The viral Coldplay kiss-cam scandal—where Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and his HR director were caught mid-affair in front of tens of thousands—illustrates something deep about human nature. Namely, that we are instinctively driven to absorb and pass on gossip, and we do so in proportion to the reputational stakes involved.
Had the same moment involved a trailer park guy and his mistress, no one would have cared. But when the people caught on camera are high-status—when the fallout threatens careers, marriages, corporate leadership—it triggers an evolved mechanism in the human brain. We snap to attention. We pass it on. We keep it alive.
In the concluding chapter of Expressly Human, we describe this mechanism as the gossip blockchain:
“We suggest that reputational events get recorded onto a kind of ‘gossip blockchain’ — a permanent, distributed, consensus-driven ledger of socially significant actions that humans instinctively monitor and update.”
That’s exactly what happened here. The kiss-cam footage was uploaded, and within hours, millions had seen it. Each of us, unconsciously, ran a sort of social ledger update. Reputations were assessed, degraded, and memorialized—not just individually, but collectively. The event was mined into the blockchain of human gossip, where it will live on as a reputational artifact.
This isn’t cancel culture. It’s something deeper: a cognitive feature of our species. We are designed to track who’s trustworthy, who’s climbing, who’s falling. Gossip is not noise—it’s social currency, and the blockchain keeps the books.
And here’s something just as remarkable: This moment led to worldwide coordinated interest, conversation, and jokes, all across social media and dinner tables—yet no one commanded us to talk about it. No elite curated the narrative. No institution forced the conversation. It happened entirely bottom-up, through the decentralized, reputation-sensitive instincts of social animals running open-source mental software. That’s the gossip blockchain in action.
Social narratives have blockchain-like properties, making them difficult to overturn
On May 7, 2020, I discussed on Twitter how, once Covid collective hysteria got going, along with a new narrative, it was going to be very difficult to ever get rid of it.