When the Government Makes Your Phone Scream

At approximately seven o'clock on Friday evening, millions of people across England and Wales discovered that their phones possessed a setting somewhere between Smoke Alarm and Impending Arrival of the Four Horsemen.

You may have been cooking dinner.

You may have been in the pub.

You may have been quietly watching television and wondering whether you had sufficient emotional reserves for another episode.

Then:

WAAAAAAAH.

The Government had entered the chat.

Phones sounded a siren-like alarm and displayed an emergency warning about the exceptionally high risk of wildfires. The message asked people not to light barbecues, firepits, garden incinerators or fireworks and to report fires immediately. It was the most extensive use of Britain's Emergency Alerts system yet in response to an active incident.

Perfectly sensible.

Also, somehow, deeply dystopian.

There is something qualitatively different about reading “wildfire risk remains high” on a weather app and having a device three inches from your face suddenly announce:

THE STATE HAS SOMETHING TO TELL YOU.

Your phone is normally your territory.

Pictures of the grandchildren. WhatsApp. Banking. Spotify. A mildly embarrassing number of searches beginning “Is it normal if…”

Then an authority you haven't invited reaches through it and makes a noise you cannot politely ignore.

For ten seconds, Britain felt less like Britain and more like the opening scene of a television drama in which somebody shortly announces that citizens in Sector Seven must remain indoors.

But perhaps the interesting thing isn't that Friday felt new.

It is how very old it was.

Every civilisation needs a way of saying: stop what you're doing and pay attention.

Long before governments could make 45 million trouser pockets vibrate simultaneously, they had other methods.

During the Second World War, Britain's Air Raid Precautions system used sirens, wardens, whistles and other signals to turn invisible information—enemy aircraft are coming—into immediate public behaviour. The Air Raid Wardens Service had been established in 1937, before war began.

The alarm mattered precisely because it interrupted normal life.

Tea stopped.

Factories reacted.

People moved.

Lights went out.

You didn't receive a push notification saying:

German bombers appear to be trending in your area.

The Cold War created an even stranger version of the same problem. Britain's Protect and Survive material told families how to respond if nuclear attack appeared imminent. The government made the booklet publicly available in 1980, while short films were prepared for broadcast during a period of serious nuclear threat.

Seen against that history, Friday night's smartphone alarm belongs to a long tradition.

The medium changes.

The human problem doesn't.

How do you warn millions of people without terrifying them unnecessarily—and how do you make them take notice without teaching them to ignore you?

That is harder than it sounds.

Why It Felt Like Dystopia

Part of Friday's strangeness came from collapsing two spaces we used to keep separate.

The air-raid siren belonged to outside.

The public-information broadcast belonged to television and radio.

The emergency announcement belonged to the authorities.

But the smartphone belongs to you.

We sleep beside it.

We photograph our children with it.

We argue with strangers about roundabouts on it.

It is among the most intimate objects ever invented.

So when it suddenly becomes a public warning siren, the sensation is peculiar.

Yet there is an important distinction between the feeling and the technology.

Despite the Big Brother-ish sensation, the Government says it does not need your phone number or know your location to send an Emergency Alert. Compatible devices receive alerts according to the area they are currently in, without location services needing to be switched on.

So Orwell is useful for describing the mood.

He is less useful for explaining the mechanism.

And this is where an older thinker becomes surprisingly helpful.

Epictetus Has Entered the Chat

Around nineteen centuries before anyone had to decide whether a disposable barbecue constituted a national security issue, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus opened his Enchiridion with a distinction:

“Some things are in our control and others not.”

That sounds almost insultingly simple.

It isn't.

The temperature isn't under your control.

A field becoming dangerously dry isn't under your control.

Whether another person behaves idiotically with a cigarette is definitely not under your control, despite several promising developments in telepathy.

But there are things that are.

Don't light the fire.

Don't chuck the cigarette end.

Call 999 if you see a wildfire.

Help somebody who needs help.

Pay attention without allowing attention to become panic.

That is essentially Stoicism stripped of the marble busts.

The purpose of an alarm is not to make you afraid.

It is to make you useful.

And perhaps that is the distinction worth carrying into Monday morning.

We live in an age extraordinarily good at producing alarms.

BREAKING NEWS.

URGENT.

RED ALERT.

MARKETS PLUNGE.

AI WILL TAKE YOUR JOB.

YOUR PASSWORD HAS APPEARED IN A DATA BREACH.

SOMEONE YOU WENT TO SCHOOL WITH HAS COMMENTED ON IMMIGRATION.

Our nervous systems receive warnings all day.

The danger is not merely panic.

It is alarm fatigue: the point at which everything is urgent, so eventually nothing feels urgent.

Friday's message was unusual because it asked for something concrete.

Not be frightened.

Not have an opinion.

Do this. Don't do that. Help if necessary.

Epictetus would probably have approved.

Possibly after asking what a firepit was.