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On October 8, 1871, dry conditions and strong winds drove deadly fires through the Midwest. The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin and parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula burned more than 1.2 million acres (4,860 square kilometers) and 17 towns, claiming between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. The Great Chicago Fire burned 3.3 square miles (8.6 square kilometers) of the city, destroying the wooden structures that made up the relatively new town, killed about 300 people, and left more than 100,000 people homeless.

The Peshtigo Fire is the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.

The Chicago Fire is the one people remember.

The difference is in part because Chicago was a city, easy for newspapers to cover, while the Peshtigo fire killed people in lumber camps and small towns. But the Great Chicago Fire also told a political story that fit into an emerging narrative about the danger of organized labor.

It was not clear, coming out of the Civil War, how Republicans would stand with regard to workers. After all, the U.S. government had fought the war to protect the right of every man to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. But immediately after the war, workers had started organizing to demand adjustments to the wartime financial policies that favored men with money. By 1866 the Democratic Party had begun to listen to them, and leaders called for rewriting the terms of the Civil War debt, which had been generous to investors in the days when U.S. bonds were a risky investment. After the war, with the U.S. secure, the calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.

Republicans, horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred, added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

They were also concerned when more than 60,000 people came together in August 1866 to launch the National Labor Union, calling for the government to level the playing field between workers and their employers. They asked for an eight-hour day, an end to monopolies, and cooperation between Black and white workers. In 1867, in what was almost certainly a misquoted comment, stories spread that Republican Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio had told an audience in Kansas that “property is not equally divided, and a more equal distribution of capital must be wrought out.”

Also in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed states into five military districts and required new state constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. For the first time in history, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to those conventions.

When former Confederates preferred to live under military rule rather than share political power with their Black neighbors, Congress amended the Military Reconstruction Act to permit the military to enroll voters. In 1868, Congress passed and then states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, protecting the right of all citizens to the equal protection of the laws. In 1870, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting Black male voting. And then, when white reactionaries organized as the Ku Klux Klan to keep Black men and white Republicans from voting for the constitutions the conventions had written, Congress created the Department of Justice to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members and protect Black rights in the South.

Attacks on Black political rights on grounds of race were now unconstitutional, and the federal government seemed prepared to back that principle up with the law. So reactionary southerners took a new tack.

Beginning in 1871, they argued that they had no objection to their Black neighbors on racial grounds. What they objected to, they said, was that these folks, newly out of enslavement, were poor. White leaders claimed that the South remained in a recession not because India and Egypt had taken over the global cotton market during the war, but because Black southerners were lazy and hoped to use their new political power to redistribute the wealth of white landowners into their own pockets.

When South Carolina voters put into office a majority-Black legislature, white South Carolinians railed against the Black voters “plundering” taxpayers. One observer commented that “a proletariat Parliament has been constituted, the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world save in some of these Southern States.” Democrats organized a “Tax-Payers’ Convention” to protest new taxes levied by the legislature.

While Republicans were unwilling to bow to the Ku Klux Klan’s violence against their Black colleagues on racial grounds, this attack had legs, thanks, in part, to events in Europe.

For two months in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. American newspapers plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. American newspapers portrayed the Communards as a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who brought to life a chaotic world in which workers had taken over the government with a plan to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to workers.

Republicans’ fear of workers grew. Organized laborers “are agrarians, levelers, revolutionists, inciters of anarchy, and, in fact, promoters of indiscriminate pillage and murder,” the Boston Evening Transcript charged. The Philadelphia Inquirer insisted the redistribution of wealth through law appealed to poor, lazy, vicious men who would rather steal from the nation’s small farmers and mechanics than work themselves. Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”

Turning first against Black southerners, Republican newspapers began to claim that African Americans were radical levelers. They were “ignorant, superstitious, semi-barbarians” who were “extremely indolent, and will make no exertion beyond what is necessary to obtain food enough to satisfy their hunger.” To these lazy louts, Republicans had given the vote, which gave them “absolute political supremacy.” They elected to office leaders who promised to confiscate wealth through taxation and give it to Black citizens in the form of roads, schools, and hospitals. “The most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power,” wrote the New York Daily Tribune, “[are] taxed and swindled by a horde of rascally foreign adventurers, and by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen.”

After the Paris Commune, Republicans began to sweep white workers into this equation as well, taking the lead of former Confederates. An article in the New York Daily Tribune quoted Georgia Democrat Robert Toombs, the first Confederate secretary of state, who explicitly compared formerly enslaved people to the Paris Communards. He called for a property requirement for voting, without which “the lower classes…the dangerous, irresponsible element,” would control the government and “attack the interests of the landed proprietors.” According to Toombs: “Only those who owned the country should govern it, and men who had no property had no right to make laws for property-holders.”

When Chicago went up in flames in October 1871, some Americans blamed the Great Fire on “communists” or “socialists” eager to take over the country. Even those unconvinced a deadly fire in a wooden city was part of a deliberate plot blamed the fire on stupid immigrant workers careless about fire. They blamed “Mrs. O’Leary and her cow,” claiming the animal had kicked over a lantern near straw, and even children knew not to put fire near straw.

The Great Chicago Fire spoke to politics as the rural Peshtigo Fire did not. It fanned the flames of fear that workers were trying to destroy America. Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace wrote, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

And for those determined to make sure workers didn’t have a powerful voice in American society, the Great Chicago Fire could be framed as an illustration of precisely that.

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Notes:

Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872), p. 29.

Back when I was a teenager, a lot of people were very into the Left Behind series. Evangelical Christianity was still very strong in those days, especially in Texas, and Left Behind blew up by putting Christian eschatology into page-turning airport-bookstore-novel form. People really believed that the stories in those novels weren’t just stories — they were glimpses of a very real future event. The Rapture — Jesus Christ’s gathering of the faithful to Heaven before the end of the world — is something that believers expect is going to happen one of these days.

Sometimes, these days, I feel as if it’s already happened. I look around at American culture and I wonder: Where did everybody go?

The mass culture of my youth is long gone. 76 million people watched the last episode of Seinfeld in 1998; fewer than 20 million watched the last episode of Game of Thrones two decades later. Right now I can’t even think of what an appropriate comparison would be. What’s the show that everyone watches?

In the 2010s, mass culture was replaced by meme culture. Everyone knew this photo and what it represented:

Social media feeds — Twitter and the Facebook wall — turned American society into a sort of digital hive mind. Feeling yourself being absorbed into that great unified consciousness could be an agonizing experience — mobs constantly punished any deviation from conformity, quirky unique subcultures were devoured and metabolized, everyone was forced into a cell with people they had spent their lives trying to escape. The hunt for virality was everything. Viral memes were the thoughts that drifted through the mind of the social media Borg.

There are almost no memes left. For so many years there was a steady drumbeat of images and phrases that people passed around among each other ad infinitum; now, I can’t even think of the last one that really made the rounds. Twitter — now X — has not died but is diminished in scope and relevance. At times it feels like a ghost town.

Where did everybody go? I would like to think that they’re offline, living as we lived in the Before Times, running through sunlit fields blasting each other with Super Soakers or playing Dungeons and Dragons in their living rooms. Or perhaps they’re in Signal and WhatsApp chats and Discord channels, talking with their friends in the comfort and safety of privacy. I would like to think that they rejected the digital hive mind for the ancient ways of individuality and Dunbar’s Number.

But my bet is that they’re just watching short form video. Over the last few years, the entire internet has steadily carcinized into a single type of app/website/media/entertainment — a vertically scrolling feed full of short video clips. Vine invented it, TikTok popularized it, and now every other site has copied this one dominant, all-conquering format. Already, vertical short-form video feeds are more dominant than every form of media except for social media itself:

But even this significantly understates the change. The term “social media” used to mean people writing things to each other or sending images on Facebook or Twitter; now, it’s mostly used to mean people watching videos:

Even the long-form video sites, like YouTube, are increasingly just short-form sites showing a bunch of clips. This shift has basically killed the original use of social media, turning it from a town square or conversation room into a form of purely passive entertainment:

I am not part of this trend. I had TikTok on my phone for a year or so, but I could never get into it; in 2021 I deleted the app. The videos all felt like some kind of bland snack that you keep eating even though you don’t really like it — everything seemed optimized to make you swipe to the next thing, like the programming in those hundreds of channels that only existed so that satellite TV could brag that it had 700 channels.

Mass culture is often absorbing; meme culture is delightful and horrifying in turn. Short-form video feels to me like anesthesia; the swiping is the point, not the content. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.” I suppose I’m the exception.

So here I am, alone at the end of culture. I feel like one of the people from the Left Behind series, waking up to find most of the people around me taken to digital Heaven.

Have you ever heard of “heavenbanning”? It’s not a real thing…yet. It’s the hypothetical idea that social media platforms could neutralize obstreperous users by replacing their entire feed with AI content that flatters and agrees with them. You’d think you’re interacting with other human beings, and that everybody just happens to love you and think you’re brilliant, while in reality you’re in solitary confinement with an LLM.

It’s possible to think of vertical short-form video feeds as a kind of heavenbanning. Your feed is curated by AI, tailored to your own preferences. The videos you see aren’t made by anyone you know, or (probably) by anyone you’ll ever meet. The people you know in real life don’t see the same videos you do, unless you share them. Eventually the world blurs together and you lose track of time:

Researchers at several universities in China, in a study involving more than 1,500 high-school students, found that their future time perspective was damaged by a steady diet of such short-form videos…Now, [short-form videos are] also making us less able to plan for the future, or even care about it.

Right now, short-form videos are mostly made by would-be human influencers or clipped from human-made long-form videos that few people actually watch. But in the very near future, much of what you see in your TikTok or Reels feed could be AI-generated. And as the cost of compute drops, AI will be able to generate personalized videos for everyone — content tailored not necessarily to delight you, but to keep you engaged, to keep you swiping, to keep you making in-app purchases.

When I was a kid, I used to wonder what all the dead people were doing in Heaven for all of those countless eons. Now I know what they’re doing. They’re swiping.

I think about the Great Filter sometimes. We’ve searched the skies for signs of alien intelligence for many decades, and found nothing — natural or artificial. The Great Filter is one possible explanation for the silence of the cosmos — it’s the idea that there’s some dread Thing in the Universe that destroys sentient species before they can spread out to the stars.

There are plenty of hypotheses as to what the Great Filter might be. Perhaps every sentient species destroys itself with nukes or bioweapons. Perhaps AI always tends to wipe out its organic creators before retreating into inaccessible virtual worlds. Perhaps there’s a race of killer robots silently cruising between the stars, slaughtering every organic species that looks like it might one day rise to become a threat.

Or perhaps it’s the smartphone. In previous decades, fertility decline was due to couples choosing to have fewer children; now, it’s increasingly about people never forming couples at all. The isolating effects of social media are one obvious culprit; it’s very hard to conceive a child while you’re on your phone.1 Myers and Hooper (2026) found that “access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24”. Breen et al. (2026) found that “the expansion of 3G coverage [in Nigeria] during the study period led to a decline in fertility, corresponding to a 7% reduction in the annual probability of a woman having a birth.”

Given the timing and the microeconomic evidence, smartphones are the likeliest explanation for why instead of leveling out near 2, the total fertility rate in rich countries — and, increasingly, in middle-income countries — has busted right through that floor and headed down toward zero. Smartphones at least help to explain why Latin America now has an even lower birth rate than the EU.

Even without vertical short-form video, social media might still be enough to shrink the human race. Online interactions substitute for offline ones, but only one of the two can make a baby. But it’s hard to deny that vertical short-form video is even more isolating than other online activities — in the case of heavenbanning, it’s almost solipsistic. At least on X you can meet your mutuals. In the brave new world of AI-generated personalized short-form content, your “mutuals” will be made of matrices and computer chips.

Personally, I don’t like vertical short-form video because I think it’s pretty boring. But the fact that it could represent the euthanasia of our species seems like an additional downside. Perhaps it’s in the fundamental nature of intelligence to hack its own reward function — to find a way to give up striving and building and loving, and to simply hit the dopamine button until it starves itself ecstatically to death.

The next time you look at the night sky, you should wonder if instead of star empires and unearthly paradises, it’s simply a vast graveyard of short-form video fans. Such an outcome would be much gentler, but hardly less cataclysmic, than the end of Revelation.

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