When the adulterous embrace between Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and his HR boss Kristin Cabot went planetarily viral, most Westerners thought the couple totally deserved the scorn, due to the recklessness of exposing their affaire at a massive Coldplay concert. To act as lovers, any common person thought, is something practiced in hotels, private restaurant rooms, and uncrowded places that excite the morbid thrill of rubbing nipples. This reaction denotes that most of us have already accepted the panoptic condition of mobile phones, through which anyone can randomly capture our intimacy and share it with everyone; in fact, if someone dared to rail against the intrusion of kiss cams or the jumbotron, they would be banished as naive, or worse still, as a technophobe alienated from the real world.
From being sold as a tool to improve our communicative capacity, social media has become a minefield sculpted to highlight the most revealing biographical stain of others. In this sense, from the image known to all, what is most notorious is how the man escapes from the screen to hide and the woman covers her eyes dead with shame, both adorably endearing (and boomer) attempts to flee from a snapshot that had already decided the future of their reputational existence. As the admired Kyle Chakya said in a recent New Yorker piece in reference to the Coldplaygate, the viral existence of humans "has gone from being aspirational to becoming a form of punishment." Until recently, public shaming on Twitter lasted hours and the affected person only had to hibernate at home for a few days; now the penance must become real.
Let the unfortunate protagonists of the matter tell you, who, apart from having to endure the very normal anger of the wronged woman, have seen how their company has forced them to leave their jobs (poor Andy and Kristin now only need to suffer the misfortune of having to go from lovers to a couple, a downgrading that is dreadful in terms of individual freedom and sexual fun). In order to end a person's life, one previously had to delve into numerous archives to find out if someone had been part of the SS or poke their nose into their photo collection to find out if some image with an innocent pubescent girl was hidden there. Now civil death is much faster; it is enough to search for a tweet where someone speculated about the tendency of the poorest immigrants to steal or an Instagram photo where the protagonist of the future scorn had the bad luck to coincide with a drug trafficker to screw up the life of their neighbor. Currently, every image is a suspicion.
Contrary to the cliché that associates internet youth with overexposure, this condition of perpetual suspicion of visuality is causing many zentennials to begin to exercise a furious diet when it comes to sharing images of their daily lives. If appearing embraced by a co-worker at a concert can unseat you from the social elite, in another order of things, a photograph of some Eggs Benedict or any self-portrait in a Mallorcan cove, far from an opportunity to express the joy of living, can quickly become the gateway to a multitude of users who are eager to accuse you of being a compulsive gentrifier and a nature predator favorable to mass tourism. The inexorable viral condition is the normalization of the presumption of guilt, the extreme catechist radicalization that equates pleasure with sin.
For a few days, the Coldplaygate has turned into a curious game of couples facing the kiss cam; now they no longer kiss, but emulate the protagonists of the affair, imitating their useless and disastrous escape. But the matter has also caused lovers to shy away from concerts as a form of leisure. They will always have the opera box seats, where one can still discreetly sample a thigh or return to the bourgeois peace of the inn, where surely soon the commercial incentive of communicating the absolute absence of any camera, even a security one, will be advertised. It is better to run the risk of dying from a fire or a robbery than to be a victim of a planetary stoning, of course.