If you live in San Francisco and have the Citizen app installed, you already know the drill. Your phone buzzes, you glance down expecting maybe a weather alert or a text from your mom, and instead you're greeted with something like "Man fighting nobody in particular" — no further context, no resolution, just vibes.
Another day, another completely deranged Citizen notification that reads less like a public safety alert and more like a deleted scene from a David Lynch film. The latest entry in SF's ever-growing collection of unhinged push notifications reportedly described someone engaged in a fight with… unclear adversaries. Who is he fighting? The air? His demons? The cost of a one-bedroom in SoMa? We may never know.
One local quipped, "Sorry, that was me getting ready for challenging my boss to a fight. You know. The American dream." Honestly? Relatable content in this economy.
But here's where it stops being funny and starts being worth thinking about: Citizen has essentially become a doom-scrolling machine masquerading as a safety tool. The app pumps out vague, context-free alerts that do very little to actually keep anyone safe and a whole lot to keep everyone anxious. It's the notification equivalent of a guy on the corner yelling that the end is nigh — technically informative, practically useless.
As one SF resident put it, recalling a previous gem: "Still doesn't beat my favorite Citizen alert: 'multiple people fighting with machetes.'" And sure, that's darkly hilarious, but it also raises a real question — when everything is an emergency notification, nothing is.
Meanwhile, the city continues to spend enormous sums on public safety bureaucracy while residents rely on a private app with the editorial standards of a fever dream to figure out if their block is safe. Maybe instead of crowd-sourced chaos alerts, we could invest in the kind of policing and emergency response that makes an app like Citizen genuinely unnecessary.
Until then, keep your notifications on. The content is, admittedly, unmatched.