July 28 2025 - 11:55am
Last week, the Tea app — a platform where women anonymously rate and review the men they date — rocketed to the top of the App Store charts. Then, it spectacularly imploded when it was exposed that 72,000 user images, including government IDs, were publicly hosted. It’s a perfect storm of contemporary anxieties: dating apps, privacy violations, being terrible at your job, gender wars, and the weaponization of gossip. But was anyone’s life truly ruined, apart from perhaps CEO Sean Cook and his developers?
This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. Even in 2020, being publicly tagged as a “red flag” on a viral app or website would have been a social death. Your employer might have been contacted. Your dating life would have evaporated. You would have hemorrhaged friends. You may have even contemplated suicide in the aftermath.
But in 2025, we’re exhausted, having reached peak cancellation fatigue. The machinery of public shaming, once so devastatingly effective, is breaking. Everyone has been problematic. Everyone has receipts. Everyone has that one screenshot that could, theoretically, destroy them. The result isn’t that we’ve become more moral, though. We are simply out of gas.
Gossip apps aren’t new. There was TheDirty.com, where anonymous submissions could destroy reputations with a single post. There were campus “secrets” Facebook pages, Honesty Box, Ask.fm, Whisper, and Yik Yak, all of which transformed schools into living burn books. There are Facebook groups which ask: “Are we dating the same guy?” The Tea app is just the latest iteration, refined and monetized. We’ve always been gossips. Now, platforms are just promising to make the whisper network “safe” or “accountable”. Yet every attempt fails, because the point isn’t accountability: it’s revenge, or entertainment, or some horrifying marriage of the two.
In 2022, the writer Rayne Fisher-Quann warned of this very phenomenon in a piece about West Elm Caleb, the serial ghoster who briefly became TikTok’s most hated man. But where others saw the beginning of cancellation fatigue, she saw acceleration. She noted how brands rushed to profit from the scandal, how the most serious allegation — non-consensual nude photos — was ignored in favor of more palatable outrage about ghosting, and how the spectacle served as “a system of smoke and mirrors that obfuscates true systemic change”. Fisher-Quann was right about the commodification and the distraction. But three years later, the machine she described seems to be grinding itself down through overuse.
Take the recent incident where Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and HR chief Kristin Cabot were caught on a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert, leading to both their resignations within a week. A couple of days of collective sneering synchronized outrage, then people moved on following a funny ad produced by the company. The customary 15 minutes of infamy have now been compressed into 15 seconds, distributed so widely that their ruinous power has been diluted.
First, our culture turned us all into cops — everyone watching one another, documenting infractions, building cases. But something happens when everyone realizes they’re simultaneously the watcher and the watched. This surveillance doesn’t produce better behavior: it produces nihilism; we are not so much more forgiving as more numb. The panopticon has become so total that it’s collapsed under its own weight.
The old model assumed most people’s lives were fundamentally private, with public exposure representing a catastrophe. But what happens when exposure becomes the default? When everyone assumes their worst moments are already documented somewhere — or worse, lied about? We learn to live with the ambient hum of potential humiliation.
The Tea app might spawn lawsuits and think pieces. Some venture capitalists will fund a competitor with better security. But the men whose profiles were exposed will, for the most part, be fine. Everyone has baggage. More important is that this incident represents the logical endpoint of a surveillance culture. In a world of surveillance, the only sane response is to stop caring. When everything is a scandal, nothing is.
Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.
default_friend