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BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hello, hello. I’m Brittany Luse, and you’re listening to IT’S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR, a show about what’s going on in culture and why it doesn’t happen by accident.
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LUSE: OK. So, there’s been a video that went viral recently. Can you describe what happened in the video and the Coldplay of it all?
KATE WAGNER: Yeah. So, this guy, Andy Byron, he’s a CEO at an AI firm in New York called Astronomer. He was at a Coldplay concert with his head of HR, Kristen Cabot, with whom he was allegedly having an affair. And Coldplay passed on the kiss cam to them. And to be fair, they did look like they were having a magical time.
LUSE: (Laughter) I’m inclined to agree.
WAGNER: Of course, they noticed and they ducked out of sight, and the whole thing became a meme pretty quickly.
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LUSE: This week, we’re connecting the dots between Coldplay, panopticons and dating app screenshots. I know, I know. How are all of these things connected? Well, we’re going to find out with Kate Wagner, architecture critic at “The Nation.” Kate, welcome to IT’S BEEN A MINUTE.
WAGNER: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
LUSE: Yeah, I mean, this was a sensation, I’ll say (laughter). This was a total sensation. You know, I get why this went viral. I mean, it’s a juicy story, you know. Jumping away from someone you’re dancing with on a kiss cam. It’s just not expected. And to find out that they’re a CEO and the head of HR, I mean, is obviously kind of wild. Byron has tendered his resignation and Cabot has been placed on leave.
And, of course, they’ve both been punished and doxed by the online public. But – and this is my opinion here – I have serious concerns, though, about whether this video should have been posted.
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LUSE: To listeners who are skeptical, hear me out. Covert canoodling between two high-powered executives should be questioned. But I think this video’s virality and the fallout from it speaks to a larger issue – the erosion of privacy in our lives. We see viral videos of people acting funny in public pretty regularly, but it goes beyond public places.
Dating screenshots, text threads and call-out posts go viral all the time, too. We’re at risk of being surveilled and going viral anytime we interact with another person, in public or in private. Ultimately, why are we all OK surveilling ourselves and each other? And what does surveillance culture do to all of us?
So, Kate, you wrote this great essay in Lux Magazine about how internet surveillance has killed eroticism in particular, and there’s a lot there, but off the jump, what are the ways you think we are all complicit in creating this surveillance culture?
WAGNER: I think this problem starts pretty early in the development of social media, right? Reality TV, of course, opened the camera into our homes and exposed, you know, people’s lives. We love tabloids. We love spectacle. We were already primed to kind of use that ourselves when we each got handed a mic, right?
And so this kind of content has always been popular on social media. It’s always been popular to sometimes exploit ourselves or to post, you know, intimate things about others. Like, you could go viral. You could maybe even make a career. Like, look at Hawk Tuah Girl, right?
LUSE: Yeah.
WAGNER: You can get enormous amounts of attention from a single post. That became a powerful incentive for letting down these boundaries that maybe we should have questioned from the beginning. Is it really OK to post, you know, screenshots of a private conversation? Is it really OK to photograph strangers? And I think it’s now become socially permissible, and the consequences are devastating.
LUSE: I think a part of it is that we have a surveillance culture, but also part of it is that a lot of us are also willing to put other people, but also ourselves out there in pursuit of attention.
WAGNER: I also think people want validation, right? There’s a common type of post that’s, like, look at this guy on Tinder and his profile. Is he sus? Look at how crazy my ex is being in this text message. It’s like, yeah…
LUSE: Yeah.
WAGNER: …I want to be the one who is validated. I want to be the one who is seen as having the right judgment. When we do this to ourselves, when we do this to each other, it inhibits us from sharing the world with others. Like, the fear of going viral, the fear of being surveilled, the fear of being called out. I think these things all drive us away from public life, and they drive us away from the things that should make us happy. And people wonder why people want to date ChatGPT. Maybe this is the reason.
LUSE: In thinking about privacy, how do you differentiate between the privacy we can expect in public and the privacy we can expect in private life, especially now that the internet has kind of invaded both?
WAGNER: Yeah. I think the internet has made both public and private life very porous concepts. The internet seeps into our private lives, even though it’s ostensibly a public space. And it’s also a private space. DMs, dating sites, these are private spaces, ostensibly. And in public life, you know, you’re always vulnerable to being seen and being known.
But the internalization of the internet into how we interact in public spaces, I think is a really interesting phenomenon. For example, I saw this article that posited that Gen Z are drinking less, not because of, like, health reasons, per se, but because they’re afraid of being filmed acting a fool. And I don’t know if you saw the Tyler, The Creator bit, where he had a party without phones.
LUSE: Yeah.
WAGNER: And there’s this idea that people are dancing less because, again, they don’t want to be filmed. Like, it inhibits how we behave in public space. And when he had this party without the phones, he said it was completely electric.
LUSE: Yeah. I thought that was so interesting. I mean, he had this post where he was talking about, like, being sad, you know, that people don’t dance anymore, so he created a space where they could. To quote him, “I asked some friends why they don’t dance in public, and some said because of the fear of being filmed. It made me wonder how much of our human spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme, all for having a good time.”
He said, as you mentioned, “I just got back from a listening party for this album and, man, was one of the greatest nights of my life. It felt like all that pent-up energy finally got released.” Now, I am, like, late 30s, prime millennial age. Me, I’ll dance anywhere. Like, I’ll dance at the grocery store, I’ll dance on the street.
Like, I don’t care if I hear something. It’s like, my body – I can’t stop. Like, I don’t care if someone takes a video of me ’cause I’m, like, I’m riding a good one. Like, you can’t accuse me of having a bad time.
WAGNER: (Laughter).
LUSE: But it is a thing, though, for a lot of people. Are you, like, a dancer or are you a non-dancer?
WAGNER: No, I actually I am afraid to dance.
LUSE: Really?
WAGNER: Yeah. It started actually in middle school. This girl who was watching me, she was really popular and she was, like, you dance like a freak, and I never danced…
LUSE: Wow.
WAGNER: …After that. And then…
LUSE: Oh, my gosh.
WAGNER: …As I got older, I was just afraid of being seen dancing or also of being filmed.
LUSE: What you’re describing, I mean, when you talk about this sort of, like, mean, popular girl from middle school or even, like, those of us who have had the traumatic experience of having their diary read by a parent as a teenager…
WAGNER: Oh, my God.
LUSE: …It’s interesting that, like, that kind of deeply shameful, deeply personal kind of fear is kind of baked into our social interactions. It’s baked into, like, our kind of social contract right now. Talk to me more about how that affects how we interact with other people, or even ourselves.
WAGNER: Yeah. I think it breeds a level of distrust that is inhibitive to making really deep connections with people. Yeah, I started to notice this pattern with my friends where, when they were talking about conflict in their lives, they weren’t talking really about, I, you know, I statements. This made me feel like this, and now I don’t know what to do.
They were kind of presenting themselves in a – in an almost pseudo PR way, where they were trying to justify themselves and their actions and defend themselves against some kind of, like, invisible audience or some kind of moral judgment that, you know, I was their friend and I would not feel that way about them.
It sounded a lot like posting online, the kind of thing you would say when you would talk about a conflict in your life online.
LUSE: I mean – and that gets at something else I think that’s kind of key to all this. Like, I think people are afraid of being mocked, certainly. But more than that, I think a lot of people are afraid of being judged as being…
WAGNER: Yeah.
LUSE: …A bad person. I think that surveillance and morality are so closely intertwined. Like, there’s a moral aspect of this. Like, it’s not just about entertainment. And like I said, was I entertained by the Coldplay kiss cam? Hell, yeah, I was.
WAGNER: (Laughter).
LUSE: But there are people who took it so much further. They’re going on Facebook and trying to find the CEO’s – or perhaps former CEO’s – wife, or, you know, they’re trying to, you know, dig into people’s, like, you know, sort of personal lives and kind of trying to find out what’s going on. Frankly, in order to put them on blast or punish them, like they did with Byron and Cabot.
Now, I’ll say, I think that when we’re talking about, like, you know, abuses of power, when we’re talking about things like sexual assault, racism, I think that there have been call-outs or viral moments or screenshots or surreptitious recordings. And I could see how that might be more helpful for attaining some kind of justice for those things than staying silent about that sort of serious, egregious, heinous behavior.
But I also think, though, we’ve reached a point where any little infraction against someone else’s moral code – right? – like, you know, however personal and individual that may be, whether that happens in public or in private, that can be reason for fear of doxing. That definitely was the case with West Elm Caleb, who went viral and was doxed just for being kind of a bad date.
Talk to me about how surveillance culture is tied to moral judgment.
WAGNER: Yeah, definitely. In my piece I drew a connection to #MeToo, which I was in graduate school at the time, and there were professors at the school where I was in graduate school, where there were, you know, rumors and there were long-standing open secrets, and there were ways that people were trying to deal with this.
And the thing about #MeToo was is that there was a collective effort to address a certain injustice. And a lot of times that collective effort happened through formal means. When we were trying to, you know, protect ourselves in graduate school, we wanted to get a Title IX, right? The hysterical kind of response to #MeToo from misogynists has been to paint it as nothing but kind of call-outs on social media where women want to ruin an innocent man’s life.
And by drawing this kind of equivalency between the more quotidian ways that we hurt each other and ways in which we severely hurt one another and which were trying to be dealt in this collective way, successfully, I think, chipped away the accomplishments of #MeToo. But I also think that there was this idea – and I think it was a utopian idea – that we could make change in the world simply by telling stories.
WAGNER: What happens when those stories are weaponized against us? People used to call it, I guess, call-out culture, but I don’t think that’s really fair. I think something else is happening here that is really just about punishment.
LUSE: It’s tricky, too, because I think part of the reason why the call-out post or, you know, the leaking of X, Y and Z became these powerful tools to begin with, is because people who were posting these conversations or who were posting these screenshots and what have you, are people who perhaps did not have the tools, didn’t have the power, didn’t have the money, or were not believed to be able to, like, interact with the court system in a confident way, or at all. Structural solutions have failed people.
WAGNER: Absolutely.
LUSE: So in some ways, like, I see the purpose for the power of these, you know, this type of engagement, I guess, this type of call-out. But I think for those same reasons, they can be so easily warped and they have been so easily warped. We’ve kind of reached a point where people, instead of thinking about a grander scale of, like, how right or wrong something may be, people are sometimes more thinking, like, is this offending my sensibilities?
WAGNER: Yeah, exactly.
LUSE: I’m thinking about actually a post that went viral this week on X. Someone shared a screenshot of their roommate saying that his girlfriend was going to be moving to their town soon, and she needed to stay with them all.
WAGNER: I saw this, yeah.
LUSE: Basically, for all of Tuesday, people were chiming in – yeah – as to, like, whether it was OK that the roommate announced this was going to happen. Should he have asked? Well, it depends. How long is she going to be staying there? And I wouldn’t deal with this. I’m not the kind of person who takes things lying down, like the rest of you.
I mean, this was, like, a nine-hour affair (laughter) on Twitter or, excuse me, on X. This is not (laughter) a deep, moral wrong.
WAGNER: Yeah (laughter).
LUSE: It’s a deep moral question. You know, this was a private conversation between roommates that may have put them all at risk after it went viral. My hypothesis is that because people feel powerless in so many other ways and they don’t feel like they have authority in so many other ways, that they can gain a feeling of power when the internet rallies behind them, or, you know, if you’re seeing a post, you can put forth a sort of authority on who’s right or who’s wrong.
WAGNER: I think that it’s also a matter of feeling entitled to other people’s lives. You know, it’s one thing if you’re racist or abusing somebody, but a lot of discourse is just, I don’t like that, and so I’m going to use my public following to get you to bend the knee.
LUSE: I wonder, how do we get out of living in a kind of fear of being watched and punished when the threat of going viral online still very much, very much exists?
WAGNER: Yeah, I mean, I think we live in a kind of penopticon, right? And, you know, the penopticon is an idea that originates in the late 18th century, which was, by the way, like, a time of extreme unrest. It was, like, war and revolution, what have you. And the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham had this idea of, like, a circular jail where the cells are arranged around a central guard tower and, like, the guard can keep an eye on all the inmates and none of the inmates can ever know if it’s them who’s being watched ’cause the guard is a little too way – far away to tell.
And so the idea was by inducing this sort of self-inflicted vigilance, the inmates would be better behaved and would, you know, regulate their actions more. The philosopher, Foucault, who studied how power relations mapped into society, saw the panopticon as a way of analyzing how we create and sustain social norms.
And so the panopticon in the internet age is not only omnipresent in the digital space, we’ve also internalized it.
LUSE: The prison guard is in your heart.
WAGNER: In my heart.
LUSE: Yeah.
WAGNER: And so we have to, as a culture, fight for our right to have privacy. And we as a culture also have to stop participating in the spectacles. We have to ourselves not feel the temptation to post about strangers, especially to post photographs or to post screenshots. We have to have – regain a certain sense of empathy, which is that, you know, would you like that if that happened to you?
Look, we have these tech companies. They’re profiting off of us exploiting ourselves and each other. We live in a time where we’re afraid to dance…
LUSE: Hah.
WAGNER: …Because we’re afraid of being filmed. Like, our basic human autonomy and our basic ability to find pleasure in the world has become so eroded that something’s got to give. We have to ask ourselves, is this the way we should be living? And I think the answer is no. And so, part of it is logging off. But it’s also changing our own ways of thinking about what we do on social media and how we feel about other people.
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LUSE: Oh, my gosh, Kate, I hope you dance.
WAGNER: Thank you (laughter).
LUSE: I hope you dance, Kate. And I hope that for other people. But, Kate, I have learned so much here. Thank you so much.
WAGNER: Thank you. This was really fun.
LUSE: And as a thank you, I like to teach you a little something with a game.
WAGNER: Yay.
LUSE: Yay, I love that. We’ll be right back with little game I like to call But Did You Know? Stick around.
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LUSE: All right, all right. We’re going to play a little game I like to call But Did You Know?
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LUSE: Here’s how it works. My producer has gathered some trivia about a very relevant topic. And for the first time ever, you’ll be playing against me. But don’t worry. The fix isn’t in. I’ll read the questions, and I haven’t seen any of these questions before now. And I also do not know the answers in advance. My producer, Liam, will be the off-mic game master and will send a message with the answer after we’ve guessed.
WAGNER: Oh, my God.
LUSE: It’s all multiple choice. The first person to say the right answer gets a point. Person with the most points wins. Are you ready?
WAGNER: Yes.
LUSE: This trivia game’s theme is Caught In 4K. It’s about big moments caught on camera. OK. First question. The Hindenburg crashed in 1937. There was a lot of footage of the crash because journalists came to see the first transatlantic Zeppelin flight, but someone was also filming from the inside of the Hindenburg? Oh, no. OK.
Who were they? A, a vaudeville acrobat named Joseph Spah? B, a German movie starlet named Greta Schneider? Or C, an Olympic javelin thrower named Eugene Hoots (ph)?
WAGNER: Well, I have no idea, but I’m going to guess A, because that is the most amusing answer to me.
LUSE: I’m also going to go A, too. I think that’s just such a cute answer. And the answer is A.
WAGNER: Whoa.
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LUSE: All right. His stage name was Ben Dova.
WAGNER: (Laughter).
LUSE: Oh, my God. Wait. I’m sorry.
WAGNER: What?
LUSE: (Laughter) I didn’t understand it.
(LAUGHTER)
LUSE: His stage name was really Ben Dova. Liam, where did you find this? And Liam says, yes.
(LAUGHTER)
LUSE: Oh, my God. OK. Wow.
WAGNER: That’s great.
LUSE: He had brought a camera with him and was filming the Hindenburg’s landing when it crashed. Oh, my God. He told the Pittsburgh Press he smashed the window with his fist, climbed through and jumped out. What – what the hell? (Laughter) He said, quote, “I was not panicky. I guess being in the show business, ready for everything, was the reason I held my head.”
WAGNER: (Laughter).
LUSE: Oh, my gosh. I mean, if, I guess, I don’t know, if I was an acrobat, I’d also feel uniquely qualified to jump out of a burning Zeppelin without freaking out.
WAGNER: Yeah, that seems like a thing they would do, like, under the big tent, right?
LUSE: Exactly. Exactly. Very – it’s giving circus. All righty. Question number two. What kind of exercise was fitness instructor Khing Hnin Wai doing when she unwittingly captured a coup in Myanmar in 2021? Was it, A, Jazzersize? B, Aerobics? Or C, Zumba?
I think it was Zumba.
WAGNER: I think it was B – right? – aerobics.
LUSE: Liam, tell me. B, you’re right (laughter).
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LUSE: You’re right (laughter). I just assumed it was Zumba because, I don’t know. I feel like Zumba is like – you know what, though? Zumba’s probably not even that new. I was like, ’cause Zumba’s, like, so new. It’s, like, from, like, 2006.
WAGNER: (Laughter) Yeah.
LUSE: So, as of right now, the score is you, two, me, zero. Last question. This event probably wasn’t as momentous for the world as the first two, but it was momentous for me. After the 2014 Met Gala, a fight between JAY-Z and Solange was – yeah, this was momentous for me. I still remember where I was. It was captured in an elevator. What else was caught on camera at the Met Gala that year?
A, 2 Chainz proposed to Kesha Ward? B, Jason Derulo fell down the stairs? Or C, a streaker in a pink mankini tried to run on the red carpet? I’m going to go A.
WAGNER: I think it’s B ’cause it turned into a meme.
LUSE: But is that real? Did he really fall down the stairs? We’re going to find out. Let me see. C. We were both wrong. I didn’t even know that.
WAGNER: Wow.
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LUSE: A streaker in a pink mankini tried to run on the red carpet. Fab choice, in my opinion…
WAGNER: Yeah, for real.
LUSE: …I’ve got to say, but wow, I guess the shock of that probably got drowned out by the elevator moment. Wow.
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LUSE: All right. Well, that’s it for But Did You Know? for this week. Congratulations to Kate on your win.
WAGNER: Thank you.
LUSE: Thank you so much for joining me today.
WAGNER: Thank you for having me. It’s been really fun.
LUSE: That was Kate Wagner, architecture critic at “The Nation.”
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LUSE: And I’m going to put on my influencer hat for a second and ask you to please subscribe to this show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you’re listening. Click follow so you know the latest in culture while it’s still hot. This episode of IT’S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by…
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.
LUSE: This episode was edited by…
NEENA PATHAK, BYLINE: Neena Pathak.
LUSE: Our supervising producer is…
BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.
LUSE: Our executive producer is…
VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is…
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: All right. That’s all for this episode of IT’S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I’m Brittany Luse. Talk soon.
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