Synopsis: Strasbourg’s council met the dancing epidemic of 1518 by paying for more music. Five centuries later, a modest three-day checklist has landed in an attention economy that rewards every tremor, and once again the cure sounds a lot like the disease.
Torch sales nearly quadrupled in the three days after the British government published its Be Ready checklist on 22 October 2026. Radio sales almost doubled. By the Saturday, several wind-up models had sold out at four outlets. The advice itself was dull: three litres of drinking water per person per day, tinned food that needs neither stove nor fridge, a few banknotes in case the card terminals fail, a radio that runs without the grid. France, Ireland and the Netherlands had been saying much the same for some time. The Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, said he wanted people watchful but not frightened. The checklist had slipped its leash within hours.
Somewhere between the Cabinet Office website and a family group chat, three days of tinned fish had become a confession. Why now? Why water? What do they know that they’re not telling us? Each forward came with a line of commentary attached. Each line made the next forward feel more urgent. Nobody along that chain had to lie. They only had to read a precaution as a premonition and pass it on, believing a friend deserved to know.
In July 1518 a woman the chronicles call Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street in Strasbourg and began to dance. There was no festival and no music. She went on for days. Others joined her: dozens within a week, perhaps hundreds by August. The accounts disagree sharply, and historians treat the grimmer claims of daily deaths with real suspicion. Even so, the city records leave no doubt that something had seized Strasbourg. The physicians decided it was a natural affliction of overheated blood, to be cured by sweating it out, so the dancers must dance on. The council cleared guild halls, built a wooden stage and hired musicians. It also paid sturdy men to hold up the exhausted so the dancing wouldn’t stop. The music drew crowds, and the crowds produced more dancers.
The council eventually reversed its decision. Public music was banned, and the worst afflicted were loaded onto wagons for the shrine of Saint Vitus near Saverne, a journey of several days. Vitus was the saint believed to punish sinners by compelling them to dance. Priests gave the pilgrims red shoes marked with crosses and sprinkled with holy water, then led them around a carved figure of the saint. By early autumn the dancing had stopped.
The historian John Waller has spent years on these chronicles. He argues that the outbreak needed two conditions at once. One was a population worn down by famine, sickness and cruel winters. The other was a shared belief that a saint could curse the sinful with ceaseless motion. Misery supplied the pressure and belief supplied the script. Fear will take whatever form a culture keeps ready for it, and Strasbourg had kept one ready for generations.
Contagions of this sort have never needed a printing press, let alone a smartphone. Strasbourg’s dance spread along its streets and through its churches, and through the anxious talk of neighbours who had buried children in the hungry years. In 1962, fits of laughter spread from a girls’ school near Lake Victoria through villages in what was then Tanganyika, closing schools for months. Neither travelled faster than a person could walk.
Ours travels at the speed of light. It also has something the medieval city lacked: a band that’s paid by the size of the crowd. The platforms that spread the Be Ready story aren’t malicious. Nobody designed them to frighten anyone. They measure movement and supply more of whatever moves people. Alarm moves people better than reassurance does. A sober explainer about cyberattacks and storms gets a scroll and a shrug. A clip of an empty supermarket aisle (any aisle, any year, any country) gets shared ten thousand times. Each share is a coin dropped into the musicians’ hat. Strasbourg’s council hired its fiddlers once, in good faith, as a cure. Our fiddlers hire themselves afresh every second, and their wage rises with every new dancer who takes the floor.
A government advises preparation because it sees a more brittle world: undersea cables, overheated summers, software that can take a country’s services offline in an afternoon. The advice is reported because it’s news. Online, it becomes a warning. People stock up. Empty shelves are photographed, and the photographs travel further than the checklist ever did. They now count as evidence that the danger is real, because look how many people are preparing. In the Netherlands, households with an emergency kit rose from about fifteen per cent in 2024 to roughly half by early this year. That’s a sensible change, but it’s also visible, and in a contagion, visibility is itself the vector. Precaution, seen by enough eyes, turns into proof.
The dancers of 1518 weren’t fools. They lived in a world that had given them every reason to expect punishment, and a belief that told them what that punishment would look like. The script we’ve been handed has its own saint. It’s the official who knows more than he says, whose every reassurance is read as a cover-up and every instruction as a leak. Belief in that figure is now so widespread that a three-litre water ration can’t arrive as practical advice. It arrives already decoded.
Yet a three-day checklist means something very different depending on where it lands. In much of rural northeast Thailand, rainwater still stands in large glazed jars beside houses, filled through the wet months and drawn down through the dry ones. Three days without mains water there isn’t a scenario to fear. It’s too ordinary to mention. The same is true for households on prepaid electricity meters, or in cities where the grid is something you plan around rather than depend on. When the European Union announced its own seventy-two-hour advice in 2025, the disaster researcher Ilan Kelman pointed out that many families can’t afford enough food for today, let alone a reserve. Panic buying is a privilege of people with spare money and spare cupboard space. For billions of others, the precarity now being advertised in London as a new condition is simply how they have always lived.
That uncomfortable fact sits under the whole spectacle of stockpiling. What frightens rich societies today is less the unknown than the prospect of arriving where most of humanity already lives. The anxiety is real, yet it’s curiously self-absorbed, and the attention economy sells it back to its owners with a soundtrack.
I’m only too aware, writing this, that I’ve picked up an instrument. An essay about contagious fear is still a piece of content about fear. It will be shared or ignored by the same calculus that decides the fate of a clip of empty shelves. When it goes out, notifications will chime on several thousand phones. Some readers will forward it with a line of their own attached.
The anticipation of catastrophe has never needed the catastrophe to make itself felt. Markets price it. Politicians campaign on it. Families argue about it over dinner, and children absorb it without being told. A society that rehearses emergency often enough begins to lose the faculties that real emergencies most demand: proportion, patience, the ability to hold a probability without mistaking it for a prophecy. People grow reactive in place of reflective. They learn to read the crowd before they read the facts. Strasbourg’s dancers lost control of their feet. We risk losing the capacity to judge, through steady small erosions that pass for vigilance.
The shrine at Saverne offered a strange kind of cure. The council stopped the music, but the remedy still came as footwear. The pilgrims were sent home in new shoes, blessed for the very activity that had broken them, as if the dance were never really in doubt and only its meaning had to be changed. Our remedies have the same cut. There are fact-checking feeds that run on the same engagement metrics as the rumours they chase, and wellness apps that charge a subscription for calm. There’s a three-year government campaign that can only succeed by reminding people of danger for its whole run. Each is fitted for continued motion, offered by institutions that can no longer picture a population standing still, to people who are no longer sure they would recognise stillness if the music finally stopped.