Nature Is Healing

Full disclosure: I've been on the kiss cam. As it turns out, it was with my wife. We were in San Diego for a Padres game. Between innings the Diamond Vision¹ was showing a live montage of couples kissing in the stands, with a graphic of pink hearts framing the images. A camera operator with a shoulder-mounted camera took a few seconds to set up the shot, pointing his lens in our general direction and gesturing that it was his intent that we be the next couple featured. Like actors on a set, we hit our marks while the operator moved his camera into a proper shooting position. A final hand gesture from the operator and a red light atop the camera let us know we were on, the disembodied voice of some imagined director in both of our minds shouting "Action!" It would be inaccurate to say the moment was staged—thirty seconds before the red light came on we had no idea a camera operator was even in our section of the stands—but we were knowing and willing participants in the spectacle. It doesn't always work that way.

On 16 July 2025, a couple were caught on the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert in Boston. The position of the two has been described as a hug or an embrace. Those who've seen the video are free to draw their own conclusions about whether those terms understate the intimacy of the moment. The couple's chagrined reaction—him ducking out of the frame and her turning and covering her face—has played out over fifty million times on computer and phone screens the world over. The two were almost immediately as identified as Andy Byron, now former CEO of software firm Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the company's head of HR².

As Chloe Veltman wrote for NPR, kiss cams have a history of creating awkward moments. They tend to emphasize opposite-sex couples (or, in a moment of particularly passive aggressive homophobia, they show a same-sex couple wearing the opposing team's gear). They sometimes find celebrities at times and places where those celebrities might prefer to go unnoticed. And although not mentioned by Veltman, there are those times when the camera finds a pair who are obviously siblings or friends or some combination where a public kiss would be inappropriate and there follows a cringy moment of head shaking and hand waving, as if shooing the camera away.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Chip Cutter and Lauren Weber attribute the incident's sudden rise in the popular consciousness to a broader disdain for CEOs, "a takedown of the 'haves' versus the 'have nots.'" The word schadenfreude appears in the article not less than three times, but one gets the impression that it's only because Cutter & Weber's editor wouldn't let them use the word envy. Well, it's The Journal. What do you expect? But Cutter & Weber aren't entirely wrong. The fact that the incident involves a CEO and an HR executive certainly makes it hard to feel sorry for the two. The fact that some reports have surfaced that the CEO might have been kind of a jerk makes it even harder to feel sorry for him. The look on Byron and Cabot's faces at the moment they saw themselves on the screen was priceless. We can imagine—rightly or wrongly—two people unaccustomed to facing consequences for their actions suddenly realizing that consequences will be unavoidable. What Cutter & Weber get wrong though is that by packaging the story so neatly in terms of class rivalries (a sort of packaging likely to be palatable to their readers) they miss out on all the other factors that made this a defining cultural moment.

First, we have to talk about the band. A meme that popped up two days after the concert pretty much said it. "Sure, it’s funny when it’s a CEO. But what about next time when it’s you? When your friends and family find out you like Coldplay?" As part of a statement distancing himself from Astronomer and its then embattled CEO, cofounder Ry Walker tweeted, "I have 704 liked songs in Spotify - none are Coldplay, but I do think Chris Martin is an amazing vocalist". Coldplay occupy an interesting space in commercial music, a space that they share with bands like Train, Nickelback, and Maroon 5. These are bands that have large and loyal followings, bands that obviously have the talent and the know-how to make music that lots of people will enjoy, but they're also bands that a significant number of us absolutely love to hate. If Byron and Cabot had been at a Pearl Jam concert, or Metallica or Bruce Springsteen, we very well might not still be talking about what happened.

We could also talk about the Streisand Effect, named for the time when the California Coastal Records Project imaged the state's entire coast, including Barbara Streisand's Malibu estate. Streisand's objection to the image of her home being in the public domain encouraged people to seek out what otherwise would have been an obscure image in a little-known database, and it has since been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. I'm far from the first to point out that if Byron and Cabot had kept their cool, no one would have noticed. The whole thing would have been five seconds of forgettable imagery on a screen, existing only in the moment. 

Then there are the minor players. A woman, initially misidentified as a coworker but apparently unconnected with the incident, stands to Cabot's right. As the principal players try to make themselves small, she stands frozen like a statue, mouth fixed in what might be a grimace or a bemused smile, eyes wide and drawn to what's going on next to her but seemingly willing themselves to look away, left hand placed protectively on the side of her head as if that's enough to shield her from the horror of the moment. The mystery woman's identity is quite beside the point. In the mid 2020s she's all of us, caught up in a moment not of her making that is frightening and embarrassing and yet somehow almost impossible to look away from. Other minor characters make their appearances. As Byron ducks out of the shot, we see two hands pop up into view at the bottom of the screen, their owner out of frame, both waving simultaneously in the style of Eugene Levy's Bobby Bittman character on SCTV. Two young men rush in to take Byron and Cabot's places, pumping their fists and jumping around with an exuberance that belies the drama going on in front of them. From the earliest days of television, people have had a fascination with seeing themselves on TV. In 2025, one would think that everyone has grown accustomed to seeing themselves on screens, and yet here we are. Whether it's a remote news report, a sporting event, or a Coldplay concert, there's never a shortage of people who will work themselves into the shot for no purpose other than to see and be seen. Maybe Cutter & Weber were unwittingly onto something after all. Maybe we all have a little narcissistic CEO in us, and there but for the grace of God go we all.

As I've written about before, we live in a time in this country's history when we're more bitterly divided than we've been since the 1960s. We live in constant dread of what terrible thing we're going to hear about on the news next. This is the era in which the term doomscrolling was invented. And then one fine summer day in 2025, a CEO slipped on a banana peel and all of us—red and blue, north and south, urban and rural, rich and poor (OK, maybe not that last one)—had a rare opportunity to get in on a shared laugh, a laugh that came at us from every corner of contemporary culture. I think we owe Byron and Cabot a debt of gratitude.

1. I'm old enough that I still refer to giant video screens at sports stadiums by the brand name used by Mitsubishi Electric for the technology that first appeared at Dodger Stadium in the early 1980s.

2. Or, in Astronomer's corporate-speak, chief people officer. Please.