A friend in upstate New York sent me a WhatsApp: “Man, this is bad. This is the end of the world.” He is dramatic that way; he makes a living writing screenplays. “Our freedoms of movement, speech, and the right to hug and kiss in public,” the text continued, “has [sic] now all been usurped from us. Big Brother is spying on all of us.”
He attached the now infamous Coldplay concert video featuring a man hugging a blonde woman. The highly pixilated image seemed innocent enough until the woman dislodged herself from the man’s embrace and turned her back on the crowd and stadium cameras. Her male friend ducked under a chair. And then, just like that, the whole dramatic segment was over.
“This video is now coasting at 45-million views on TikTok.”
End of the world? It did not make sense.
However, before long I was furiously searching for the Coldplay video and any accompanying text. So was the whole world. More than 60-million people had already watched the clip. By the end of the week, more than 50,000 articles had been written about the no longer anonymous couple. We are all complicit in this. Digital Draculas, all.
The Coldplay scandal is captivating mainly because it has a throwback kind of Carry On naughtiness. It’s a story straight out of a Mills & Boon meets James Ellroy wreckage in the making. (I don’t think anyone still reads Mills & Boon, even though the digital reality we live in is tailor-made for such roman-a-clefs.)
If you have watched Coldplay belt out songs such as True Love, Always In My Head, A Sky full of Stars, Another’s Arms and, say, Ghost Stories, you too would have been giddy with joy. I am not making up those titles. In fact I’m shocked that no-one in the media has made a huge thing about them or the implications of the scandal for the thing we hold most sacrosanct: privacy.
By now we are all familiar with the drama. A man with a name straight from classical poetry, Andy Byron (could he be a distant relative of the greatest lover in literature?) the CEO of a data tech company, Astronomer, and the company’s HR director, Kristin Cabot, are the couple caught by modern technology’s deer-lights.
That automatically raises a red flag because in some companies it is not on for the boss to canoodle with a junior. The danger of course is that a romantic affair between colleagues is embedded with all kinds of potential for impaired judgment.
As we speak, both love birds have resigned. But that’s not the end of the story, a saga that demands discussion about personal rights in the digital space.
And yet these two people are also fallible human beings, not Jesus disciples, or Buddha’s most devout monks
These two lovers are real human beings. They are both married with two children each — Cabot’s are men in their 20s, Byron’s are teenagers. What will now happen these in children’s lives at school? In the case of Cabot’s offspring, how will they conduct business with a straight face? How will their children’s friends and colleagues be affected?
How should the lovers’ spouses pick up the pieces and lead ordinary lives again? If they are devout members of a church, how will they sing hymns of forgiveness knowing their fellow congregants are gossiping about their trials and tribulations? Most of all, how will they sleep at night?
Is “moving forward” even an option they are able to conceive of right now?
Yes, when grown-ups engage in private behaviour publicly, it is on them to consider, shall we say, the lay of the land. And yet these two people are also fallible human beings, not Jesus disciples, or Buddha’s most devout monks.
Like you and me, human beings make mistakes. We lust, we canoodle, we kiss, we hug, we have sex. It’s not like Cabot and Byron invited us to their rendezvous. They stepped out in public, but with their privacy still relatively theirs.
Yes, it's a gamble. Not because their employer might discover their secret but because of their families. Have we stopped to ask ourselves: what if their spouses know what drove them to such recklessness? What if they are no longer happy in their respective homes?
None of these questions is easy. Life, especially relationships, is a hot mess for many.
I do not hold strong views on the affair, but I understand the danger of quick, cheap, unsustainable moralism — it is easy for us to subject them to high standards of conduct that we ourselves do not always adhere to. With our sniffy, raised nostrils, we are inviting the curtailing of freedom of movement, freedom of fraternity and overall freedom to live as we wish to within the limits of the law.
This is a fascist reaction we are better off without.
Which brings us to our submission to the tyranny of technology. Some argue that technology should be borderless and accessible to everyone, but what happens when the same technology is used for harmful reasons? What happens when technology is used to drop bombs on innocent children and women in hospitals, villages, or queues for food aid, medicine, and so on?
I love titillation just like the person next door. That said, it is incredibly worrying that in an age when poverty levels are up; research institutions are killed off; books on the slave trade are burnt; nations are subjected to genocidal erasure; immigrants are deported to countries they have never heard of; and I can spend three weeks in my village in Hammanskraal without running water, all we are consumed by is the embarrassment of two backdoor lovers.
We dial up our titillation demands. The fix of our lives. Sweaty, craving our daily dose of lewd, we pop token after token into the machine and, drooling, we peep. Well, we are only human, right?
• Madondo’s I’m Not Your Weekend Special: Portraits on the Life+Style & Politics of Brenda Fassie was published by Picador Africa 10 years ago. He is the author of books on black magic allegories, rock & roll and performance of rituals.
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