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Comment on The Astronomer CEO's Coldplay Concert Fiasco Is Emblematic of Our Social Media Surveillance Dystopia | 404 Media

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theangriestbird@beehaw.org ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

That he is a billionaire and doing something deeply unethical is what makes the story go viral all over social media.

Is there a reliable source that he is a billionaire? I haven’t seen that in any reporting. “Billionaire” is a four letter word around these parts, I would be careful about throwing the label around without solid evidence.

Perhaps the problems this exposes are not just our grim and omnipresent surveillance apparatus, but the attached system of gig-economy content creators all racing to the lowest common denominator for scraps of engagement and ad revenue

This I think is the real story. This isn’t necessarily about our surveillance state, but more that we are constantly observed by the world and it is a specific type of hell that we cannot escape. The fact that this makes adultery more difficult is a bittersweet benefit, I guess, but there are no guardrails on this sort of thing. If this was in any other context besides a cheating CEO this would all be supremely fucked up, and that’s why I think this is an article worth talking about.

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SteevyT@beehaw.org ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Half-assed Google search suggests he’s worth somewhere between 20 and 70 million.

Astronomer as a company is worth around a billion.

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- theangriestbird@beehaw.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  Half-assed Google search suggests he’s worth somewhere between 20 and 70 million.
  
  Sounds believeable, but I will point out that a google search alone is not a reliable source, so we still truly do not know and we shouldn’t be making statements like this without reliable sources. Page one of a google search is just all the publications that paid google the most money to be on page one. IME, most of those are trash-tier AI-gen articles.
  
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codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Fair cop, I didn’t check source I just saw it mentioned elsewhere. His company being valued at just over a billlion probably confused people.

I grant that there’s a difference of degrees here, but him being “just” an unethical millionaire doesn’t substantially change my views on the situation.

Someone in another thread mentioned polyamory which I find a personally interesting angle as well, since I practice relationship anarchy. This situation would just never happen to me because all my paramours know each other and know about the activies we do together. It makes me suspicious of these stories because while I also enjoy laughing at a rich guy getting caught, I don’t like that it culturally reinforces this idea of monogamy as a core value and that breaking the trust of such monogamy should have public consequences.

Obviously the last thing I want is society-wide condemnation of the wrong aspect of this situation. It isnt the having a side-piece that’s the problem, it’s the lying to your primary partner (and everyone else) that actually creates the trouble.

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