Comment A tech executive's alleged affair exposed on a stadium jumbotron is ripe fodder for the gossip rags, but it exhibits something else: proof that we need not wait for an AI-fueled dystopian surveillance state to descend on us - we're perfectly able and willing to surveil ourselves.
The embracing couple caught at a Coldplay concert this week as the jumbotron camera panned around the audience would have been another unremarkable clip, if not for the pair panicking and rushing to hide, triggering attendees to publish the memorable moment on social media.
"Either they're having an affair or they're very shy," Coldplay singer Chris Martin said of the pair's reaction.
As is always the case when viral moments of unknown people get uploaded to the internet, they didn't remain anonymous for long, with the internet quickly identifying them as the CEO of data infrastructure outfit Astronomer, Andy Byron, and its Chief People Officer, Kristin Cabot. We're not going to weigh in on Byron's, who internet sleuths have determined is married (for now), or Cabot's behavior - making someone pay for the moral transgression of an alleged extramarital affair may be enough reason for the internet to go on a witch hunt, but that's not our concern here.
What's worrying is what this moment says - yet again - about us as a society: We have cameras everywhere, our personal data has become one of the most valuable commodities in the world, and we're all perpetually ready to use that tech to make those we feel have violated the social contract pay publicly for their transgressions.
This is hardly a new phenomenon.
Professor Malcolm Gaskill, a historian who specializes in witchcraft in early modern Britain, described today's technology in a 2016 op-ed as just a faster, more public outlet "for the worst behavior."
"Although the west's appetite for witch-hunting has long been sated, the urge to persecute has not, which explains why the idea remains so useful," Gaskill said. That "urge to persecute" can be seen in plenty of examples of internet witch hunts over recent years.
Take the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, for example: Self-appointed Reddit sleuths identified the wrong person as being one of the perpetrators, who it turned out had committed suicide prior to the bombing. The countless videos of badly behaved or intoxicated individuals who lose their jobs as a result of poor choices may not be as poorly targeted (or unjustified), but they're still an outlet for the same bad human behavior: Our willingness to persecute someone for a perceived wrong despite not knowing the full story.
There are plenty of reasons to distrust some of the surveillance-obsessed big tech firms, or law enforcement agencies that use unreliable facial recognition technology to identify suspects while withholding its use from the courts. It's hard to fathom any of us wanting to be surveilled in the way people like Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison envision, with a centralized database monitored by AI and identifying new levels of mass surveillance and policing.
The workplace doesn't even need to evolve much for it to become the surveillance state that we worry about our governments descending into. Tracking technology is everywhere in modern offices, with various forms of technology routinely used by companies to track worker behavior. Who wants that?
Practically, however, it seems like we all do: We gleefully lap up posts about one or two people's bad choices when they become the topic du jour, opining and sharing them to everyone we know, or taking to the web to search it out and make it a hotter topic.
There's really no reason to set up an expensive and oppressive surveillance state when we all have location tracking, internet-connected shaming machines in our pockets. Big tech gave us the tools of our own surveillance, and as "ColdplayGate" shows yet again, we'll keep using those tools if they'll make us feel better about ourselves - especially if someone else gets knocked down a peg in the process. �
