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The sadist assault on the 'Coldplay couple'

I wish I didn’t know who Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot are. As you no doubt know by now, the Astronomer CEO and his firm’s HR chief were caught on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert.

While turning someone into a meme might seem fun, it’s severely undignified, and discards the customs and safeguards of a liberal society in order to participate in a sadistic pile-on. The force and direction of this collective online judgment should be turned against itself: We should punish not those caught in the panopticon, but the anonymous posters, Redditors, and the like; all who take joy in random acts of scorn. There are secondary benefits, too: public spaces are also just better without everyone being on their phones; 50,000 people all filming the same concert, for instance, aside from having unintended consequences, is stupid and unaesthetic.

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