Flock cameras. Canoodling lawyers. How much supervision are we comfortable with?

Let’s state it right up there that it’s probably not a smart idea or a morally honorable thing to do in broad daylight in Central Park and make out with your younger co-worker, especially if you’re married. That’s allegedly what happened between two white-shoe lawyers on a recent summer day. It’s possible that such things happen all the time in a city of 8.6 million; it’s possible not. Honestly, it’s none of my business or yours. The only reason I know about it is that a TikToker named Jay Guapo, who has 3.6 million followers, happened to walk by and decided to film the couple and berate them (“There are kids around!”) and continue filming over their desperate objections, then post the video on his feed, where it has now been viewed more than 12 million times, a process that became the subject of the New York Post. published several stories about the incident, calling the pair “canoodling lawyers.”

The TikTok comment was enthusiastic about the video. Viewers could tell by the anguished looks on the pair’s faces that they were deeply unhappy about being filmed – unhappy in a way that suggested canoodling was off limits. But some commentators seem more concerned with Jay Guap’s decision, often arguing that sure, they may have been doing something wrong, but extramarital canoodling is not illegal. So why film it? And why publish it?

For some it was compensation for a grievous sin; for others, it was just the latest reminder that smartphone cameras and social media platforms have combined to create a stochastic kangaroo court — one that can be convened through an invisible portal to deliver swift justice, or at least its own version. (The Financial Times reported six days after the video was published that the law firm had put the elderly canoodler on leave.) The taboo against marital infidelity needs no introduction and would, I bet, have been settled before Moses first climbed Mount Sinai. But “filming strangers in public and putting it on the Internet in front of millions of people, for fun” wasn’t possible in the days of chiseled tablets, and not even two decades ago, in the days of BlackBerrys. It’s too new a behavior for there to be any cultural consensus about it. At what point is it okay to film strangers? whenever you want Are they breaking the law? Whose law? So the court stays in session, all day and all night, thanks to the miniaturization of recording devices.

It can seem hard to believe now, but at the dawn of this age, some people actually believed that spreading cameras, microphones, and whatever else into millions of hands could be a shield against surveillance.