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How surprised would you be if I told you that the now infamous Coldplay-infidelity incident was all staged?
A company that only a few people have heard of, which provides an "orchestration-first DataOps platform built on Apache Airflow" (wut?), rents airtime on the Gillette Stadium jumbotron during a Coldplay concert, featuring its CEO and head of HR performing a comedy of errors. Within a day, the brand catapults to headline newspaper articles from The New York Times to Tokyo's Yomiuri Shimbun.
Astronomer? That's such a cool name!
"Any publicity is good publicity," said Phineas Barnum, or was it Oscar Wilde? Who would know, as neither of them appeared on a jumbotron while saying it.
Contrast that with this age of fake news and deepfakes, world leaders fomenting conspiracy theories and then falling prey to them, commercialization and monetization of every datum about our lives. At this point, who's to say what's true or false, never mind right or wrong?
Think about it: If it were staged, it wouldn't even be a novel meme. Awkward jumbotron moments often feature in TV commercials. It's the Allstate mayhem dude saying "I'm the guy sitting next to your girl on the Kiss Cam" all over again. That camera angle, looking up at the expensive seats in the rafters, is all-too familiar to football fans from the Taylor Swift moments at Arrowhead, as she cheers for Travis Kelce. Wait, is that real romance or a win-win PR stunt for the mega-brands Swift and NFL?
Which brings us to privacy.
Earl Warren and Louis Brandeis lamented "Kodakers lying in wait" (though, to be precise, that phrase was coined by Robert Mensel a century later in his piece about Warren and Brandeis). Little could they imagine the Gillette jumbotron searing a scene of marital infidelity, workplace romance and panicked fumble into our collective consciousness.
"Right to be alone," Warren and Brandeis would have sternly boomed. "Right to be alone?", we would counter with indignation.
The couple in question were standing — then ducking — in a suite at Gillette, surrounded by 80,000 people, each waving a camera and a LED wristband for Fix You and Yellow! And that moment, "Once upon a time, we fell apart / You hold it in your hands, like two‑halves in your heart," as Coldplay would no doubt put it, was there for all to see.
Is there privacy in public, online or off, in an age when everything is recorded, stored, analyzed, sliced and diced and sold to advertisers?
The question of privacy in public was never more salient than it is these days, with AI developers scraping every bit and byte of our digital footprint to train AI models. In 1890, Warren and Brandeis could roam through the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, under a cloak of anonymity. Brandeis didn't gain celebrity until his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1916, and even then, based on his courtroom sketch in the newspaper, it's doubtful he'd be recognized in the street.
These days, when every Instagram or TikTok post can go viral, one moment you're featured in a friend’s post, the next your privacy is torpedoed forever, or rather, until the next meme.
So much for being let alone.
Who wants to be let alone anyway? Millions of people, "creators," are pounding the pavement day in day out in a valiant effort to get the world’s attention. Italian brain rot, Gordon Ramsey slang memes, the bagpipe cat, eye of rah, and on and on the list goes.
Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot got a freebie, narrated by Chris Martin no less!
But what about consent and legitimate interests the Europeans would ask, waving a brick in each hand. Don't be alarmed! They're just holding printouts of GDPR and the EU AI Act.
Do laws even matter? With technology so powerful, so all encompassing, ubiquitous cameras (smile for the jumbotron), social media channels (now you're a meme), AI scraping and training algorithms, projecting memes, deepfakes, truths and conspiracies all over the world 24/7/365.
The rich and powerful, CEOs of "dataops" companies who buy USD2,000 seats aren't immune. Against such forces of nature, we're as helpless as ants. Our lives crushed in an instant, mistakes immortalized, careful what you post, careful what you say or do, cameras are looking, microphones recording, AI transcribing, social media projecting.
2025. We've made so much progress. "We live in a beautiful world."
