Not so long ago, a bad decision might have cost someone a little embarrassment at church on Sunday or a stern look from a neighbor over the fence. Now the consequences are global and immediate. One shaky video, one ill-timed hand gesture, and millions of strangers are suddenly in the room. Are we better off because selfishness gets called out? Or worse off because every stumble meets a digital pitchfork?
Start in Miami on September 5. Phillies– Marlins. Fourth inning. Harrison Bader launches a shot into the left-field seats at loanDepot Park. A dad—Drew Feltwell—comes up with the ball and walks it to his 10-year-old, Lincoln, a birthday moment you could frame. Then it unravels. A woman who’d chased the ball confronts them, insists it’s hers, and soon the boy is empty-handed while cameras catch her flipping off the section. The clip flies, the nickname machine spins, and the internet declares a villain. Stadium staff hustle to stop the bleeding: swag bag in-game, meet-and-greet after, and Bader sends the kid home with a signed bat. Meanwhile, the pile-on overshoots the target. Strangers get misidentified, a New Jersey school district has to issue a public “not our employee,” and the actual woman remains unknown. The boy gets a bat; the online detectives get it wrong; the rest of us get a reminder that outrage accelerates faster than accuracy.
A few miles north and a few days earlier, the U.S. Open serves a cleaner case study. After a match, Kamil Majchrzak lobs a signed hat toward a kid. A suited spectator—Piotr Szczerek—snatches it like a year-end bonus, pockets it, and gets immortalized by broadcast cameras. The internet closes ranks. Days later, the apology lands, the hat is said to be returned, and the player turns the mess into a meetand- greet. The souvenir doesn’t last; the lesson does. He left the Open without the hat and—with a little luck—without the impulse to grab the next one.
Then there’s Foxborough in July. Coldplay at Gillette Stadium. A jumbotron sweep finds Astronomer’s CEO, Andy Byron, and his chief people officer, Kristin Cabot, wrapped up together—both married to other people. Tens of thousands in the building, millions online by morning. The corporate fallout is immediate: resignations at the top. The personal fallout keeps rolling: divorce filing in August, and this week, the estranged spouse says the separation pre-dated the concert. Public spectacle, private wreckage. Coldplay shows are built for singalongs and confetti—this one added career cannons and court filings.
Thread the three together and a pattern snaps into focus. The stands, the concourse, the concert lawn—what used to be forgotten by Monday morning now loops forever in the scroll. Sometimes the web delivers tidy accountability: a kid gets the ball intended for him, a young fan ends up with the cap, power gets checked in public. Sometimes it curdles into a witch hunt: wrong names, wrong jobs, wrong towns, all trialed by timeline before the truth can catch up. The boy in Miami needed crowd control; the woman in the clip needed accurate ID; the corporate duo in Foxborough needed an HR policy that wasn’t written on a napkin.
None of this replaces eternal judgment for those who believe in it, but something else is running alongside: a worldly tribunal that convenes anywhere a lens can lock and a clip can travel. The pitchforks have always been there; they used to gather at the edge of the village square. Now they live on home screens, tucked between Candy Crush and the weather app. Whether that makes us better or worse is still an open question. What’s certain is that very little done in the dark stays there for long.
