What does it mean to be a private individual in public? Are we all just characters waiting to go viral?
These questions have resurfaced following the instantly infamous Jumbotron incident that occurred during a Coldplay concert last week. Astronomer CEO Andy Byron, who’s married, and the company’s head of human resources, Kristin Cabot, were caught cuddling before trying (and failing) to evade the camera. Chris Martin quipped, apparently accurately, that they acted like they were having an affair.
The public is mostly having fun with the scandal, reenacting the incident on social media, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and at multiple sporting events; it’s been used in a relatively lighthearted way for film promotion and as a gag at other concerts.
Some, though, have taken a more hands-on approach to the drama. Once the concert footage went viral, users flooded the comments of Byron and Cabot’s LinkedIn pages before they were taken down. Another Coldplay concertgoer sent TMZ additional footage of the couple canoodling. Users identified Byron’s wife, flooding her social media, as well as a third Astronomer executive, who was spotted on the Jumbotron laughing at the ordeal.
Understandably, a married CEO getting caught and subsequently resigning for having inappropriate relations with a subordinate hasn’t warranted much sympathy. The ordeal is amusing to the extent that the players are largely unrelatable and seemingly thoughtless. Still, the fallout has been disconcerting to some. While the couple was exposed in a seemingly organic and accidental way, the speed at which the story escalated, with the help of online sleuths and even brands weighing in, demonstrated how easily personal matters can become public spectacles.
It raises some obvious concerns about our relationship to privacy in a digital culture where the surveillance of strangers has been normalized and personal information is increasingly accessible. What happens to privacy when everything is available? What happens when exposing others is more and more commonly dressed up as fun?
Since the early days of social media, average people have been at risk of becoming public, widely discussed figures overnight. Still, the advent of TikTok has made this a much more common occurrence — frequently without the permission of the people who go viral. The idea that you could be watched at any time but can never know when has gone from a philosophical prison design — Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the panopticon— to a state of reality. In a 2023 BuzzFeed News story, reporter Clarissa-Jan Lim described this mostly TikTok-driven phenomenon as “panopticontent,” where “everything is content for the creating, and everyone is a nonplayer character in [users’] world[s].”
This happens in quite a few ways on the app. Users frequently record their interactions with strangers. They post people they find attractive or think are behaving poorly. Even when users are filming themselves — like at the gym, for example — they inevitably expose people lurking or speaking in the background. A particularly uncouth trend has happened recently where users will snitch on people they’ve overheard trash-talking their friends. Last year, women did the same thing to men they suspected were cheating on their partners. Everyone is at risk of becoming a main character online.
In many cases, filming strangers has been proven to be a correct and necessary course of action. The Black Lives Matter movement was bolstered by citizens recording their negative interactions with police, for awareness-raising and proof in seeking justice. This seemed to inspire a surge in “Karen” videos, exposing people for racist and other discriminatory behavior. However, post-pandemic, the tendency to pull out your phone and press record has descended into something much less urgent and more opportunistic.
We’ve witnessed this before. At the height of tabloid culture in the ’90s and early 2000s, we watched celebrities get hounded by paparazzi and have their personal lives examined with a microscope in magazines. Associate professor Jenna Drenten, who studies digital consumer culture at Loyola University Chicago, coined the term “TikTok tabloid” to describe how this behavior has translated to the app in much more participatory fashion from observers. However, she says that users have created a power imbalance by subjecting regular people to this sort of spotlight.
“In the past, there was an implicit social contract: Celebrities traded privacy for fame, and audiences felt justified in scrutinizing them,” says Drenten. “But that logic doesn’t cleanly apply to regular people caught in viral moments. And yet, the same infrastructure of judgment, spectacle, and moral commentary gets applied to them.”
This behavior isn’t just user-driven. It’s often amplified and commodified by brands, as seen with Neon, Chipotle, and even betting platforms, like Polymarket, following the Coldplay incident. Drenten says that the “blurring of public spectacle, private consequence, and corporate opportunism” is where things get even more “ethically murky.”
“The viral attention economy is no longer limited to individuals or content creators,” she says. “Brands are increasingly acting like culture-jacking spectators, helping to fuel the pile-on.”
A larger problem often occurs after this content circulates and rakes in tons of views. The social mystery at the heart of any human drama routinely incites further engagement and sleuthing, with users becoming participants in the saga. As with the Astronomer CEO and his family, spectators usually end up doxxing the people involved, whether that’s exposing their job positions or their home addresses.
As this behavior gets swept up in more socially-sanctioned reactions (like jokes from regular people and brands), it affirms an increasing loss of etiquette around personal information, one that’s been spearheaded by tech corporations, according to one Cornell University professor. Helen Nissenbaum, author of Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, says tech companies have been influential in shaping our views on privacy based on what’s accessible to us, creating an “all bets are off” approach to spreading information.
“The big tech platforms have gotten away with a really poor conception of privacy,” Nissenbaum says. “It’s allowed them to say things like, ‘If it’s in public, anything goes.’ This is how OpenAI defended itself by saying, ‘We’re scraping stuff on the open web without asking.’”
Apps have normalized collecting and sharing users’ personal information to target advertisers. There are now websites, like Did My Friends Vote, where you can easily but not always accurately access someone’s voting history. These issues around theft and consent are playing out in the development of generative AI. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for using their original content to train its popular AI tool, ChatGPT.
This sense of entitlement trickles down to practically anyone who owns a phone. Nissenbaum says, as a result, we need to adopt a “new theory” and new “social norms” around privacy. One way is to remind people that these extreme levels of surveillance and information-gathering are, in her words, “creepy.” The consequence is a world where people feel less free to be their authentic selves in public, whether that’s dressing how they want or attending a protest.
“When we get to this point where we accept that people can take videos, take photos, post it online for ICE or NSA or whoever to grab those photos, now we’re in a police state,” she says.
For now, the Coldplay Jumbotron incident might warrant some genuine laughs. But if we value not only our privacy but our sense of individuality, our impulse to amplify strangers’ drama could probably use some reflection.
