Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot at the Coldplay concert
Photo screenshot, editing NRC
I would like not Have known who Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot are. As you undoubtedly know now, the CEO of Data company Astronomer and his head of Preslees cases were caught on the stadium screen during a Coldplay concert. He tried to sneak away while she hid her face, but it was too late. Someone put the images online. Everyone jumped on top. And their lives were turned upside down.
Like I said, I wish I didn’t know who they were. And that is because each of us, for whatever reason, could become Andy Byron or Kristin Cabot: people with defects in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everyone can take a wrong-but-IRRELEVANT-Voor-Rest-of-us decision, but still look forward to your own downfall. What makes these events clear is that a disease has crept into the social fabric and that there is an urgent need for a new privacy ethics.
A warning sign
The story of the ‘coldplay concert couple’ is essentially irrelevant and without meaning, it tells us nothing about the world, about ourselves; It is not very funny or tragic or in -depth. There is no pathos, no insight. It is true that the current culture on X and other social media apps may be less directly destructive than during the peak of the ‘Woke’ period (circa 2017 to 2021). Yet it is viral Potential of these kinds of stories a warning sign that our culture is obsessed with shame, surveillance and control. An obsession with the private life of others is a disease.
The leaks, doxxen, spying on private citizens on Reddit, on private Facebook groups, on X, on Instagram, on Tiktok-regardless of the moral quality of the people investigated-harms everyone. Because it makes everyone subject to this omnipresent, collective panopticum, and the more these images circulate, the more normal it becomes.
Group exchange, dating apps, e-mails-or in the case of Byron and Cabot, simply being in public without the intention of being filmed-should not be subject to public judgment. These kinds of stories distract from serious issues and distracts attention from the truly powerful individuals and entities that influence our lives more considerably.
Just like every village
There is clearly something in human nature that is inclined to gossip, shame and mock (brash, automatic). But new technology enables us to express these low -hearted tendencies in historically unprecedented ways. We should seriously have the twisting effect that such stories, and our obsession with it, have on our souls.
The Global Village Like any village – reprimanding, punitive, obsessed with gossiping, with nothing better to do. While it may seem nice to make someone a meme, it is seriously disrespectful and throws the habits and security measures of a liberal society overboard to participate in sadistic group behavior. So although the concrete example we are talking about may not seem worth thinking, that is my point.
There could be a lesson in this story about the hypocrisy of a CEO and an HR officer, who have an affair that had led to immediate dismissal in employees of a lower rank. But what I see emerging in the public debate is not intelligent criticism of HR departments and their culture, but Schadenfreude, Joy for the misery of any other person.
If these trends continue – continue to work as algorithms as they do, and I can’t imagine them not will do – more and more victims will be dragged out of their anonymity for an ‘mimetic sacrifice’. And as a result, meaningful taboos around privacy, shame and respect have disappeared, and everyone’s lives and behaviors have become feed for comment and mockery.
New taboos
We urgently need new taboos – not against adultery or sexual immorality or interpersonal deception, because we clearly have had enough of that. We rather need taboos against the incitement of ourselves in idiotic, detiguous crowds, who are unable to think about how the topics of our riduculization suffer from this digital stoning. A wiser perspective would show that we all, at the wrong time, liars, fools, cheatscharlatans, being hypocrites. Let him not sinned it on the like or repost button.
We all sin, and we could have received grace or mercy among the theocracies of older liberal and lighting arrangements. However, algorithmic justice and judgment do not contain the virtues of theocratic society – at least you could still resort to religious law, with its exceptions and case studies – nor of classical liberal society: there is no fair procedure, not a professional mechanism. There is no mediating structure in it The Global Village. It is instinctive, animal, hasty, cruel.
Click on the check mark next to ‘I am not a robot’
The power and direction of this collective online judgment must be focused on itself: we should not punish those who are caught in the panopticum, but the anonymous posters, redditors and the like; Everyone who finds joy in random deeds of contempt. If we want to live in a tolerant, healthy society, we have to expand our cameras, distance themselves from mimetic, digital village bricks, and reflect on our own casual and imperfect lives and ourselves.
This ‘obligation’ will not come from above: there are no indications that tech companies will change their products to discourage this kind of behavior. Self -regulation, on a large scale, is the only answer for the time being. The way we talk, write, act and respond matters. Culture is important to the extent that culture is a layer of software that at least partially determines how we use our phones. We are urgently lacking codes of conduct with regard to technology and our ability to take on each other, to do doxx and bothering.
Self -control
If our natural response to constant mutual surveillance is not aversion, it should be; Phones are equipped with cameras, but cameras that are connected to global consciousness are weapons. Filming strangers should not be normalized – people say they should put their phones away. Contribute to the viral pile of reports about random people who had no intention of viral To go, should not be normal either. If Big Tech does not remove, self -control is required. Bodies can help maintain and strengthen these new standards by banning the use of telephones in as many public spaces as possible.
There are also secondary benefits: public spaces are simply better without everyone being on their phone; 50,000 people who all film the same concert, for example, is in addition to the unintended consequences, stupid and unesthetic. Not all of us needs our own poorly framed photos of Gustav Klimts The kiss to make when we visit Vienna. Professional photos and postcards are already well available. We could also use our memory.
The codes of conduct are what we might call ‘counter-mimetics’; In the first instance, they must be artificially injected into social interaction and discourse before they catch on. That’s what I propose here. We may think that something is amusing and worthwhile to provide comments or bad and worth reprimanding, and maybe that is the case in isolation. But all in all we make life unbearable, anxious and merciless.
It took several centuries before knights on horseback developed the code of conduct that is known as chivalry for killing or threatening anyone who had no horse, armor and sword; Let us hope that we can develop codes of conduct around our phones or which next generation of AI devices also replace telephones.
Privacy is a hard -fought socially good; Give it back to others to protect your own.
This piece appeared earlier in Unherda British news and opinion website, and has been translated with support from AI.