It doesn’t take a surreptitious phone camera to get caught in a viral video. Smartphones have cast a decentralized web of surveillance over the world, with bystanders ready to document and broadcast any incident containing a hint of drama. But what Andy Byron, the former C.E.O. of the data-tracking software company Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the head of human resources at the same company, had to fear was a good old-fashioned jumbotron. At a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts last week, the two were caught snuggling on the stadium’s screen. As soon as the couple realized that their image was onscreen, they broke apart. Byron, who is married, dodged off camera. Cabot, who is not his wife, spuns to face away and hid her face in her hands. But, of course, it was already too late for them to stop the scene from spreading, especially after Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, observed from the stage, “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy.” The clip instantly took off on social media (one TikTok post capturing it has more than ten million likes) and fuelled plenty of traditional media headlines, too. Byron and Cabot weren’t necessarily living remarkable lives, but they happened to get caught in the magnifying glass of the internet at an inopportune moment.
If there’s a lesson from so-called Coldplaygate, it’s the extent to which, during the past decade or so of digital culture, going viral has gone from being an aspirational goal to a form of punishment. A climate of intensified online scrutiny stretches back, in my mind, to the case of Justine Sacco, a public-relations representative who gained instant infamy for a racist tweet, in 2013, while she was logged offline during a flight. By the next day, she’d been fired from her job at IAC. The following year came another, subtler cautionary tale, when a teen named Alex Lee, a.k.a. “Alex from Target,” attained internet notoriety simply for being the epitome of the American sixteen-year-old boy. He eventually became disaffected by his stardom and left a burgeoning influencer career to take a job at UPS. (“It’s so much better than doing social media,” he told People last year.)
The rise of video-driven social media has made the targets of public attention more visible, in a literal sense: we are more likely to see faces and hear voices, and to connect an online persona with a real-life counterpart. Perhaps beginning with the popularity of the short-form-video app Vine, in the twenty-tens, the mundane or absurdist details of the physical world became fodder in real time for the best online content. TikTok, popularized in the U.S. during the pandemic, entrenched short video clips as the universal language of the internet. In 2022, a graphic designer working at West Elm and a serial dater in New York City named Caleb gained unflattering fame as West Elm Caleb when women he’d dated found one another on TikTok; they shared photos of him and compared notes on his ghosting tactics and habit of sending unrequested nudes. Caleb represented something of a terminal point in the merging of “real” life and digital content. Casual doxing—revealing someone’s IRL identity—is now a default, because there’s no clear boundary between our lives online and off. It’s unclear how Byron’s and Cabot’s identities were discovered, but Coldplaygate did not necessarily require automated surveillance or facial-recognition software. Online amateur detectives can readily identify a tech C.E.O., a role that, like so many these days, comes with its own requisite social-media presence.
Doxing is a form of collective entertainment. It holds its victims liable for their actions, making them pay through enforced virality. The internet is one giant glasshouse and everyone is throwing stones, waiting for a crowd to latch on to a target and follow suit. Life is content, and content is defined by its ability to compel attention. There is little room for the moral complexity of offline existence when everything operates by the logic of the feed. At the time of West Elm Caleb, the writer and critic of digital life Rayne Fisher-Quann observed that the circular firing squad of social media “compulsively flattens real people into interactive reality shows.” Even so, it’s been surprising to see just how eagerly the internet has taken up one unknown executive’s infidelity as entertainment, perhaps because of the story’s welcome frivolity relative to the hyper-partisan politics and wartime violence happening elsewhere in our timelines. The couple has been relentlessly memed, referenced by the New York City Sanitation Department’s X account, riffed on by the band Oasis during its reunion tour, and parodied at a game by the mascot of the Philadelphia Phillies. A woman claiming to be Byron’s daughter made a TikTok account and posted a video of herself next to a fire pit with the caption “reconnecting with life after your dads affair makes national news.” The account then went private—Byron does not actually have a daughter—but not before gaining nearly two hundred thousand followers.
When faced with such an onslaught, a subject has two options: exploit the virality or hide out until it passes. Still, taking the latter approach doesn’t mean dodging real-world consequences. After Coldplaygate, Byron quickly deactivated his LinkedIn, but by Friday he’d resigned from his job. Cabot has been put on leave. On Monday, Pete DeJoy, the company’s replacement C.E.O., posted somewhat wryly about the incident on his own LinkedIn: “Astronomer is now a household name.” (It surely is, but how many of its new followers are in need of an “orchestration-first DataOps platform built on Apache Airflow”?)
Byron and Cabot reminded me of another internet moment, one from 2015, when viral content was less often driven by schadenfreude. One day in February, two llamas escaped from a temporary gig at an Arizona retirement home and then meandered the environs of Sun City. The llamas were chased by police and news helicopters, with the video live-streamed to a rapt online audience monitoring for updates. The llamas were eventually caught, but we were momentarily united in our voyeurism of their escapades. Byron and Cabot are the llamas, too, trapped in the glare of online attention that will pursue them rabidly for a matter of weeks until boredom inevitably sets in. Then again, we are all those llamas any time we find ourselves in a vulnerable moment in public, knowing that it is as likely to be documented as not. That same day as the llamas got out, BuzzFeed, then at the height of its wholesome viral powers, promulgated a photo of an ambiguously colored dress, and the internet went wild, because no one could decide whether the dress was blue and black or white and gold. That was the whole story. Now, when the grist for virality tends to be interpersonal drama with high human stakes, it’s no wonder we’re less enthusiastic about posting our lives. ♦
