laughing emoji while his assassin, Luigi Mangione, became an overnight folk hero. In 2023, when Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate, loaded his janky Titan submersible with paying customers headed toward the ocean floor and was never heard from again, very few people jeered the deaths of his passengers (particularly the one who didn’t want to be on the expedition at all). But just as few mourned the demise of an arrogant billionaire who ignored warnings from at least 38 experts that the Titan was not fit for purpose.
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The Coldplay suspected cheaters are not in this echelon of monsters. But their timing isn’t too great either. The glee that followed the kiss-cam kerfuffle is less about who Byron and Cabot are, but about what they represent: A tech monopoly that hoards wealth, doesn’t pay its fair share of taxes and is speedily replacing humans with AI. Byron and Cabot may be lovely people, but they are also avatars of an industry that has proved over and over how willing it is to be careless with the safety and security of its workers and users. (The hypocrisy of a CEO appearing to step out with his company’s HR director is the cherry on top, a reminder that for those with power, rules are only for other people.)
Schadenfreude shaming like that of the Tribune, the WaPo and the Free Press suggests the same. Byron and Cabot appear to have done what many people do when they’re stupidly in love or lust: They forgot that others could see them. It’s unfortunate that they were caught on a kiss cam and not by, I don’t know, a fellow concertgoer who knows their spouses. But plenty of others have been busted by ambient technology — on closed-circuit security systems, Ring cameras and even Google maps. Likewise, plenty of lives have been disrupted by kiss-cam incidents that were invasive, homophobic and mortifying. If these outlets want to use their platforms to denounce surveillance capitalism, no one is stopping them. Holding social media responsible for two consenting adults suspected of betraying their partners and humiliating their families, though, is transparent toadying.
The Coldplay incident — and truly, congrats to the band on the collateral hype — highlights a long-simmering tension between legacy media and what was once “new” media. Outlets that always controlled the narrative and expected to keep doing so underestimated the power of social media, and X in particular, to amplify the histories, injustices and erasures that, among other things, proved that “objective” media is a myth. Every time that resentment resurfaces, it’s in ways that feel more obvious and more grasping. Was the kiss-cam incident as important or consequential as the rest of the news that broke last weekend? Of course not. But if these outlets are shocked about social media’s enthusiasm for watching a tech mogul be held accountable, maybe they should connect the dots.
