The Sadist Assault on the ‘Coldplay Couple’
21st July 2025
I wish I didn’t know who Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot are. As you no doubt know by now, the Astronomer CEO and his firm’s HR chief were caught on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. He tried to sneak away, while she covered her face, but it was too late. Someone posted the footage online. A pile-up ensued. And their lives were turned upside down.
As I say, I wish I didn’t know who they are. And that’s because any of us might, for any particular reason, become Andy Byron or Kristin Cabot: flawed people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anybody can make a bad-but-irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-us mistake on camera and face personal destruction. What such episodes reveal is a pathology in the social body, and the desperate need for a new ethic of privacy.
The “Coldplay-concert-couple” story is fundamentally irrelevant and effectively contentless, telling us nothing about the world, about ourselves; it isn’t particularly funny or tragic or profound. There is no pathos, no insight. True, the current culture on X and other social-media apps is perhaps less immediately destructive than it was during peak woke (circa 2017 to 2021). Still, the viral potential of these kinds of stories is a warning sign that our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance, and control. An obsession with other people’s private lives is a sickness.
Yeah, well, in the modern world, there’s a lot of sickness going around. Other people aren’t seen as actual, you know, people, but rather as prey.
July 22nd, 2025 at 16:50
I don’t agree. They were each allegedly cheating on – betraying – someone to whom they’d given a profound commitment, and smugly thinking they’d gotten away with their personal treachery. Not to mention their kids if there were any. Secondly they proved beyond doubt their own gross stupidity. Everyone knows there are multiple cameras at these events. Professionally they were expected to demonstrate intelligence, not stupidity. They chose the latter. Personal fail, professional fail – they deserved what they got.
July 22nd, 2025 at 17:30
To your first point, I would say: So what? What business is that or yours or mine? To paraphrase an American President, we are the friends of morality everywhere but the guardians only of our own.
To your second: Gross stupidity? Failing to think things through is one of the hallmarks of modern society. We see people every day who are more stupid than we expect them to be (I’m looking at you, politicians). In a world where people walk down the street looking at their phones and risking getting run over by traffic, this seems to me fairly minor. I could give you a long list of people whom we might professionally expect to act intelligently–which they do in some areas of life, and which they don’t in other areas of life (I’m looking at you, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates)–and that’s just the way people are.
I don’t say that they don’t deserve what they got. I merely say that it reflects a very disturbing and degenerate tendency within modern society to stick one’s nose in things that are not one’s business. We are increasingly living in a world of Nosy Parkers (I think the term “Karen” fits here), and I wish people would stop doing that shit. (Yeah, and while I’m at it I’ll wish for a pony….)