Watching American culture empty out, the author argues the missing crowds did not go back to books or bars — they were swallowed by vertical short-form video into a personalised digital heaven.
In 1998, 76 million people watched the finale of Seinfeld. Two decades later, fewer than 20 million watched the last episode of Game of Thrones. Ask today what show everyone is watching, and there is no answer.
As a teenager, the author moved through evangelical circles where the Left Behind novels were everywhere. They were about the Rapture — the faithful lifted to heaven before the world ends. Looking at American culture now, he gets the same feeling: where did everybody go?
From the town square to a private screening room
Meme culture in the 2010s pulled everyone into a digital hive mind. Deviate and the mob came for you; quirky subcultures got eaten alive. It was agonising, but at least you knew others were in there with you.
Now even the memes are gone. X is still standing, but it feels like a ghost town. What replaced it is the vertical feed: a format that now outranks every other medium, with even YouTube turning into a pile of clips. Social media used to mean people writing to each other. Now it mostly means people watching video.
The author tried it — a year of TikTok, deleted in 2021. The videos felt like a bland snack you keep eating without enjoying, everything tuned to make you swipe to the next one.
Nobody in your feed is real
There is a hypothetical called heavenbanning: a platform replaces a troublesome user's entire feed with AI content that flatters and agrees with them. You think you are talking to people. Really you are in solitary with a language model.
Vertical feeds are already close to this. The recommendations are made by AI, the videos are not shot by anyone you know, and your friends see something different from what you see. A study of more than 1,500 high-school students at several Chinese universities found that a steady diet of these videos damages the ability to plan for the future.
AI-generated video is next. As compute gets cheaper, everyone can have a feed made just for them — designed not to delight you but to keep you swiping and buying.
The Great Filter might be the screen
The cosmos is silent. One explanation is the Great Filter: something that destroys intelligent species before they can reach the stars. Nukes, runaway AI, killer robots — all guesses. The author's guess is the smartphone.
Falling fertility used to mean couples choosing fewer children. Increasingly it means people never pairing up at all. Two studies put numbers on it: iPhone access cut births by 4.5 to 8 percent among 15-to-19-year-olds; expanded 3G coverage in Nigeria cut a woman's annual chance of giving birth by about 7 percent.
Online interaction substitutes for offline interaction, but only one of the two can make a baby. And the vertical feed is more isolating than anything else online — on X you can still meet your mutuals. In an AI-curated feed, your mutuals are made of matrices and silicon.
As a child, the author wondered what everyone in heaven did for all those eons. Now he knows. They are swiping.
Why it matters
When what keeps people hooked is the swiping rather than the content, calling it an attention economy is too generous. What is being sold is whether anyone still bothers to meet real people, pair up, and have a child.
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