matt bernstein
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In Defense of the Coldplay Couple: An Examination of the Social Media Surveillance State
🕑 Added 2025-08-02 01:59:32 +0000 UTCLast month, two middle-aged white people were caught embracing on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. A video of them awkwardly dodging the cameras went viral on a scale that harkens back to the Ellen era. The Internet decided that the two were having an affair, and within a day, their names, job titles, and families were plastered across social media and cable news. The videoed man’s wife ran from the spotlight, but sleuths chased her down anyway. The marriage of strangers became a real-life investigation in the court of TikTok.
Today, feminist streamer Caroline Kwan and I contextualize this latest viral story in the Internet’s long history of doing very similar things to people far less detestable than a tech CEO and his head of HR. We make the case for why strengthening the surveillance machine Is Not Good, even when it’s wielded against people we don’t like.
Follow Caroline on Twitter: https://x.com/carolinekwan
Follow Caroline on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/carolinekwan
Watch Sarah Z’s video essay on West Elm Caleb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeCi4CSqtzw
Read Couch Guy’s essay: https://slate.com/technology/2021/12/tiktok-couch-guy-internet-sleuths.html
Comments
Alexandra
So happy you guys talked about the panopticon, we can truly never escape it now that the internet exists… Foucault’s theory of docile bodies is also relevant and really interesting in the context of social media. Thank you again for an amazing listen ❤️
Hailey Dahl
I think the scariest part of these internet villains is that they make us more cruel to people in our real lives. I’m not personally scared of becoming an internet villian, it doesn’t occur to me when I leave the house but I have noticed my friends and family picking up very judgmental, critical rhetoric made popular by these cases and that is alarming! These villians are avatars for what falls outside of normativity and these public hate campaigns give us permission to apply the same level of hatred to folks in our lives who don’t conform
Tess
Not the same, but similar, Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, is interesting (elder millennial here) Thank you for your intelligent commentary and conversation, such a pleasure to listen to.
Alice di Angelo
The Coldplay couple case was massively reported here in Brazil as well, but I had never heard about any of the other social media surveillance cases mentioned in this episode (except for the Baby Reindeer show repercussions). I think this particular case blew out of proportion even more because of who the people in question were (especially the tech CEO), but this just makes your point even stronger: we can't treat our principles with flexibility, bending them depending on who's involved.
Ezechiel Thibaud
I also think there is something specifically American about how people feel about cheating. I am French and I was living in the US at the time where our former president was caught cheating on his wife. Everybody and their mother was asking me how I felt about it and if he should resign. I don’t remember anyone in France caring about this, as most people assumed it was his private life and didn’t necessarily say anything about his ability to be president (which is not to say he was a good president, or that cheating is fine). Cheating might be wrong, but I don’t see why anyone should lose their job over it.
