Thought this was an interesting take on this. I think I mostly agree.
The Coldplay Couple Did Something Bad. The Internet Did Something Worse.
The Coldplay Couple Did Something Bad. The Internet Did Something Worse.
The original function of public shaming was to keep the bonds of community strong. Now, it’s a spectator sport.
By Kat Rosenfield
As a novelist, I would struggle to imagine a more surreal or absurd scene than last week’s viral incident at a Coldplay concert—to the point where if I wrote it into one of my books, my editor would likely send it back with a note politely asking me to please tone it down.
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The biggest scandal on the internet right now started with the video, which you’ve surely seen: a jumbotron lights up with the image of a middle-aged couple, obviously and blissfully in love, swaying in each other’s arms on a beautiful summer night. “Oh, look at these two,” says Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin—and all hell breaks loose. Their smiles are replaced by looks of sheer panic. She spins away, flinging her hands over her very red face. He dives out of frame, frantically waving his arms like he’s trying to push the camera away with the power of telekinesis.
“Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” Martin quips.
The internet understood the assignment. Seemingly within minutes, online sleuths had identified the pair. He was the CEO of a software start-up called Astronomer; she was his head of HR. And yes, they were both married to other people, whose identities the online masses also took it upon themselves to sniff out and publicize.
It was a full-bore public shaming, imbued with an unhinged and vicious glee that we hadn’t experienced since, well, the last time millions of strangers rallied to the cause of destroying someone’s life—but magnified by the fact that everything and everyone involved was a standard menu item at the Things You Love to Hate buffet. Adultery. CEOs. HR representatives. Rich people with linen shirts and expensive highlights. Coldplay, for that matter.
The resulting cancellation wasn’t just energetic; it was inspired. Someone wrote a fake statement from the CEO, a too-good-to-verify non-apology that went instantly viral. At the same time, mainstream outlets reported (accurately) that the CEO had resigned. Meanwhile, the incident triggered a tidal wave of content that is still rolling in as we speak. The image of the pair at the moment of discovery, their smiles still in place but their eyes wide with panic, was instantly remixed into joke memes ranging from the political to the absurd; the Phillies staged a kiss cam gag featuring their “Phanatic” mascot, a green muppet-like creature of indeterminate species, taking a nosedive to avoid being caught on camera with another muppet. On Etsy, one can now buy a T-shirt with the slogan “I Took My Sidepiece To The Coldplay Concert And It Ruined My Life.” A hundred thousand posts bloomed; a thousand commentators wrote thinkpieces about the ramifications of it all.
When we take joy in the distress and ruination of other people, we make monsters of ourselves.
Including this one. Because true, it’s hard not to feel that frisson of schadenfreude at seeing a couple of cheaters get theirs—especially when one is an unsympathetic millionaire and the other is very specifically in the business of scolding people that they should not, under any circumstances, and especially not these circumstances, be having sexual dalliances with their coworkers. Oh, the irony! And god, the satisfaction! And as defenders were swift to point out: This is just what people do to each other! Sure, the jumbotron is a novel twist, but public shaming has been a staple of human society since the dawn of time, a necessary correction to the social transgressors in our midst. As the writer Matt Ruff asked on X, “how much of this is genuinely new and how much just a writ-large version of small town social dynamics?”
And yet, the ability to take small-town social dynamics and write them large—so large that anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world, can log on and get their licks in at whomever has been declared the target of the day—that, right there, is what’s new. The original function of public shaming was to hold people accountable for doing things that tore at the fabric of social trust, to keep the bonds of community strong by punishing those who would weaken them. The worst pain of shaming wasn’t in being called names, or put naked in the stocks and pelted with dung; it was having to look into the faces of the people you’d hurt, people who sat beside you in church, who ate meals at your table, whose children played together with yours.
It’s not just that it’s impossible to replicate that dynamic on a global scale, online, where the people shaming you are a faceless, nameless, avatar-masked mob. It’s that the dynamic morphs into something twisted and poisonous when you free it from the bonds and bounds of community. Traditional shamings would inevitably be restrained by the knowledge that whatever you did to this person, you would have to live with the continued reminder of having done it; when it was all over, you and the transgressor would once again have to work, pray, and live together side by side. Online shamings lack this limiting principle; instead, they have no limiting principle at all, and their participants are motivated not by disappointment or duty but by sheer ravening bloodlust.
Forget about how this impacts people like the CEO and his mistress, garden-variety sinners who, through a combination of terrible luck and atrocious judgment, will be famous, and hated, for the rest of their lives. You don’t have to feel sorry for them (although I admit, I kind of do; there are literal mass murderers who enjoy more anonymity and less opprobrium than these two). If there’s a truly compelling reason not to normalize shaming as a global, always-on public spectator sport, it’s not that it degrades the humanity of the shamed; it’s not even the trite “who among us has not canoodled at a Coldplay concert with his sidepiece” justification. It’s simply this: When we take joy in the distress and ruination of other people, we make monsters of ourselves.
