Present Tense is The Swaddle Team's stream of consciousness response to the world's madness.

The theme of this week is social media virality. This is the formula: organic engagement is inversely proportional to how badly you want it. Not even Wimbledon could compete with three complete strangers, who became the Internet's main characters overnight as a result of this equation.

One was an Indian woman who was caught stealing from Target and was duly apprehended by cops in America. Now we're all debating the optics of Indians committing petty theft abroad.

Next, a man and woman in a close embrace were put on blast on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. The man ducked, the woman hid her face, another woman smiled sheepishly. What could perhaps have gone unnoticed if the cheating couple had reacted normally instead propelled the internet into a flurry of investigation and memes. Now, we are all getting live coverage of the Astronomer CEO and HR Head's divorces from their respective spouses.

On the other hand, there was a family that really, really wanted to be seen online -- so much that they presumably spent a lot of money to get popular Instagram accounts to wish a certain couple a happy one-year anniversary. We were reminded by the meme account Pubity, for some reason, that their wedding last year was a global phenomenon that brought many high-profile people together. Paparazzi pages that one typically follows for satiating their appetite for B-list famous-for-being-famous celebs spent at least six rows on the grid dedicated to recapping this wedding. Even print newspapers went down memory lane to commemorate the event. Orry released BTS videos (which makes for great viewing if you pretend it is documentary footage). There is something quite grounding about seeing Elie Saab and Manish Malhotra gowns gathered up to navigate the doorway of what appears to be a standard tourist bus with neon lighting and rickety seats.

Meanwhile, another planned social media drop came from unexpected quarters: Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham of FleetwoodMac cryptically teased a rekindling of their relationship. That even rock n'roll legends are doing coordinated posts, only to be upstaged by the Coldplay concert affair, just confirms the aforementioned formula: there is nothing that the Internet rewards more than shame. This, perhaps, is what we all get wrong in the quest to farm engagement online: common wisdom preaches a bit of shamelessness in baiting an audience, but to really be seen you must in fact be the opposite. You must be filled with shame and, more importantly, you must be caught against your will.

Like, for instance, the ever-elusive Epstein client list. What should be treated like a serious dossier of insidious crimes is instead getting the Jumbotron treatment. Many big names suddenly find themselves in the glare of this awful thing, and the more they defend themselves, the worse they look. Stephen King, for instance, who keeps posting that the Epstein client list is fictitious. He seems super sure about this -- almost too sure, you might say. Elon Musk continues to tease this list at frequent intervals during his non-stop posting spree (does he ever take a walk, a nap, anything that requires logging off?).

Once in a while, someone will publish some names that are allegedly part of a list, not the list, and they add disclaimers that the names don't prove any association with Jeffrey Epstein. So why talk about them? It's almost a moot question: this is exactly the kind of thing we're meant to do on the Internet.

At the risk of being killjoys, a few questions to consider: what if the Target thief's life is ruined forever now? What if the Coldplay couple cannot re-integrate into society after this? They're already immortalized into a video compilation of couples caught cheating. There's a floating suggestion to turn them into a couple's costume for Halloween. Which is perhaps the best summation of the state of things: there's nothing more frightening than one day finding your life upended by Pop Base or Brut posting grainy videos of your indiscretions. Unless you are a business tycoon, in which case you can literally buy the Internet and hold all its users hostage to your nuptials.

In other news, a quick closing recap about the movies: Superman is apparently hiding a political message and War 2 -- a Rs. 200 crore film -- dropped posters that designers think were made on Canva. Good propaganda and bad propaganda in the same week? Just another day in 2025.