Coldplaygate & our fear of being watched

It's Been a Minute

NPR

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4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

Whether it's the Coldplay kiss cam or screenshots of dating profiles, it feels like any one of our private lives could inadvertently go public any minute now.

A Coldplay concert kiss cam video went viral when one couple featured jumped away from each other and hid their faces. The internet quickly identified the concertgoers, and it turned the couple's life upside-down. It makes you think, though... could this happen to me, too?

Brittany talks with Kate Wagner, architecture critic at The Nation, to discuss what this viral moment says about our eroding privacy in both public and private life, and how we've internalized casual surveillance. Do we all carry Coldyplay kiss cams in the form of our phones?

Read Kate's article in Lux Magazine about why internet surveillance is killing eroticism here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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0:12.1	Learn more at RWJF.org.
0:17.9	Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
0:34.6	Okay, so there's been a video that went viral recently.
0:39.1	Can you describe what happened in the video and the cold play of it all?
0:43.0	Yeah.
0:43.5	So this guy, Andy Byron, he's a CEO at an AI firm in New York called Astronomer.
0:50.1	He was at a cold play concert with his head of HR, Kristen Cabot, with whom he was allegedly having an affair.
0:58.0	And Coldplay passed on the kiss cam to them.
1:01.9	And to be fair, they did look like they were having a magical time.
1:05.8	I'm inclined to agree.
1:08.0	Of course, they noticed, and they duckeded out of sight and the whole thing became a meme
1:14.6	pretty quickly. This week, we're connecting the dots between Coldplay, Panoptikons, and dating
1:22.0	app screenshots. I know, I know. How are all of these things connected? Well, we're going to find out with
1:29.7	Kate Wagner, architecture critic at the nation. Kate, welcome to it's been a minute. Thank you.
1:34.4	Thank you for having me. Yeah, I mean, this was a sensation. I'll say this was a total sensation.
1:40.6	You know, and I get why this went viral. I mean, it's a juicy story, you know, jumping away from someone you're dancing with on a kiss cam. It's just not expected. And to find out that they're a CEO and the head of HR, I mean, is honestly kind of wild.
1:55.1	Byron has tendered his resignation and Cabot has been placed on leave. And of course, they've both been punished and doxxed by the online public.
2:03.9	But, and this is my opinion here, I have serious concerns, though, about whether this video
2:10.6	should have been posted.
2:13.2	To listeners who are skeptical, hear me out.
	...

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