Democracy’s Digital Panopticon

What the very public humiliation of Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot tells us about ourselves

The front page of the New York Post on Friday, July 18.

Like millions of people across the country, and some untold number around the world, I laughed when I saw the video of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and the company’s chief “people officer” (aka, its head of Human Resources) Kristin Cabot get caught embracing on camera at a Coldplay concert last week. But of course it wasn’t the embrace that caused the video to go viral. It was the fact that in the clip the couple quickly realize their images are being projected onto jumbotron screens around the stadium and scramble in a panic to disappear. Byron ducked and vanished to the bottom right of the frame, while Cabot simply turned her back and waited it out until the camera moved on.

Everyone—even Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin, who said as much from the stage—instantly understood an extramarital affair had been exposed. Though just how public the exposure really was wouldn’t be revealed until the next day.

I wasn’t at the concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts last Wednesday evening. Yet I first saw the video the moment I woke up and checked my phone early Thursday morning. As I said, I laughed. I may have mumbled, smiling, “Oh my god, that’s amazing” before I showed the video—now posted on TikTok and being shared by countless accounts on Twitter/X—to my wife and daughter. Something similar must have happened in households across the country, because by later that afternoon, the video was everywhere, reposted with jokes and snarky comments, turned into amusing viral memes, repurposed as online advertisements.

It felt like the whole nation, or a large chunk of it, was engaging in a collective act of schadenfreude—taking delight in the suffering of strangers. That the suffering was the result of a man and woman betraying their spouses and getting caught only made it more delightful, because the humiliation visited on both parties seemed like it was well deserved. They shouldn’t have cheated; maybe this’ll teach ’em a lesson.

This isn’t a post about how, come to think of it, we should feel bad for the couple. Though I’ll admit that I do. Byron has resigned as CEO. Cabot is on administrative leave pending an investigation. Both of their families have been terribly hurt and humiliated. There’s no telling if either marriage will survive. That’s a lot of human damage. But I’m far more interested, and alarmed, about another dimension of the event—namely that we now live in a world in which events like this are possible and bound to become more commonplace.

We understandably spend a lot of time looking for signs of incipient authoritarianism in the Trump administration’s power grabs, corruption, and malicious treatment of immigrants. But these political acts are taking place within a broader cultural context—one in which ubiquitous cameras and social media networks have facilitated the creation of a digital panopticon in which everyone in public is constantly surveilled and runs the risk of spontaneous collective punishment imposed by … all of us.