On July 16, Andy Byron, the CEO of a medium-sized software company, attended a Coldplay concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The jumbotron camera turned to Byron, who was holding Kristin Cabot, the company’s HR director, around the waist. When they noticed themselves on camera, they immediately disengaged, with Cabot turning her back and Byron awkwardly ducking out of view. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” said Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, to the stadium audience of 66,000. Cabot and Byron were indeed married, but not to each other. The clip quickly went viral on TikTok, then everywhere else.
Initially, I thought no more about it than any of the other wild and scandalous clips that cross my desk daily: “None of my business.” Far be it from me to cast judgment on another man’s sin.
That was until I saw the chatter lamenting the invasion of Andy Byron’s privacy. In fact, this was—and still is—the only educated discourse I’ve personally encountered on this scandal du jour. First, it was Matthew Gasda for Unherd, and then Kat Rosenfield for the Free Press. Whereas for Gasda the lesson of this event is that we need a “new ethic of privacy,” for Rosenfield the main concern is that public shaming doesn’t scale and degrades those who judge. Both authors agree that the public judgment of the Coldplay Cheater is a more worrisome crime—or at least more deserving of educated critique—than one measly case of adultery.
Andy Byron took his paramour into the public sphere and embraced her at length. Being spotted by the jumbotron camera is not exactly unforeseeable. This is not Foucault’s panopticon; it’s a lovely, fun, and family-friendly tradition, colloquially called the “kiss cam” for a reason. The dramatic effect of the video derives in part from Andy Byron’s lack of the one virtue that even the worst rakes in history have generally mustered: discretion.
The reason Byron has attracted such extreme mockery, however, is his physical response to the spotlight. As an anthropological matter, it is among the most pathetic instances of physical theater produced by an adult man in the smartphone era. How is an observer of public culture not to comment upon such an artifact? Here we are presented with a man whose authentic instinct was to hide like a cornered rodent. This is an economically successful man, the leader of a successful company. And yet his fully developed adult nature is so craven that he weaseled away to hide—from the world, his wife, and himself. That’s the central meaning of this short film, which is not in the genre of comedy but horror.
Now, it is true that in the early 2010s, our society developed quite a taste for moralistic witch hunts. Since then, we’ve seen countless more or less innocent people consumed on digital scaffolds. With Trump’s second term, and his normalization by a new faction of high-status tech leaders, a countervailing inclination to correct the excesses of that period has emerged. In this context I can sympathize with Gasda and Rosenfield’s observations.
But while it’s true that we are recovering from an ugly, deranged period of mob dynamics, it is a mistake to suppose that our society is somehow too judgmental in general, that straightforward wrongdoing should not be scrutinized so much, and that every ethical verdict of the public hive-mind is somehow indecent or unfair.
For in many ways, the public witch hunts of the “woke” period were a kind of perverse compensation for the normalization of gravely evil behaviors during the preceding period.
For example, educated opinion insisted for decades that divorce is harmless, families are unnecessary, and adultery is just a natural fact of life. These incessant and elaborately intellectualized edicts were heard and heeded, perhaps more than their proponents even expected. The resulting society was unbearable, precisely for the types of people who promulgated these ideas. It was then the same types who would hallucinate the most terrible moral atrocities out of the most trivial interpersonal interactions.
The lesson of the great “woke” panic is not that we should relax our public judgments of bad behavior. The lesson is that we must re-learn how to pass judgment on the real ethical horrors that we previously normalized.
It is in this context that we should consider what is owed a public figure caught publicly in adultery. The case of Andy Byron is significant, not because he is especially evil and deserves brutal judgment, but because it’s a clear-cut test case for the post-woke ethical compass of the digital hive-mind.
Readers sympathize with Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne because a hypocritical authority judges her adultery, brands her, and places her on a scaffold for public shaming. In the present case, Andy Byron was the only authority with the power to judge Andy Byron. Unlike Prynne, Byron took himself to a public scaffold and, when the spotlight struck, physically shamed himself. If a recording of this drama enters public circulation, what could it possibly mean to respect his right to privacy, or to withhold judgment? It was he who gave away his privacy, and it was he who judged himself. The case is not interesting as a sin for us to judge, it’s interesting because it comes to us uniquely self-judged. The man tells us with his body that he is guilty, that he is ashamed. If it is not reasonable to pass public judgment on the character of this public actor in this public morality play, then it should never be deemed reasonable to pass judgment on any behavior whatsoever.
We should not cease public judgment of human behavior in the public sphere. Our only obligation is to be as fair, precise, sensitive, balanced, and proportional as possible. When it comes to the public performance of heinous sins that we’ve normalized for decades, to a socially suicidal degree, the demands of fairness and proportionality could not possibly require less judgment.
