You Are All Stars Now

If you were online in December, there's a good chance you saw a video of a grandmother accidentally lighting her birthday cake on fire. Or maybe you saw one of the other two videos, filmed by other family members from different points of view. Regardless of the POV through which you first experienced the video, it was instantly memorable: A grandmother prepares to flambé her baked Alaska, begins to pour the alcohol from a punch glass, and then clicks on the long lighter while there is still alcohol pouring from the cup. The fire immediately spreads from the cake to the cup, which is still in her hand, then to the tablecloth, then to the floor.

A sort of silent chaos ensues. Hardly anyone says a word or makes a sound, aside from "Mom! Mom!" and "What the ffff..." If you listen closely, you can hear muffled laughter. Otherwise, the noises are of dishes and utensils clanking, the still-fiery cake being placed on what looks like an extremely flammable chair, flames being swatted out, someone immediately leaving the room (later reported to be in search of the fire extinguisher), and a terrified cat scrambling through the room. Multiple phones continue recording the entire scene.

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The reason you saw these videos, if you did, was that they immediately went viral. Like the fire, they spread from TikTok to Instagram to X to Reddit to major news outlets. Almost instantly, it became a meme, with some cultural arbiters using it as a metaphor for all of 2025. Sure, there were some concerned and horrified responses, but the majority of comments and reactions seemed to focus on how incredibly funny the entire scene was. And to be fair, it was pretty absurd in an unexpected slapstick kind of way, especially with the skittering cat. Plus it resolved quickly, without injury or death. Anyone can do Accidental Wes Anderson, but Accidental Buster Keaton is virtually impossible without a little help from powers unknown.

Then 2026 rolled around. Like 2025, it began with an unfathomable, horrific tragedy. This time it was not an intentional attack but a terrible accident, albeit one that could have been—well, if not avoided, at least less devastating. And even though it seems like a year's worth of news has happened in the week since the Crans-Montana fire and me writing this newsletter—Maduro's arrest in Venezuela, ICE shooting a civilian in Minnesota, Elon Musk's Grok generating user-requested AI slop versions of child sexual assault material (CSAM) on X—my brain keeps returning over and over to those teenagers in that fire, and to the videos they took in those last horrifying minutes.

I realize this is a hell of a way to start the new year in this newsletter, and for that I'm sorry. It's just that this has been tumbling around in my head for the past seven days, and I think writing about it is the only way to try and piece it together.

If you've looked at any of the photos and videos from that night, of the precise moment when the ceiling first caught fire and then of the brief attempts to put it out, you probably had a rush of thoughts similar to mine: Oh my god the ceiling is foam? This is a deathtrap! What the fuck are you all standing around and filming for? Get out! Oh god, I wonder if any of these kids taking these videos made it out alive. Maybe you thought, without meaning to: Jesus Christ, teenagers and their phones, technology has sucked us in so much that we're all disconnected, drop the phones and run before it's too late.

Well, even if you didn't think any of this, I know a lot of other people did, because I've read a lot of articles and Reddit threads, caught up on news conferences, cried through many videos, scrolled through desperate posts on Instagram from parents and friends begging for information, read the comments, and gone back to this story every single day to see if there are updates. I watched heroic teenagers and adults, devastated parents, shell-shocked first responders and bystanders, the head of the volunteer fire department, stare dazed or completely break down sobbing. I've lurked in the Switzerland and firefighting subreddits, where I've frankly learned a lot about both Switzerland and fire safety.

Throughout it all, I've been sorting through ideas of responsibility and fault and blame, on every possible level. It's pretty clear already that many adults failed, at least when it comes to the fire itself, the design of the bar, the materials, the lack of inspections, the single exit, the lack of guidance in an emergency, and so on. But what about the photos and videos? What about the initial response so many of us had, watching those teenagers film the fire? I've forced myself to ask a set of very unpleasant questions, which are: Whose fault is that, really? Whose fault is it that so many of them thought first to capture this moment, rather than to get the fuck out as soon as possible?

As some of you are already aware, the fire in Le Constellation was essentially a repeat of the 2003 Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island: The ceiling of the basement club was also lined in highly flammable foam, the band used pyrotechnics, there were not sufficient exits, people didn't know what was going on until it was too late, and it became too late very quickly because the fire spread so fast the entire club became a deathtrap. This Reddit post provides a very interesting comparison, complete with what feels eerily like near-identical video footage from both events. Except in the case of the Station fire, the video footage was from a news cameraman who was there with video recorder. After looking at that post, I went to read the Wikipedia article about the fire, and I was struck by a long quote from the cameraman. I'm going to include the whole thing here:

It was that fast. As soon as the pyrotechnics stopped, the flame had started on the egg crate backing behind the stage, and it just went up the ceiling. And people stood and watched it, and some people backed off. When I turned around, some people were already trying to leave, and others were just sitting there going, "Yes, that's great!" And I remember that statement, because I was, like, this is not great. This is the time to leave.

At first, there was no panic. Everybody just kind of turned. Most people still just stood there. In the other rooms, the smoke hadn't gotten to them, the flame wasn't that bad, they didn't think anything of it. Well, I guess once we all started to turn toward the door, and we got bottlenecked into the front door, people just kept pushing, and eventually everyone popped out of the door, including myself.

That's when I turned back. I went around back. There was no one coming out the back door anymore. I kicked out a side window to try to get people out of there. One guy did crawl out. I went back around the front again, and that's when you saw people stacked on top of each other, trying to get out of the front door. And by then, the black smoke was pouring out over their heads.

I noticed when the pyro stopped, the flame had kept going on both sides. And then on one side, I noticed it come over the top, and that's when I said, 'I have to leave.' And I turned around, I said, 'Get out, get out, get to the door, get to the door!' And people just stood there.

There was a table in the way at the door, and I pulled that out just to get it out of the way so people could get out easier. And I never expected it take off as fast as it did. It just – it was so fast. It had to be two minutes tops before the whole place was black smoke.

In 2003, before smartphones and social media, a bunch of adults reacted in much the same way as the teenagers in Le Constellation. They stood around for what seems like an eternity looking at it from an outsider's perspective, but was probably only two minutes. They thought, Hey cool, this is great. And then it was too late.

You know what? Adults still react that way. Look at grandma setting her baked Alaska and herself on fire. Adults should know better, right? Even if none of us know how we'll react in an emergency, we should at least be able to put the phone down and help. Most of us grew up without smart phones and social media, without any of this being ubiquitous. So if we don't know better—if we don't do better—how can we expect children to?

One of the things I've been trying to poke at here over the past year is not just how tech products are made, but why they capture our attention so well even when we think we hate everything about them. Social media sucked us in large part because it acted like it was giving us connection and community, all while allowing us to tap into our worst impulses. Everyone I know hates their phones. We all want to disconnect but somehow in trying to avoid the phone we feel like we're on it more and more. Even GenAI, which is the easiest to hate and the easiest to avoid! I know so many people who also admit to liking it for whatever convenience it provides at the time. Bad habits are so much easier to form than good habits, and so much harder to break. Tech wrapped a bunch of bad habits in a bunch of shiny packages, and now we're all kind of fucked.

The bad habit I'm thinking of in this context is not only the way our phones have allowed us to lean all the way in to detaching from reality and dissociating from our bodies—two things I think most people want to do way, way, way more than any of us care to admit or discuss. It's also the habit of plausible deniability. The video of grandma and her cake is funny because we know everything is fine. How can I possibly compare that little harmless fire to this other devastating tragedy? How? Because in the moment when it starts, how is anyone to know what form it is or isn't going to take? How are they to know anything but what they've seen everyone else do, time and time again, which is start recording, live-streaming, sharing, hoping to be the next big viral news story? Which in the end they do become, in the horrific mirror image version of the other "ha ha this sums up 2025" video.

Sometimes I wonder what will be the thing that makes us stop and really consider what we're doing. These are all things people have been doing for generations, even for centuries. Smartphones didn't invent shitty behavior or a lack of self-awareness any more than social media invented voyeurism and a desire for fame. They just gave us the opportunity to engage in all this 24 hours a day, in our bedrooms and on the bus, with the rest of the world and without any guardrails.

I don't think "the thing" has to be the same catalyst for everyone, or that everyone has to simultaneously say "I will throw my phone into sea and forsake social media for all of eternity." But we all play a part in this, don't we? I guess it just comes down to what part we want to play.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx