The New Yorker:

A C.E.O.’s affair, caught on jumbotron and spread across social media, demonstrates that mass attention on today’s internet tends to be deeply undesirable.

By Kyle Chayka

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, spun 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.)

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