The Byron Syndrome

Andy Byron kissed a woman at a Coldplay concert. It wasn't his wife, and the world literally stopped. Global debates on social media, endless sociological analyses, memes that multiplied like viruses. All of humanity had an opinion on the private life of some guy nobody knew. Byron became more famous than Mandela, more discussed than Gandhi, and even more viral than the pandemic itself.

On the same weekend that Byron became a true celebrity, the Gaza Ministry of Health confirmed more than 60,000 Palestinian deaths, including 17,000 children. UNICEF recalled that more than two million people, almost the entire population of the Gaza Strip, are displaced and without regular access to drinking water. Sudan, plunged into a forgotten civil war, has at least 150,000 dead. And thirty years ago, in just one hundred days, some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in Rwanda while Western television preferred to watch O.J. Simpson's escape live in a white Bronco.

Today, as yesterday, it's not a lack of news, it's an excess of distraction. Byron is O.J. Simpson and Gaza is Rwanda. And us? We're the same idiots, only with smartphones. The Byron case made headlines in dozens of countries, psychological analyses of influencers who barely know how to write, and even musical remixes on TikTok. But on the same weekend, children were dying of thirst, denied a stage, perhaps because they lacked adequate audiovisual production. They lacked the musical framework of Coldplay.

This selective outrage didn't start with Wi-Fi, make no mistake! In 1348, while the Black Death decimated a third of Europe, the elites organized tournaments and banquets. French nobles spent fortunes on extravagant clothing, arguing over the appropriate sleeve length while serfs died by the millions and corpses piled up in the streets of Paris.

During World War II, Hollywood had Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow" while Anne Frank wrote in an attic. The entertainment industry never stopped because, if it did, it would sell fewer tickets. There was always some Nero playing the lyre while Rome burned, complete with processions and banquets in the midst of the catastrophe. The difference is that today we have democratized distraction. Anyone with a smartphone can choose to entertain themselves with sex scandals while children starve to death. As Stalin said, murder is a tragedy, but genocide is a mere statistic.

Social media, in turn, has transformed banality into spectacle. It's not enough to commit adultery; it must be turned into hashtag fodder. Morality has become a performance in which sharing a black square on Instagram offers the same comfort as saving a life, as long as it doesn't involve effort. Yes, it's psychologically more comfortable to destroy the reputation of an unfaithful executive than to face the complexity of a genocide. Byron is an easy target, Gaza is complicated. Hence, Byron.

What we have today, in this trivialization of evil, is the spectacularization of the banal, in which we allow ourselves the luxury of transforming trivial personal dramas into historical events, while true catastrophes become "heavy content" that no one wants to share. If medieval public executions were literal, today they are symbolic, with jobs destroyed, reputations shattered, private lives exposed in a digital arena where everyone is judge and the defendant never has the right to a rebuttal.

The digital mob is more cruel than any medieval executioner because it has the illusion of moral superiority. Like the stoning scene in "Life of Brian," where the mob gathers to execute someone for a minor transgression, we gather digitally to throw virtual stones. The difference is that the Romans knew they were barbarians, while we think we are civilized.

The most obscene? Celebrities who make millions post stories about "consciousness" and "world peace" while remaining religiously silent about wars funded by the same governments that give them advertising contracts. Katy Perry, for example, may speak of universal love, but she's never mentioned Yemen—and she even goes to space, despite her often-touted environmental concerns. Oprah may promote "gratitude," but Sudan doesn't exist in her spiritual universe. Meanwhile, yoga instructors make videos about "positive energy" with the Ukrainian flag in the background and where, curiously, no chakra aligns with Palestine.

Social media algorithms systematically silence certain realities while promoting romantic dramas as if they were sacred texts. Baudrillard was right when he said that we live in an age of simulacra where symbols are worth more than reality. It's easier to cancel Byron than to try to stop a genocide. It's the digital equivalent of the scene from "Life of Brian" where Brian shouts to the crowd, "You are all individuals!" and everyone responds in unison, "Yes! We are all individuals!"

We are morally narcissistic in high definition, because we are outraged not by the suffering of others, but by what that outrage communicates about our own ethical superiority. "I'm the kind of person who cares." Then we return to brunch, Netflix, and the next scandal.

History will judge us brutally. They'll ask how a generation with access to all the information in the world chose to obsess over the love lives of executives while passively watching genocides broadcast live. They'll study us like we studied the Germans who pretended not to know about the concentration camps. The difference is that the Germans had the excuse of censorship; we have Google, after all! Once again, as Brian from Monty Python would say: "You don't need to follow me! Think for yourselves!" But this quote will probably also become a meme and lose all meaning because that's what we do best: transforming wisdom into entertainment, tragedy into content, and awareness into product.

In the end, as these words scroll across the screen, children die of thirst and survivors sleep under rubble. And when you close this window, others will open: a new scandal, a new performance of virtue. Because tomorrow will always be another Byron. And Gaza, or Sudan, or any other invisible hell, can wait.