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The CEO seemingly having an affair with the head of HR at his company at the Coldplay concert is a viral video for the ages, but it is also, unfortunately, emblematic of our current private surveillance and social media hellscape.
The video, which is now viral on every platform that we can possibly think of, has been covered by various news outlets, and is Pop Crave official, shows Andy Byron, the CEO of a company called Astronomer, with his arms around Astronomer’s head of HR, Kristen Cabot. The jumbotron cuts from one fan to this seemingly happy couple. They both simultaneously die inside; “Oh look at this happy couple,” Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin says. The woman covers her face and spins away. The man ducks out of frame. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re very shy,” Martin said. The camera pans to another company executive standing next to them, who is seemingly shaking out of discomfort.
It is hard to describe how viral this is at the moment, in a world in which so many awful things are occurring and in which nothing holds anyone’s attention for any length of time and in a world in which we are all living in our own siloed realities. “Andy Byron” is currently the most popular trending Google term in the United States, with more than double the searches of the next closest term.
There are so many levels to this embarrassment—the Coldplay of it all, the HR violation occurring on jumbotron, etc—that one could likely write a doctoral dissertation on this 15 second video.