A Culture Trained to Watch People Burn

The fire in Crans-Montana exposed a moral failure; a technology-shaped culture that conditions people to watch danger unfold, phone in hand, and mistake passivity for participation.

The footage from the nightclub fire at Le Constellation in Crans-Montana, better known for après-ski than mass tragedy, is almost impossible to watch. At least forty people are dead. More than a hundred are injured. Some bodies are so badly burned that identification will take weeks, relying on dental records and DNA. Parents wait to learn whether their child is alive or dead.

As families mourn, videos circulate. Phones are raised as fire races across the ceiling. Clubbers cheer, as if what they are witnessing is a special effect rather than a life-threatening emergency.

What should unsettle us is not simply that people filmed, but that recording rather than intervening appeared to be instinctive. Partygoers who had already escaped appeared to stand outside and film those trapped inside through windows, rather than attempting to smash the glass and pull people free.

We have seen the same reflex elsewhere. When Anthony Joshua was filmed in Nigeria being pulled from the wreckage of a crashed car, injured and disoriented, while two of his friends lay dead, onlookers raised their phones and filmed. Similar things happen when fights break out in pubs, stealing takes place in shops, and when riots unfold.

Le Constellation’s bottle sparklers did, in fact, serve a clear commercial purpose. I’ve requested them myself on nights out. They are a deliberately engineered spectacle, designed for social amplification across Instagram, TikTok, X, Meta and Snapchat and optimised for likes, shares and comments. By those metrics, the sparklers were a success. The venue delivered exactly what modern nightlife increasingly seeks to produce: shareable, viral moments. Those viral moments drive engagement and, in turn, advertising revenue for social media platforms, while the resulting exposure functions as marketing for brands, translating visibility into customer demand and ultimately revenue, so the saying goes, ‘all publicity is good publicity’.

In today’s nightlife economy, even toilets are designed for Instagram. Neon slogans, curated mirrors and flattering lighting. Increasingly, they are labelled “gender-neutral”, forcing men and women to share alcohol-soaked spaces already notorious for harassment.

One shared bathroom is cheaper to build and operate than two. With unisex toilets, inclusion provides moral cover for cost and corner-cutting. The same instinct locks an inconvenient fire exit instead of manning it, soundproofs over a sprinkler system so the bass does not disturb the neighbours, swaps in cheaper, less fire-resistant materials to protect profit margins, and postpones safety drills because cocktails need mixing. Fashion trumps function. Spectacle trumps safety.

Clubs are no longer simply places to drink and dance. They are content factories. The phone is not an intrusion into the experience; it is the experience. Once spectacle becomes the product, basic considerations of safety and common sense become expendable.

I like to think I would have smashed windows. That I would have grabbed people and dragged them out. That I would have recognised immediately that fire racing across a nightclub ceiling is not a special effect but imminent danger.

But candidly, I have no idea what I would have done.

I have had a smartphone since I was fourteen. I have been shaped by the same culture as everyone else in that club. The same learned reflex to document and post. That is precisely why this footage is so disturbing. It collapses the comforting fiction that they are different from us.

It raises an uncomfortable question. How has the instinct to record changed the way we respond in emergencies? When danger breaks out, has the reflex to film displaced the reflex to act? In fires, crushes and confined spaces, seconds matter. Hesitation kills.

The question, then, is not whether smartphones caused the fire. They did not. The question is whether a device that relentlessly rewards observation over intervention reshapes behaviour at precisely the moment when instinct and decisiveness matter most. And if that is even partly true, what does it mean that so many of those caught up were young adults and teenagers? Are young people being taught to act in the world, or to stand just outside it, recording?

The Crans-Montana fire will intensify existing debates about smartphones and social media, particularly their impact on young people. We already impose age limits on activities such as alcohol consumption, gambling and driving on the basis that developing minds are more vulnerable to harm. By coincidence, just hours after the disaster, Denmark’s prime minister used her New Year’s speech to accuse tech giants of “stealing childhood from our children.” Denmark has since signalled its intention to introduce some of the toughest restrictions on children’s access to social media anywhere in Europe. Australia, too, moved decisively, banning around 550,000 Meta accounts belonging to under-16s in the first days of its landmark social media prohibition.

In the UK, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has suggested that a future Conservative government would ban social media for under-16s, while Reform UK’s has aligned more closely with Labour’s position: wait and assess the impact of Australia’s experiment. The central question is whether this represents an assault on individual liberty or a legitimate application of the harm principle. The right is increasingly split between social conservatives, who prioritise child protection, and libertarians, who are instinctively wary of regulation.

Tech regulation, or the lack of it, does not excuse the nightclub itself. Nightclubs have an appalling record of repeating the same lethal mistakes. We have seen it before, from the Station nightclub fire to the Kiss nightclub fire. Different decades, the same complacency. For that reason, the right must argue for smart regulation, not that regulation is inherently bad.

But the fire in Crans-Montana exposed something deeper than regulatory failure. It exposed a moral failure: a technology-shaped culture that conditions people to watch danger unfold, phone in hand, and mistake passivity for participation.

When the instinct to act gives way to the instinct to record, responsibility weakens. When responsibility weakens, accountability dissolves and social obligations thin. The Crans-Montana fire offered a glimpse of what that erosion looks like in moments of danger: the habits, expectations, voluntary actions and unwritten rules that normally guide people to act for one another, and which allow a free society to function without constant oversight, appeared not to assert themselves.

The next fire, the next crush, the next crowd trapped behind glass will not arrive as a surprise. It will unfold in full view, phones raised, footage circulating in real time. And when it does, we will recognise it, because we have already accepted a culture that prefers observation to action.

Albie Amankona is a broadcaster, financial analyst and political activist. He is the co-founder of Conservatives Against Racism and a member of the Conservatives LGBT+ National Executive. He regularly appears across broadcast media and can be followed on X through @albieamankona.