Flock Cameras. Canoodling Lawyers. How Much Surveillance Are We Comfortable With?

Let’s stipulate here, right up top, that it’s probably not a smart idea, or a morally upright thing, to go to Central Park in broad daylight and make out with your younger colleague, especially if you’re married. This is, reportedly, what happened between two white-shoe lawyers on a recent summer day. It’s possible this sort of thing happens all the time in a city of 8.6 million; it’s possible it doesn’t. Frankly, 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 be walking by and decided to film the couple, and scold them (“There’s kids around!”), and continue filming them over their distressed objections, and then post the video to his feed, where it has now been viewed more than 12 million times, becoming in the process an ongoing subject of investigation by The New York Post, which has published several stories about the incident, dubbing the pair the “canoodling lawyers.”

The TikTok commentariat was thrilled by the video. Viewers intuited from the mortified looks on the pair’s faces that they were profoundly unhappy to have been filmed — unhappy in a way that suggested the canoodling was unsanctioned. But some of the commenters seem more disturbed by Jay Guapo’s decision making, often arguing that, sure, maybe they were doing something wrong, but extramarital canoodling isn’t illegal. So why film it? And why post it?

For some, it was comeuppance for a grave sin; for others, it was simply the latest reminder that smartphone cameras and social media platforms have together created a stochastic kangaroo court — one that can be summoned through an invisible portal to deliver swift justice, or at least its own version of it. (The Financial Times reported six days after the video was posted that the law firm had put the elder, male canoodler on leave.) The taboo against marital infidelity needs no introduction and was, I’d be willing to bet, a settled matter before Moses climbed Mount Sinai the first time. But “filming strangers in public and putting it on the internet in front of millions of people, for fun” was not possible in the time of chiseled tablets, nor even just two decades ago, in the age of the BlackBerry. It’s too new a behavior for there to be any sort of cultural consensus about it. At what point does it become OK to film strangers? Whenever you want? If they’re breaking the law? Whose law? So the court remains in session, all day and all night, thanks to the miniaturization of recording devices.

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