Taylor Swift and Matty Healy are post-reality TV

When we're all on our phones, reality is the new entertainment.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

So what I think about Taylor Swift dating Matty Healy is—*piano falls on me from the sky*—Kate

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On Sunday night, Keith Urban took one for the team and all but confirmed longstanding rumors of a romance between Bo Burnham and Phoebe Bridgers. That’s not what he thought he was doing, though. He thought he was posting a TikTok video of himself and his wife, Nicole Kidman, dancing in the VIP tent during one of the Philadelphia stops of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. Phoebe and Bo were right behind them, seemingly making out. I honestly cannot believe the video is still up. 

@keithurbanwe love ya @Taylor Swift 🫶 #erastour

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“KEITH YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU DID BUT THANK YOU,” one commenter wrote.

Thanks to TikTok I feel like I have seen this entire tour despite never stepping foot in an arena. I also know everything notable that has happened in the audience. The stadiums are filled with tens of thousands of people, and nearly every one of them is on their phone. And they’re not just filming in little clips—the entire thing is getting livestreamed, or saved, just in case the viewer catches something unexpected. There’s drama about concert etiquette, about whether it was sweet or rude that some fans held up pictures of Swift’s dead grandma during “Marjorie,” about whether or not there are hot dogs. There are also people near the VIP tent who have captured conversations between Swift’s rumored new fling Matty Healy and her friends, as well as his facial expressions during sexy or emotional moments in Swift’s performances. Taylor Swift may be the one on stage, but at her concerts, you are often the one being watched. 

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Delia Cai touched on this phenomenon of self-surveillance in a recent piece for Vanity Fair, and there’s no better example of it than the second night of Swift’s Philadelphia stop, in which she scolded an overzealous security guard while singing “Bad Blood.” At first, I saw the video of her yelling, seamlessly slotting her admonishments in between the lyrics. The person taking the video only showed Swift, so it wasn’t clear what had happened. Luckily, a few videos later, I got a better angle thanks to someone who inadvertently captured video of the altercation between the security guard and a young woman at the barricade. I was then served a video of Gigi Hadid in the VIP tent reacting to all this, and later a video, taken by someone’s dad, of the security guard getting escorted away. 

“I am sooo close to learning what actually happened,” a person, trusting that the algorithm would reveal all, commented on one of the TikToks. Finally, I got a storytime from the girl at the center of it all. She said the security guard yelled at her for getting too close to the barricade, and that Taylor saw what was happening and defended her. This moment wasn’t broadcast, but it was indirectly experienced by viewers nonetheless. 

At events like concerts—or anywhere where a bunch of people are in the same place with their phones—reality is the new entertainment. I can trust that every morning after an Eras tour stop, I’ll open my phone and be served a new bit of news or drama in fifteen-second clips showing multiple perspectives of the same incident. The algorithm weaves them all together into a narrative, which is then spliced up and analyzed until I’m so far down the rabbit hole I’m sitting through a (convincing) theory that Matty Healy is keeping a tiny piano in his Louis Vuitton bag. 

I'm down bad for The 1975

Taylor and Matty could not be better suited for this technological moment, because they’ve both been playing with the idea of reality as entertainment for years. The entire first leg of the 1975’s At Their Very Best Tour featured Matty making a commentary on modern masculinity with a drunk, brooding stage persona;  Swift’s unswerving dedication to dropping Easter eggs in every Instagram post and paparazzi photo keeps fans running in circles without her even having to sing a note. 

I’ve been thinking about the irrelevance of reality TV in a social media world, and I’m starting to think this citizen panopticon is what comes next. Entertainers play with reality—accidentally (Keith Urban outing Phoebe and Bo) or on purpose (Taylor and Matty mouthing “This is about you, you know who you are. I love you” in their back-to-back respective concerts)—and we document it. The metaverse isn’t a dystopian Zuckerberg invention far off in the future, but something we have already created ourselves.