I wish I didn’t know who Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot are. As you no doubt know by now, the Astronomer CEO and his firm’s HR chief were caught on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. He tried to sneak away, while she covered her face, but it was too late. Someone posted the footage online. A pile-up ensued. And their lives were turned upside down.
As I say, I wish I didn’t know who they are. And that’s because any of us might, for any particular reason, become Andy Byron or Kristin Cabot: flawed people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anybody can make a bad-but-irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-us mistake on camera and face personal destruction. What such episodes reveal is a pathology in the social body, and the desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.
The “Coldplay-concert-couple” story is fundamentally irrelevant and effectively contentless, telling us nothing about the world, about ourselves; it isn’t particularly funny or tragic or profound. There is no pathos, no insight. True, the current culture on X and other social-media apps is perhaps less immediately destructive than it was during peak woke (circa 2017 to 2021). Still, the viral potential of these kinds of stories is a warning sign that our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control. An obsession with other people’s private lives is a sickness.
Leaking, doxing, spying on private citizens on Reddit, on private Facebook groups, on X, on Instagram, on TikTok — regardless of the moral quality of the subjects under consideration — hurts everyone. Because it makes everyone subject to this omnipresent, collectivized panopticon, and the more these images circulate, the more normal it becomes.
Group chats, dating apps, emails — or in Byron’s and Cabot’s case, simply being in public with no intention to be filmed — should not be subject to public judgement. This species of story is a distraction from serious issues, and runs cover for the genuinely powerful individuals and entities who materially impact our lives.
Clearly, there is something in human nature that is primed to gossip, shame, and ridicule (thoughtlessly, automatically). But new technology allows us to give vent to these sordid tendencies in historically unprecedented ways. We should take seriously the moral warping effect that such stories, and our obsession with them, have on our souls.
The global village is like any village — scolding, punitive, consumed by hearsay, with nothing better to do. While turning someone into a meme might seem fun, it’s severely undignified, and discards the customs and safeguards of a liberal society in order to participate in a sadistic pile-on. So while the particular example at hand might not seem worth this much deliberation, that is my point.
There might be a story here about the hypocrisy of a CEO and an HR officer having an in-house affair that might get lesser-ranking employees fired. But what I see surfacing in the discursive arena is not intelligent critique of HR departments and their culture, but a glee at the immiseration of a random person.
If these trends continue — if algorithms continue to work the way they do, and I can’t imagine they won’t — then more and more victims will be dragged out of anonymity for mimetic sacrifice. And as a consequence, meaningful taboos about privacy, shame, and respect have disappeared, and everyone’s lives and behaviors have become fodder for comment and ridicule.
We sorely need new taboos — not against adultery or sexual immorality or interpersonal deception, because clearly we have plenty of those already. Rather, we need taboos against aggregating ourselves into idiotic, loathsome mobs, incapable of thinking about what the subjects of our ridicule and these digital stonings might suffer. A wiser perspective would admit that we all, at the wrong moment, are liars, fools, cheaters, charlatans, hypocrites. Let who has not sinned click the “like” or “repost” button.
We all sin, and we might have received grace or mercy under the theocracies of older liberal and Enlightenment arrangements. Algorithmic justice and judgment, however, contains neither the virtues of theocratic society — you could at least avail yourself of religious law, with its exceptions and casuistry — nor of classically liberal society: there is no due process, no appeal mechanism. There’s no mediating structure in the global village. It is instinctive, animalistic, rash, cruel.
The force and direction of this collective online judgment should be turned against itself: We should punish not those caught in the panopticon, but the anonymous posters, Redditors, and the like; all who take joy in random acts of scorn. If we want to live in a tolerant, sane society, we should turn off our cameras, step away from mimetic digital village stonings, and reflect on our own haphazard and imperfect lives and selves.
This “should” will not come from above: there is no sign that tech companies will change their products to disincentivize this kind of behavior. Self-regulation, at scale, is, as of now, the only answer. The way we talk, write, act, and respond matters. Culture matters insofar as culture is a layer of software that at least partially governs how we use our phones. We sorely lack codes of conduct surrounding technology and our ability to record, dox, and harass each other.
If our natural response to constant mutual surveillance is not disgust, then it should be; phones come with cameras, but cameras linked to the global cortex are weapons. Using them to film strangers should not be normalized — telling people to put their phones away should. Piling on viral posts about random people who had no intention of going viral should not be normal, either. If Big Tech won’t take them down, then self-restraint is called for. Institutions can help uphold and reinforce these new norms by prohibiting phone usage in as many public spaces as possible.
There are secondary benefits, too: public spaces are also just better without everyone being on their phones; 50,000 people all filming the same concert, for instance, aside from having unintended consequences, is stupid and unaesthetic. Each of us doesn’t need to take our own badly framed photos of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” when we visit Vienna. There are professional photos and postcards widely available. We could employ the faculty of memory, too.
Codes of conduct are what we might call counter-mimetics; they do have to be injected into social interaction and discourse, artificially at first, before they catch on. That’s what I’m proposing here. We might think something is amusing and worth commenting on or bad and worth scolding, and maybe, in isolation it is. But on the whole, we’re making life intolerable, anxious, and graceless.
It took several centuries for mounted knights to develop the code of conduct known as chivalry to regulate their unparalleled ability to kill or threaten anyone who didn’t have a horse, mail, and sword; let’s hope we can develop codes of conduct around our phones or whatever next-generation AI devices replace phones.
Privacy is a hard-won social good; give it back to others to protect your own.
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