aaand it’s now gone too far: schadenfreude, the internet, and you

So there was this Coldplay concert last week where some CEO and HR person from this big company got caught being real cozy on their jumbo cam that tried to duck in their panic.

Was this an objectively juicy tidbit to hear about in passing about the 1%? For sure. Emphasis on, and I cannot stress enough, in passing. 30 seconds max.

First things first, let’s get one thing out of the way. The professional consequences (perhaps in the short-term, who’s to say how this will follow them throughout their career and as you’ll hopefully read, will understand that this is a lot more complicated as to whether or not it should) that come with situations like this is something that needs to be address. Not to reopen healing wounds…much like the Try Guys situation a few years ago and the call for Clinton’s impeachment…it seems there’s a critical misunderstanding. The professional consequence is not about the infedlity. It is about the abuse of power and the liability it creates.

I could say it’s been since 2020’s Tiger King, when everyone was cooped up watching a show hyperfixating and court of public opinion determining Carole Baskin killed her husband (featuring tiktok dances and package delivery polls)…but we all know this has been an issue that’s gone on much longer. Gawker and Perez Hilton hounded renlentlessly after celebrities like Britney and Paris.

In situations like this, there tends to be a diffusion from immediate virality then spreading into the mainstream media and mainstream jokes, like the “couples Coldplay cam” at the basebal games.

At what point will people realize it’s been taken too far? I vote one of its final stages is when there are tip jars based on the meme (remember those Amber Heard/johnny depp tip jars? I sure never forgot those).

The internet constantly needs to up the ante, so the “bit” (i.e., someone getting caught in real time of their infidelity, that a real person must now recon with on an international scale) is then taken and run with for attention. Only after we’ve hit the tip jar levels will we then reach the guilt stage: The Think Piece statge. Shit, maybe this is even what I’m doing now; there will always be a group of people that says, we should have stopped when people were “helpfully” tagging the CEO’s wife on facebook in news articles…maybe we didn’t need to make a push alert that she removed her husband’s last name from her social media. To what extent are they important vs a way to intellectualize our way out of the guilt we feel in participating in the dogpile?

It’s times like this we can’t overlook the value and beauty of the friend groupchat. Much like Ellen’s show in the 2010s, this would’ve been a quick, supercharged 5 minutes of “fame" among a handful of people that would’ve naturally transitioned to something else and that would’ve been that. There’s value to someone curating and moderating the value placed on attention. Maybe there’s some harm reduction to bringing back gossip the way it was intended instead of being little internet freaks about it. Food for thought!

Extra credit recommended reading/viewing:

Cringe | ContraPoints