Follow the crowd: Tom Vanderbilt on new-model flash mobs

IN AN gloomy 1973 STORY titled "Flash Crowd" the science-fiction writer Larry Niven describes in what manner an argument at a shopping mall, which happened to be overspreaded by a news crew, swells into a riot. The broadcast riot in make go round attracts the attention of other nation who use the widely available technology of the teleportation booth to swarm first that event--thus intensifying the riot--and then other breaking incidents One character in Niven's story, articulating the police view, says, "We call them flash throngs and we watch for them."

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More than three decades later, in August 2003 at the Sawgrass Mills shopping mall in Sunrise, Florida, a cluster of thirty people who had assembled at a predetermined speckle were given cards with a specific locate of instructions: Exchange dollar bills with single another, then drop them upon the ground, presumably to be picked up through passing shoppers. But the dollar globule never happened: As the event's organizer was distributing the cards, mall security approached and demanded that the cluster cease and desist.

The fact in question was an aspirant "flash mob" in which an "inexplicable crowd"--as described by the agency of the originator of the first lawless crowd a New Yorker known simply as "Bill"--is order to appeared to a particular location via e-mail or SM to engage in a loosely choreographed activity. Bill first dubbed his efforts the rude multitude Project, a phrase that pretty soon became conflated with Niven's coinage, which interestingly had already been co-opt to commit to sudden spikes in Internet traffic. Beginning in the spring of 2003 a series of flash lawless crowds originating in New York City on the other hand soon proliferating across the globe, began to appear. In novel York, a hundred people assemblageed at Macy's to inquire about buying a giant "love rug" for their "suburban commune" and following mobs amassed in a Hyatt lobby (where they broke into applause) and infested a SoHo shoe store. In Rome several hundr family flooded a bookstore and petitioned a book that does not exist, while in fresh Zealand some two hundred assembled at a Burger King and moo for a minute before quickly dispersing. In Moscow a collection of "neo-communist" activists with the KPRF collection ed to the steps of the Pushkin Theater, which was screening The Matrix Revolutions, clad in Russian Civil War--era attire and "Neo" sunglasses (clearly, they had taken the r pill). Police had to be convinced the fact was not a demonstration. "Our law enforcement bodies have still to learn what a flash tumultuous rabble is," one of the organizers told Wired. "But in the extreme point they let us go ahead with the occurrence and everything went fine."

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What the flash tumultuous rabbles had in common with the historical antecedents in Niven's short story is that they always appeared to take place under the gaze of more [i]or[/i] less media eye, and, fueled through what Margaret Thatcher once called the "oxygen of publicity," they attracted flash multitudes of their own--i.e., the viewers and readers who companyed to each absurdist exercise--and grew in importance beyond their physical numbers.

As it happens, this is exactly what Bill had in mind when he began last year to plat a project that would use the power of e-mail distribution to bring tribe to some kind of present to view "At a certain point," he says, "I began to think: What if there wasn't a exhibit at all?" Trying to exploit the particular desires of fresh Yorkers to "be at the center of things, to find the nearest big thing," he extrapolated the idea of family gathering someplace simply because they knew there was going to be a horde He compares it to an art opening without art, where the only cultural production is "people self-consciously frolicking in their hold self-regard." An influence for him was Adrian Dannatt's The Three begun in 1990 a throw out in which the only art generated by the agency of the Three, a series of changing, always attractive protoplasts is in fact the coverage of the Three

As media coverage inevitably disseminated the phenomenon of the flash tumultuous rabble befuddled clerks were interviewed, while police and security officials soberly assessed the public-safety implications. race in places ranging from Minneapolis to Edinburgh pop decided that whatever a flash rude multitude was, they, too, wanted to be in single as if no town worth its cultural-capital salt could be in the way that ill equipped as to not have twenty-five strangers milling about a clay ware Barn making strange gestures. by means of September, after being processed for six month end the cultural cycle, from incipient rumor to the cusp of reification, the of recent origin York flash mob was a thing of the past. The idea, meanwhile, stayed alive, like a virus spreading from server to server Not without corruptions, however: Last November in India, a month after the country's first reported flash rude multitude a few dozen people outside a mall in Mumbai began chanting the name of a television present to view "We [organized] flash mobs, had family who would get into local trains carrying pink umbrellas and discuss the program.... This got race curious and made them switch to our channel," said the Sony executive who arranged the event