Coldplay haven’t had a hit single in years. Last week, as the memes were quick to point out, they may have made two.
A couple at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts face the stage in classic concert cuddle, basking in the glow of some earnest stadium pop. Until, that is, they realise they are on the jumbotron. She covers her face; he slides downwards out of frame like the ground has opened to swallow him. “Oh look at these two,” a jovial Chris Martin can be heard to say, “They’re either having an affair or they’re very shy”.
The internet was on hand to clarify. He was Andy Byron, chief executive of tech company Astronomer. She was Kristin Cabot, its head of human resources. They were married, but not to each other. Internet sleuths posted their names to TikTok and pasted screenshots of Byron’s spouse on his LinkedIn page.
Byron was placed on administrative leave and later resigned. Grace Springer, the Coldplay fan who caught the moment on camera, is using her fame to pay off student loans. Astronomy enjoyed new notoriety. Brands piled into the comments, vying to cash in on a viral moment: “If either of their spouses are seeing this, Opendoor can help you move ... and quick ...” posted one removal company.
The state of Massachusetts abolished public disgrace – the stocks, whipping and pillory (public shaming) – in 1805 on the advice of criminologists, who claimed it only satisfied the public appetite for vengeance. Before then, it was a popular punishment and prime entertainment, as vendors swarmed to the scene of any righteous mob. Today, public disgrace is popular once more, and a powerful tool for shaping behaviour.
It’s not the first time the internet has dedicated its hive mind to public vitriol. In 2013, a PR representative, Justine Sacco, made a badly judged tweet before boarding a plane to South Africa. “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get aids. Just kidding. I’m white!”. “It was a joke about a dire situation that does exist in post-apartheid South Africa that we don’t pay attention to,” Sacco told the journalist Jon Ronson. When Sacco’s plane landed in Cape Town 11 hours later, the hashtag “#hasjustinelandedyet?” was trending on Twitter. She was the most hated person on the internet. She lost her job; her South African relatives felt disgraced.
Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig argues that four forces regulate behaviour: law, markets, norms, and architecture. To stop speeding near a school, for example, you can pass a law, impose fines (a market deterrent), rely on norms that speeding is bad, or redesign the road with speed bumps – an architecture that removes choice.
In Code Is Law, Lessig warned that digital life shifts power to architecture: platforms and algorithms hard-code what we can do, often invisibly. That’s true – but incomplete. The internet is also highly normative. Algorithms don’t just determine what appears on your feed or if you land a job interview; they also shape and amplify norms; they stoke moral outrage. Algorithms reward virility, and vitriol spreads faster than nuance. The threat of online shaming or “cancellation” now operates as soft control, supercharged by code.
“Why do you care so much what other people think?” my mother (and Marcus Aurelius) both pondered at various points in history. The answer might be evolutionary. Humans are hypersocial; we’re primed to care what others make of us.
In the past, being cast out wasn’t just sad and lonely – it was terminal. Or worse: “Ignomy is universally acknowledged to be a worse fate than death,” wrote the founding father Benjamin Rush, more than two centuries before the term “cancel culture” entered the lexicon.
Adultery and bad jokes are not crimes, but public shame can make them feel like a capital offence, without the safeguards of due process. Byron and Cabot, caught on a kiss cam, won’t face court, just global humiliation. Careers, families, and reputations can vanish overnight. Their mistake will echo for eternity in countless memes and screengrabs more permanent than any legal record.
Movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter showed the potential power of swarm activism. In these cases, people without a voice challenged power and called for change – to the norms that meant women were supposed to smile through everyday harassment or that people of colour should overlook everything from microaggression to brutal assault. The mob called for grassroots justice in the absence of institutional accountability. Some norms began to, slowly, change and change for the better.
But somewhere along the way, what looked a bit like activism morphed into social censure, where strangers on the internet survey and condemn each other’s choices and beliefs. We’ve resurrected the pillory, but now it’s powered by an algorithm that monetises our moral outrage. The Coldplay couple may or may not deserve our sympathy – frankly, it’s none of our business – but the sheer force of the swarm should give us pause.
If ignominy was once a fate worse than death, what do we call a shame that’s permanent, borderless, and always online? Two hundred years after Massachusetts tore down the stocks, we built them back up. Now they fit in our pockets.
