Astronomer CEO’s viral Coldplay moment reminds us: We’re all being watched all the time

Convenience stores often have signs that read “Smile, you’re on camera” to discourage all who enter from engaging in transgressive behavior. Perhaps those signs should go everywhere now.

On July 17, the CEO of tech company Astronomer was captured on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts, seemingly committing marital infidelity with an employee. A TikTok of the incident went mega-viral, racking up 56 million views in 24 hours on that platform alone, while also exploding across every other social media site, not to mention countless group chats.

There’s something eerie, though, about how quickly and completely an apparent personal indiscretion became universal content. It’s a cautionary tale for a new era of public shaming.

The Jumbotron Moment Seen Round the World blew up at such an incendiary level, on a bustling news day, for many reasons. The clumsy, deeply human way that the CEO and his employee seemed to realize they were suddenly visible, and then struggled to teleport out of sight, is almost objectively funny.

It’s also a cross-cultural story, encompassing the worlds of tech, music, and general human interest. After all, few current events get an equal amount of coverage at both Pop Crave and Business Insider.

The story also seemed to resonate because Coldplay might be the most meme-able band that could have been involved in such a situation, inspiring countless jokes on social media about not wanting to be caught dead at a Coldplay concert.

But the reason the jumbotron moment has not only captured so much attention but also sustained it is because after becoming a matter of public consumption, the story metastasized into a saga.

The more people found out what happened, the more unresolved variables they unearthed, including how the spouses of both the CEO and the employee reacted, what the board at Astronomer thinks of the incident, and how the CEO will address all of this.

What we do in the shadows

Jumbotrongate is now more than just a viral moment—to many online observers, it’s become an irresistibly spicy parasocial true-crime drama, one unfolding in real time rather than in a Netflix docuseries.

The apparently grueling wait for a statement from the CEO has inspired chaos agents to release multiple bogus apologies online.

A Facebook posting of one of the fakes late on Thursday night has already garnered 55,000 reactions and 14,000 comments. This impatience to hear directly from the person at the center of a massively viral, still-developing saga recalls one of the earliest, broadest, and most notorious examples of online shaming—the Justine Sacco incident.

Just before Christmas in 2013, Sacco, a senior PR executive, sent an ill-advised tweet as she boarded an 11-hour flight to South Africa. “Going to Africa,” the tweet began, before taking a turn for the controversial: “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Although Sacco had a relatively paltry following of fewer than 200 people at the time, the tone-deaf tweet came to the attention of a writer at Gawker, who helped it go tremendously, globally viral.

The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet quickly became inescapable on Twitter, driving more communal anticipation to find out what would happen next than arguably any public event since O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco chase 20 years earlier.

The incident sparked both a wave of public shaming and an awareness of how such a moment can change a person’s life. (Sacco was let go from her job at InterActive Corp., though she was later rehired in a different role.) In the years to come, people would be shamed for killing a beloved lion during a hunting trip, for threatening to call the police on a Black man under false pretenses, and for appearing to masturbate during a work Zoom.

What is now happening with the CEO of Astronomer, however, is a completely different beast.

What he did may be perceived as morally objectionable and sleazy, but it’s ultimately a private matter that managed to break containment and reach a global audience.

Who deserves anonymity?

Sacco may not have deserved the level of attention wrought by her tweet in 2013, but unlike the Astronomer CEO’s conduct, her offensive joke was something that she felt comfortable broadcasting to the world.

Meanwhile, being in a crowd of 65,000 fans at a Coldplay concert must have made the pair feel pretty anonymous. If the lesson from #HasJustineLanded was “Be careful what you tweet,” the one from this saga is more like “Be careful what you do anywhere at any time.”

There’s certainly something satisfying about seeing an apparent cheater get his comeuppance, but those celebrating it might be a little too comfortable living in a surveillance state. Most people have an implicit understanding that Nest camera footage or Alexa recordings might come up in court, and that we all leave a gigantic breadcrumb trail of data behind us wherever we go online. But it’s easy to convince ourselves that the Eye of Sauron-like panopticon will never turn on us personally.

The Astronomer CEO’s turn in the barrel should be seen as a warning that no matter who or where you are, a camera is never far away—and it’s probably aimed in your direction.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the location of the concert.