Karma Comes for Chiefs Caught on Kiss Cam
Jul. 22nd, 2025 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerOne of the most viral things from the past week is the Coldplay Kiss Cam. At a Coldplay concert several days ago a "Kiss Cam" found a couple embracing in the stands and put their image up on the Jumbotron screen. Coldplay's frontman, Chris Martin, called attention to it as the couple on camera panicked.
The woman in the couple covered her face and turned away. The man stared like a deer in the headlights for a moment before ducking out of the frame. Martin, on stage, quipped quite cannily, "Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy. I'm not quite sure."
Apparently they were having an affair. Or at least their embrace and reactions suggest they were.
When the kiss cam video went viral for its moment of embarrassment, online sleuths quickly IDed the man and woman. They are Andy Byron, CEO of Astronomer, Inc., and Kristin Cabot, the company's Chief People Officer. Byron is married... and Cabot is not his wife.
In the days since the concert, Byron has resigned his position as CEO, and the company board of directors has accepted his resignation. There's no word on Cabot's position, though she has deleted some of her presence on sites like LinkedIn.
What's interesting to me is how major media are spinning this story. The predominant storyline seems to be finger-wagging about publicly shaming people coupled with how we're all unwittingly aiding the surveillance state in causing the death of privacy.
Okay, death of privacy? How about you newspapers stop firing all your veteran journalists and replacing them with 22-year-old interns, because "OMG dEaTh Of PrIvAcY!!" was already old news, like, 10 years ago.
Likewise, the media's tut-tutting about Why can't you just let people live their lives in peace? misses the actual story. The actual story here is Man Bites Dog. Or, more accurately, the 99% who've watched the 1% get rich at their expense fire back at their hypocrisy.
My first experience with this misplaced focus on rules, compliance, and enforcement came in my first professional job. I was just a college intern. But I had to complete training on not bribing corrupt foreign officials. How likely was I, a 20-year-old intern, to be in a position where I might bribe a corrupt foreign official on behalf of my employer? Versus, say, a senior vice president who might be negotiating a multi-million dollar contract? Or the CEO who might curry favor with a country's president so as not to jeopardize government grants or a proposed corporate merger worth hundreds of millions?
Likewise heads of HR have been scourges to many of us corporate drones. We all learned years ago that despite their name "human resources" and their supposed charter in administering benefits and ensuring companies comply with employment law, HR is not on our side. They're more than happy to play disciplinarian when a peon runs afoul of a company rule, such as rules against romantic relationships between employees, but when an exec breaks a rule— or even a law—HR tends to sweep the evidence under the rug and turn a blind eye to reprisals.
Thus once the 99% discovered these two on camera were manager and direct report, and not just that but corporate leaders who fire employees for breaking such rules, well... the knives were out. To me that is why it went viral.
The woman in the couple covered her face and turned away. The man stared like a deer in the headlights for a moment before ducking out of the frame. Martin, on stage, quipped quite cannily, "Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy. I'm not quite sure."
Apparently they were having an affair. Or at least their embrace and reactions suggest they were.
When the kiss cam video went viral for its moment of embarrassment, online sleuths quickly IDed the man and woman. They are Andy Byron, CEO of Astronomer, Inc., and Kristin Cabot, the company's Chief People Officer. Byron is married... and Cabot is not his wife.
In the days since the concert, Byron has resigned his position as CEO, and the company board of directors has accepted his resignation. There's no word on Cabot's position, though she has deleted some of her presence on sites like LinkedIn.
What's interesting to me is how major media are spinning this story. The predominant storyline seems to be finger-wagging about publicly shaming people coupled with how we're all unwittingly aiding the surveillance state in causing the death of privacy.
Okay, death of privacy? How about you newspapers stop firing all your veteran journalists and replacing them with 22-year-old interns, because "OMG dEaTh Of PrIvAcY!!" was already old news, like, 10 years ago.
Likewise, the media's tut-tutting about Why can't you just let people live their lives in peace? misses the actual story. The actual story here is Man Bites Dog. Or, more accurately, the 99% who've watched the 1% get rich at their expense fire back at their hypocrisy.
Rules For Thee, But Not For Me
For more than a generation now corporate execs have been clamping down on corporate drones, demanding more oversight of minutiae and punishing them (us) for minor transgressions. They've been clamping down on the peons in organizations, citing risk to the business, when it's not the peons who are the risk. It's the execs themselves.My first experience with this misplaced focus on rules, compliance, and enforcement came in my first professional job. I was just a college intern. But I had to complete training on not bribing corrupt foreign officials. How likely was I, a 20-year-old intern, to be in a position where I might bribe a corrupt foreign official on behalf of my employer? Versus, say, a senior vice president who might be negotiating a multi-million dollar contract? Or the CEO who might curry favor with a country's president so as not to jeopardize government grants or a proposed corporate merger worth hundreds of millions?
Likewise heads of HR have been scourges to many of us corporate drones. We all learned years ago that despite their name "human resources" and their supposed charter in administering benefits and ensuring companies comply with employment law, HR is not on our side. They're more than happy to play disciplinarian when a peon runs afoul of a company rule, such as rules against romantic relationships between employees, but when an exec breaks a rule— or even a law—HR tends to sweep the evidence under the rug and turn a blind eye to reprisals.
Thus once the 99% discovered these two on camera were manager and direct report, and not just that but corporate leaders who fire employees for breaking such rules, well... the knives were out. To me that is why it went viral.
