The Coldplay concert kiss cam incident is the most viral moment of 2025. It’s also a video game now, sort of. Coldplay Canoodlers was thought up by Jonathan Mann, best known as the guy who has uploaded a new song to YouTube every day for over a decade (Remember “GTA: This Is Why We vVdeo Gaming?”) It’s a point-and-click hidden object game where you scan a crowd for two executives in an inappropriate embrace at a Coldplay concert, and a funny gag that underlines how much this all sort of secretly sucks.
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Polgyon reports that Mann used AI to “vibe code” Coldplay Canoodlers. In other words, it was made by a computer vomiting up bits of the internet originally created by other people. The idea is you scroll across stadium of anonymous faces as zoomed-in images appear on a jumbotron on the stage. Once you spot the pixelated models of the real-life Coldplay kiss cam couple, audio from the viral video cuts in with Chris Martin saying “Oh, look at these two, alright, come on, you’re okay…Oh, what?”
The incident happened during Coldplay’s July 15 show in Foxborough, MA, and has been propelling engagement on the internet ever since. The two “canoodlers” were revealed to be the CEO and Chief People Officer of Astronomer, a company that sells a DataOps platform and related AI and analytics tools. Former employees who called the CEO “toxic” are reportedly having a great time dunking on their old bosses in DMs, and neither executive, both of whom are apparently married to other people, have commented on what happened.
“Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding,” the company announced late Friday in a statement on X. “Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability. The Board of Directors has initiated a formal investigation into this matter and we will have additional details to share very shortly.”
Multiple things can be true at once. The viral moment is incredibly entertaining. Watching the leaders of a $100 million tech firm get an accidentally karmic callout by the guy who sang “Yellow,” of all people, provides a Shakespearian level of satisfying irony in an age when the internet constantly bombards us with bad things happening to the most vulnerable among us.
It’s also grim that such an ultimately unimportant moment between strangers can have the eye of the entire internet—and the reporting resources of multiple major news outlets—funneled down upon it. It’s like the Eye of Sauron obsessing over Frodo, but instead of carrying the most powerful ring in existence, he’s clutching printouts of all the embarrassing things he ever Googled.
404 Media has an excellent write-up explaining how a viral social media moment like this is only made possible by the industrial-level surveillance tools that have become embedded in everyday life. The same tools random internet users might use to goof on the internet’s weekly main characters or debate the facts of hyper-local, hyper-inconsequential events can be used by ICE to disappear people without due process. Roblox, a content creator platform with a checkered record when it comes to user safety, now wants to start scanning kids faces for age verification. Lol. LMAO. Not a chance.
Coldplay Canoodlers, a clever and no doubt well-intentioned attempt to riff on the viral conversation of the week, is another bleak dead-end. It’s a news game without message, but this kind exists with the benefit of tools that make it easier and easier to do all sorts of things just to feed the internet’s engagement machine. It’s a derivative meme saddled with the radioactive stink of generative AI. In the words of Martin, “Give me real, don’t give me fake.”
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