Editorial: At a Coldplay concert, a kiss cam catches a cuddle and ruins lives

Chicago Tribune

2 hours ago

If only the couple caught canoodling Wednesday night on the Jumbotron at the Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, had simply done what everyone else does in those moments at the arena or the ballpark: Thrown their hands in the air, cheered, hooped and hollered.
Then they likely would have escaped attention afterward, and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin would not have said from the stage, 'Oh, look at these two! Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.'
Hungry people would not then have uploaded the image of the couple to TikTok, Twitter and Instagram, and all the other unfettered, unedited sites that traffic in human misery. Internet sleuths with the aid of artificial intelligence and LinkedIn would not have figured out the identity of the couple and quickly discovered that it was (married) Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot, the head of that tech company's human resources department.
Byron would not have had to write a letter of apology to his colleagues and family, saying, 'You deserve better from me as a partner, a father, and a leader.' Page Six would not have felt the need to investigate Byron's work history and Byron's wife, whose professional life and number of children is now a subject of interest to the Hindustan Times, for God's sake, would not have had to remove the surname Byron from her Facebook page because she was being hounded and doxed.
But they did not do that. They did the opposite. Cabot, clearly mortified, turned and hid her face, and Andy Byron sunk out of the frame like the guilty party in a lineup of potential perps.
And how did most people react to this horrific, humiliating, unanticipated, life-changing sequence of events for at least three people, not to mention their colleagues and their families?
Simple schadenfreude.
In essence: Serves them right for going together to that Coldplay concert and cuddling.
When did America get this cruel?
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.
We're not here to endorse apparent affairs, if that is even what this was, between CEOs and their subordinate heads of HR, managers whose portfolio typically includes offering a channel and recourse for people who face workplace romantic approaches. We don't doubt for a second that somewhere in the tiny print of the digital agreement when Byron and Cabot bought their tickets that they gave up their right to privacy and agreed to the broadcasting of their images in the stadium, and we dutifully note the irony that a couple of Coldplay lovebirds working for a company that 'empowers data teams to bring mission-critical software, analytics, & AI to life' aren't in the best position to lament being turned into a viral sensation. With the help of bots, to boot. (That Hindustan Times story sure looked suspiciously like AI to us.)
Our point is that everyone mentioned above is a private citizen (or used to be) and that none of the people casting public scorn actually know even remotely enough about their personal relationships to be in a position to pass judgment. This couple didn't ask to be featured on the big screen and no doubt thought there would be anonymity in the crowd at a rock concert. Reasonably so.
Back in the day, most concertgoers would not just have been allergic to sleuthing so as to expose an extramarital affair, but would have been thoroughly appalled even at the notion that anyone should try. Since the 1960s, rock shows have positioned themselves as places to have fun and maybe even put your arm around the wrong person, with their consent. Society has seen them as safety valves. If you can't let yourself go a bit at, say, Lollapalooza or Coachella, American life sure would be a lot less tolerable for most of us.
Apparently, that's all in the past. The surveillance state hasn't just come to stand guard over all of our leisure activities, it now is aided and abetted by the publishing and research skills of laptop trolls and voyeurs who we think could do to be more respectful of the old truism, 'there but for the grace of God go I.'
Martin seemed to regret his comment after it was too late. He should have kept his mouth shut in the first place.
We've never been big fans of stadium cams, an easy way for sports teams and computers to generate exploitable content from their paying customers without compensating them. Some wave and enjoy the fleeting attention. But many of us don't like being thrown up on the screen without a far more explicit mode of consent than the blanket permissions we all sign away just to watch a ballgame and live our lives.
Some things are none of our business for good reason. Alas, most people don't seem to learn that until their personal business becomes the raw material for a social media company's profits.