In the end it was only a matter of time. It took a day or two of virality for the CEO caught cheating in the now truly infamous Coldplay kiss cam to publicly announce his departure from the company. I’m frankly surprised it took much longer for the woman caught canoodling in his arms to do the same thing. She was, after all, the Chief People Officer for the same company. On top of what I can only imagine is a personal calamity, the incident strikes me as a fairly grave professional conflict o...
In the end it was only a matter of time.
It took a day or two of virality for the CEO caught cheating in the now truly infamous Coldplay kiss cam to publicly announce his departure from the company. I’m frankly surprised it took much longer for the woman caught canoodling in his arms to do the same thing. She was, after all, the Chief People Officer for the same company. On top of what I can only imagine is a personal calamity, the incident strikes me as a fairly grave professional conflict of interest. Indeed, the company that employed them both has announced that she is now gone, too.
I’m not gonna pretend to be all high and mighty. Like however many hundreds of millions or billions of people around the World, I found myself titillated by the video. It’s so dumb. So clumsy. Perfect fodder for a viral sensation.
But in the last few days, as the stories have continued, I’ve also found myself thinking a bit more about what the whole thing says about us more generally.
As consumers and sharers of information on the internet, loling, liking, and sharing, there is no way for us to collectively manage a degree of proportionality in a viral screw-up.
They did the deed and they can suffer the consequences, you might argue. Sure, but at the same time, these people didn’t commit a crime. They have been dishonest, absolutely. Unprofessional? For sure. But while I don’t want to be too much of a downer, I can only imagine that right now, it feels like the price they’ve each paid is the complete and absolute destruction of their entire lives. And even if you do think that in this instance they deserve the consequences whatever they might be, what’s to say you’ll feel the same way the next time someone goes viral? There is no controlling the wildfire. And once it’s shared and shared and shared again, the scale of a viral humiliation compounds faster than at any point in human history.
And how about their families? Would you want to find out your husband or partner or parent was cheating? Most of us might say yes, painful as it might be, that truth in that situation is for the best. But what if it meant a fifth of the world’s population found out at the same time? What if it meant every student at your kids’ school knew what had happened and would bring it up for the next twenty years.
Again, I’m not being miserable and saying it wasn’t funny. It was funny! My point is that once a moment like this hits the internet, there is absolutely no controlling it. And there’s a little sliver of this whole saga that has felt a bit Black Mirror.
A few years ago, I read that amazing book, ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’, by Jon Ronson.
It had some extraordinary examples of people who’d gone viral for saying or doing really dumb, offensive things. But it also articulated something primal, something a bit ugly, a hunger in as a species to hunt as a pack, and the collective glee we take in casting someone aside and making an example of them in public.
No policy, no force on Earth can stop a viral moment. It just has to burn out. There is no firebreak, no finger in the dyke. That video will have been viewed by eyeballs in every country and on every continent. But while that video said a lot about human nature, arguably its spread around the world has said just as much. Are you not entertained?
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