Technology

One night, a friend of mine went out for dinner with her husband and toddler. The toddler, who sometimes had trouble swallowing, choked on his food — and threw up, repeatedly, in the restaurant. People around them were laughing while my friend and her family were in distress, adding to their embarrassment. But that wasn’t the worst part, she told me. She thought someone might have been filming. What if a video of her child being sick went viral? What if the awful laughter at the restaurant never ended?

Social media has long been a game of roulette with fame at one end and public disgrace at the other. But if I am posting under my government name on Bluesky (or Facebook, or X, or Nextdoor, or whatever), at least I know I am rolling the dice on becoming the next unwitting bean dad, Brienne of Snarth, or Justine Sacco. Now all it takes to become the internet’s main character is to appear in public, where people film each other to perform the dual task of policing behavior and creating potential viral content.

Look, it’s easy to see why that Coldplay couple went viral. The exaggerated response to being on camera — and trying to duck an arena’s kiss cam — is funny. The couple is possibly cheating (immoral, loathed by TikTok) and Chris Martin (the man who knowingly married Gwyneth Paltrow and then consciously uncoupled!) gets a good dunk in. All someone had to do was identify them, and they had one of the world’s most powerful accelerants: the bad behavior of a CEO with one of his employees. It was perfect internet content.

The fact that it’s perfect internet content is also what encourages us to surveil each other. And the consequences of the funny internet video were very real. The CEO resigned. His former subordinate is getting a divorce, which I know because People and E! News reported on the filing as news. The humiliation didn’t end with the viral video — it’s still ongoing, and by writing about it, I am in some sense participating.

This is all possible because our society built a panopticon that any of us can use against any other at will. And while virality isn’t new, TikTok’s algorithm makes it easier than ever for videos to take off unexpectedly, because users don’t even have to share the video to make it go wide. You don’t even have to get caught on a kiss cam at a concert.