E X PER MEN T

Or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mobBy Bill Wasik

)

[Tlhey have a goal which is there be-fore they can find words for it. This goalis the blackest spot where most peopleare gathered.

-Elias Canetti

INTRODUCTIONBefore we break down our present

cultural situation, it will be worthwhileto revisit the concept of deindividua-tion, which psychologists put forwardin the mid-twentieth century to ad-dress the question of evil more gen-erally. As first defined by Festinger,Pepitone, and Newcomb (1952),deindividuation is "a state of affairsin a group where members do notpay attention to other individualsqua individuals"; when in a crowdor pack, the theory ran, each mansees he doesn't stand out and so his \inhibitions melt away. Indeed, thewriters observed, even "the delegatesto an American Legion convention,all dressed in the same uniform man-ner, will sometimes exhibit an almostalarming lack of restraint." Zirnbar-

, do (1969) broke down the causationinto ten input variables, enumeratedA through J, ranging from anonymity(A) and arousal (E) to sensory inputoverload (F) and altered states of con-sciousness (J). Experimental heft wassoon supplied by Diener, Fraser, Bea-man, and Kelem (1976) in their pa-per "Effects ofDe individuation Vari-ables on Stealing Among HalloweenTrick-or-Treaters," which put hard

Bill Wasik is a senior editor of Harper'sMagazine.

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I MARCH 2006

numbers to the theory (see Figure 1).In recent decades, the concept of

/ deindividuation has falien into scien-tific neglect, and yet I believe that itpossesses great theoretical usefulnesstoday. Consider the generational co-hort. that has come to be called thehipsters-i.e., those hundreds of thou-sands of educated young urbaniteswith strikingly similar tastes. Have so

FIG. I-PERCENTAGE OF CHILDRENTRANSGRESSING

Total Percentnumberof transgress-children ing

NonanonymousAlone 40 7.5Group 384 20.8

AnonymousAlone 42 21.4Group 297 57.2

many self-alleged aesthetes everbeen more (in the formulation ofFestinger et a!.) "submerged in thegroup"? The hipsters make no pre-tense to divisions on principle, to.forming intellectual or artisticcamps; at any given moment, it isthe same books, records, films thatare judged au courant by all, leadingto the curious spectacle of an "alter-native" culture more unanimousthan the mainstream it ostensiblyopposes. What critical impulse doesexist among their number merelycauses a favorite to be more readilyabandoned, as abandoned-whetherFriendster.com, Franz Ferdinand, or

Jonathan Safran Foe~-it inevitably'will be. Once abandoned, it is nevertaken up again.

Over those who would sell to thehipsters, then, hangs the promise ofinstant adoption but also the specterof wholesale and irrevocable deser-tion. One thinks of Volkswagen,which for years has produced lavishnetwork spots with plots that play tohipster preoccupations, all artfullyshot on grainy stock, layered overwith the latest in ethereal priss-pop,and for what? Fleeting ubiquity andthen ruin; today the company is indisastrous straits, its target U.S. de-mographic once again favoring Toy-otas, Hondas, and even the upstartKoreans. With a rising generationso mercurial, one wonders whethereven the notion of "branding," i.e.,the building of long-term reputa-tions, which has remained thewatchword among our corporations

for more than a decade, will itselfcome to lose its luster; whether thetriumph of Internet commerce, thewidening readership of online newsand blogs (with the concomitant nar-rowing of the news cycle, such thatstories are often considered stale bythe time a newspaper can 'printthem), and the proliferation of ca-ble television channels (many ofwhich are devoted either explicitly toshopping or effectively to productplacement) will swing tastes so fad-dishly that rather than courting con-sumers for life, the corporation will becontent merely to hitch itself to asuccession of their whims.

Perhaps this is the explanation forFusion Flash Concerts, an otherwiseinexplicable marketing program thispast summer in which Ford, attempt-ing to sell a new sedan to the under-thirty-fivemarket, partnered with Sonyto appropriate what may be the mostforgettable hipster fad of the past fiveyears. That fad is the "flash mob,"which, according to a definition hasti-ly added in 2004 to the Oxford EnglishDictionary, is "a public gathering ofcomplete strangers, organized via theInternet or mobile phone, who per-form a pointless act and then disperseagain." In fact the flash mob, whichdates back only to June 2003, had al-most entirely died out by that samewinter, despite its having spreadduring those few months to allthe world's continents saveAntarctica. Not only was theflash mob a vacuous fad; it was,in its very form (pointless ag-gregation and then dispersal),intended as a metaphor for thehollow hipster culture thatspawned it.

I know this because I happento have been the flash mob's in-ventor. My association with thefad has heretofore remainedsemi-anonymous, on a first-name-only basisto all but friendsand acquaintances. For morethan two years, I concealed my iden-tity for scientific purposes, but nowthat my experiment is essentially com-plete, corporate America having ful-filled (albeit a year later than expect-ed) its final phase, I finally feelcompelled to offer a report: on theflash mob, its life and times, and itsconsummation this summer in theclutches of the Ford Motor Company.

PHASE I: INITIAL EXPERIMENTOn May 27, 2003, bored and there-

fore disposed toward acts of social-scientific inquiry, I sent an email tosixty-some friends and acquaintances.The message began:

You are invited to take part in MOB,the project that createsan inexplicablemob of people in New YorkCity forten minutesor less.Pleaseforwardthisto other people you know who mightlike to join.

More precisely, I forwarded them this

message, which, in order to concealmy identity as its original author, I hadsent myself earlier that day from ananonymous webmail account. As fur-ther explanation, the 'email offered a"frequently asked questions" section,which consisted of only one question:

Q, Why wouldI want to join an inex-plicablemob?A. Tons ofother peopleare doing it.

Watches were to be synchronizedagainst the U.S. government's atomicdocks, and the email gave instructionsfor doing so. In order that the mob notform until the appointed time, partic-ipants were asked to approach the sitefrom all four cardinal directions, based

THE AUTHOR (CENTER) AT MOB#2, JUNE 17, 2003 '

on birth month: January or July, upBroadway from the south; February orAugust, down Broadway from thenorth; etc. At 7:24 P.M. the followingTuesday, June 3, the mob was to con-verge upon Claire's Accessories,a smallchain store near Astor Place that sellsbarrettes,scrunchies, and such. Thegathering was to last for precisely sev-en minutes, until 7:31, at which timeall would disperse. "NO ONE," the emailcautioned, "SHOULD REMAIN AT THESITE AFTER 7:33."

My subjectswere grad students, pub-lishing functionaries, cultured tech-nologists, comedy writers, aspiring po-ets, musicians, actors, novelists, theirages ranging from the early twenties tothe middle thirties. They were, that isto say, a fairly representative cross-section of hipsters, and these werepeople who did not easily let them-selves get left out. I rated the project'schances as fair to good.

As it happened, MOB #1 would fail,

Photograph (detail) courtesy Mike Epstein/www.satanslaundtomat.com

but on a technicality-apparently theNYPD had been alerted' beforehand,and sowe arrived to find sixofficersanda police truck barring entrance to thestore.' Yet the underlying scienceseemed sound, and for MOB #2, twoweeks later, only minor adjustmentswere required. I found four ill-frequented bars near the intended siteand had the participants gather atthose beforehand, again split by themonth of their birth. Ten minutes be-fore the appointed time, slips of paperbearing the final destination were dis-tributed at the bars. The site was theMacy's rug department, where, all atonce, two hundred people wanderedover to the carpet in the back left cor-

ner and, as instructed, in-formed clerks that they alllived together in a Long IslandCity commune and were look-ing for a "love rug."

E-MAIL' MOB TAKES MAN-HATTAN, read the headlinetwo days later on Wired News.The successful result was alsohailed in blogs, and soon I re-ceived emails from San Fran-cisco, Minneapolis, Boston,Austin, announcing theirown local chapters. Someasked for advice, which I verygladly gave. ("[B]efore yousend out the instructions, vis-

it the spot at the same time and onthe same day of the week, and figureout how long it will take people to getto the mob spot," I told Minneapolis.)·One blog proprietor- gave the con-cept a name-"flash mobs"-after a

1 This would prove to be the project's onlyrun-in with the law, though the legalityof theproject remains a murky question to thisday.As the sender of the email, I suspect that Imight have been found guilty of holding ademonstration without a permit, and couldalso have been held liable for any damagesdone by the mob. For the Nuclear Option-a follow-up to the Mob Project that remainsunimplemented-these sortsof legalissuesareto be skirted through an automation of theentire process. In Nuclear, a network of com-puter servers, located offshore, will serve assign-up points for a worldwide email list.When the total number of addresseson the listreaches some threshold-lO million, per-haps-the servers "detonate," and all on theirlists receive an email in the morning instruct-ing them to converge in the center of theircity that same afternoon.

2 Sean Savage, of Cheesebikini.com.

EXPERIMENT 57

1973 science-fiction short story,"Flash Crowd," which deals with theunexpected downside of cheap tele-portation technology: packs ofthrillseekers who beam themselvesin whenever a good time is goingdown. The story's protagonist, Jerry-berry Jensen, is a TV journalist whoinadvertently touches off a multidayriot in a shopping mall, but eventu-ally he clears his name by showinghow technology was to blame. Similarclaims, as it happens, were soon madeabout flash mobs, but I myself believethat the technology played only aminor role. The emails went out aweek before each event, after all; onecould have passed around flyers onthe street, I think, to roughly similareffect. What the project harnessedwas the joining urge, a drive towarddeindividuation easily discernible inthe New York hipster population.

The basic hypothesis behind theMob Project wasas follows:seeing howall culture in New York was demon-strably commingled with scenesterism,the appeal of concerts and plays andreadings and gallery shows derivingless from the work itself than from thesocial opportunities the work mightengender, it should theoretically bepossible to create an art project con-sisting of pure scene-meaning thescene would be the entire point of thework, and indeed would itself consti-tute the work.

At its best, the Mob Project broughtto this task a sort of formal unity, ascan be illustrated in MOB #3, whichtook place fifteen days after #2 and wasset in the Grand Hyatt, a hotel frontingon Forty-second Street adjacentto Grand Central Station. Picture alobbya whole block long sporting well-maintained fixtures in the high Eight-.iesstyle,gold-chrome railingsand sepia-mirror walls and a fountain in marblishstone, with a mezzanine ringed over-head. The time wasset for 7:07P.M., thetail end of the evening rush hour; thetrain station next door was thick withcommuters, aswas (visible through thehotel's tinted-glass facade) the sidewalkoutside, but the lobby wasnearly emp-ty: only a fewbesuited types,guestspre-sumably,sunk here and there into arm-chairs. Starting.fiveminutes beforehandthe mob members slipped in, in twosand threes and tens, milling around in

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2006

Elevators

FIG. 2-SCHEMATIC, MOB #3 IN GRAND HYATT HOTEL

Mezzanine

)OOOOCDOOOOCO OOOOCDOOOOCDOOOOOOO

DO

[I]]]]] Escalator

Street,-~J

Mobbers, 7:06 •Non-mobbers

the lobby and making stylishsmall talk.Then all at once, we rode the eleva-

tors and escalators up to the mezzanineand wordlesslylined the banister, asde-picted in Figure 2. The handful of ho-tel guests were still there, alone again,except now they were confronted witha hundreds-strong armada of hipstersoverhead, arrayed shoulder to shoulder,staring silently down. But intimida-tion was not the point; we were star-ing down at where we had just been,and also across at one another, twohundred artist-spectators comman-deering an atrium on Forty-secondStreet as a coliseum-style theater ofself-regard. After five minutes of star-ing, the ring erupted into precisely fif-teen seconds of tumultuous applause-for itself-after which it scattered backdownstairs and out the door, just asthe police cruisers were rolling up,flashers on.

PHASES 2 & 3:PROPAGATION AND BACKLASH

I endeavored to devise a mediastrategy on the project's own terms.The mob was all about the herd in-stinct, I reasoned, about the desirenot to be left out of the latest fad;logically, then, it should grow asquickly as possible and then-thisseemed obvious-buckle under the

oMobbers.7:08

weight of its own popularity. I devel-oped a single maxim for myself, ascustodian of the mob: "Anything thatgrows the mob is pro-mob." And inaccordance with this principle, I gaveinterviews to all reporters who asked.In the six weeks following MOB #3,I did perhaps thirty different inter-views, not only with local newspa-pers (the Post and the Daily News,though not yet the Times-more onthat later) but also with Time, TimeOut New York, the Christian ScienceMonitor, the San Francisco Chronicle,the Chicago Tribune, the AssociatedPress, Reuters, Agence France-Presse,and countless websites.

There was also the matter of how Iwould be identified. My original pref-erence had been to remain entirelyanonymous, but I had only half suc-ceeded; at the first, aborted mob, a ra-dio reporter had discovered my firstname and broadcast it, and so I wasforced to be Bill-or, more often,"Bill"-in my dealings with the mediathereafter. "[LjikeCher and Madonna,prefers to use only his firstname," wrotethe Chicago Daily Herald. To thosewho asked my occupation I repliedsimply that I worked in the "culture in-dustry." (I was, and still am, an editorat this magazine.)

Usually a flash-mob story would in-

voke me roughly three quarters of theway down, as the "shadowy figure" atthe center of the project. There weredark questions as to my intentions}"Bill, who denies he is on a power-trip, declined to be identified," intonedBritain's Daily Mirror. Here is an ex-change from Fox News's On the Recordwith Greta Van Susteren:

ANCHOR: Now the guy who came upwith the Mob Project is a mystery mannamed Bill. Do either of you know whohe is?MOBBER ONE: Nope.MOBBER TWO: Well, I've-I've emailedhim. That's about it.MOBBER ONE: Oh, you have? ..ANCHOR: What-what-who is thisBill?Do you know anything about him?MOBBER TWO: Well, from what I've read,he's a-he works in the culture industry,and that's-that's about as specific aswe've gotten with him.

tronic, to-scale Tyrannosaurus rex-flash mobs had been either scheduledor executed not only in scores of U.S.cities but also in Toronto, Zurich, Vi-enna, Berlin, Rome. The followingweek, the interview request from theNew York Times finally arrived. Onthe phone the reporter, Amy Hannon,made it clear to me that the Timesknew it was behind on the story. Theywould be remedying this, she told me,by running a prominent piece on flashmobs in their Sunday "Week in Re-view" section.

What the Times did, in fascinatingfashion, was not just to run the back-lash story (which I had been expect-ing in three to five more weeks) but todo so preemptively-i.e., before thebacklash actually had materialized.Harmon's piece bore the headlineGUESSSOME PEOPLEDON'T HAVE ANY-THING BETTER TO DO, and its nut

FIG. 3-MEDIA REFERENCES TO FLASH MOBS, BYWEEK

120

'"100

"oce80<E

e'"'K" 60Z

""'0•...".0 40S=Z

20

By MOB #6-in which, on the firstThursday evening in August, five hun-dred mobbers suddenly fell to theirknees in the Times Square Toys "R" Usand cowered before the store's anima-

3 It became evident that the "shadowy" na-ture of the project was helping to spread it inthe media. In the Nuclear Option, the pro-ject is designed to seem even more danger-ous-not only anonymous and automated,but threatening to inflict "benevolent cata-strophes" (as the Nuclear manifesto woulddescribe them) on all major world cities-soas to spread even more widely.

Week beginning

sentence ran: "[T]he flash mob jug-gernaut has now run into a flash mobbacklash that may be spreading fasterthan the fad itself." As evidence, shemustered the following:

E-mail lists like "antimob" and "slash-mob" have sprung up, as did a Web sitewarning that "flashmuggers" are boundto show up "wherever there's groups ofyoung, naive, wealthy, bored fashion-istas to be found." And a new defini-tion was circulated last week on sever-al Web sites: "flash mob, noun: Animpromptu gathering, organized by

means of electronic communication, ofthe unemployed."

Two email lists, a website, and a for-warded definition hardly constituteda "backlash" against this still-growing,intercontinental fad, but what I thinkHarmon and the Times rightly under-stood was that a backlash was theonly avenue by which they could ad-vance the story. The competition hadsoundly beaten the Times already onwhat, using my taxonomy, one mightcall the Phases 1 and 2 stories (the ex-periment and its rapid propagation),and so their thinking progressed nat-urally to the subsequent phase-i.e.,the backlash. It followed inexorablyfrom the subconscious logic of con-temporary journalism: just as a popu-lar president requires momentous-looking photo spreads in newsweeklies,or as the rise of a new technology re-quires think-pieces about its threat tothe very fabric of civil society, so afad like the flash mob requires a back-lash.t Whether through direct causa-tion or mere journalistic intuition, theTimes timed its backlash story(8/17/03) with remarkable accuracy(see Figure 3).

I announced that MOB #8, in ear-ly September, would be the last. Thesite was a concrete alcove right onForty-second Street, just across fromthe Conde Nast building. Participantshad been told to follow the instruc-tions blaring from a cheap boombox Ihad set up beforehand atop a brickledge. The cheering of the hundredsgrew so great that it drowned out thespeakers. The mob had become un-moored. All of a sudden a man in atoque, apparently some sort of oppor-tunistic art shaman, opened his brief-case to reveal a glowing neon sign, andthe crowd bent to his will. He held up

4 To my further surprise, Harmon wrote asecond article on flash mobs on August 31 ,in which she attended MOB #7 and wrotewith noticeable excitement about the sametrend she had peremptorily dismissed justtwo weeks earlier. Here, I think, it was notjournalistic logic but rather her own profes-sional logic that held sway; this piece was forthe City section, in which Times reportersare sometimes allowed to "write." E.g., "1tore myself away from observing the bizarreballet and hurried to the back. A muted eu-phoria kicked in .. The mob was proud of it-self. 1t was almost impossible to detect ironicdetachment. People smiled. 1smiled."

EXPERIMENT 59

two fingers and the mob began chant-ing "Peace!"

The project had been hijacked by afigure more charismatic than myself.The stage had been set for Phase 4.

PRIOR RESEARCHWhen a British art magazine asked

me who, among artists past or present,

a small crowd in simple unison buck-ing the city's flow-a Fluxus-stvle"happening" but without the blink-ered optimism, and in that respectcloser, perhaps, to a Ray Johnson"nothing." Milgram's crowd studywas far less explanatory than it wasexpressive, serving as an elegantmetaphor for conformism while

FIG. 4-STANLEY MILGRAM'S CROWD EXPERIMENT

---who lookup- - -·who stopI

----------------~.", •...----

,- ••.•....•...,- ".".,,"

100

90

80»{j 70t~ 600-

'0 so15" 40~

30

20

10

oo 3 6 9

Size of stimulus crowd12

had most influenced the flash-mob pro-ject, I named Stanley Milgram-thesocial psychologist best known for hisauthority experiments, in which heinduced average Americans to giveseemingly fatal shocks to strangers. Asit happens, I later discovered that Mil-gram himself did a project much like aflashmob, in which a "stimulus crowd"of his confederates, varying in num-ber from one to fifteen, stopped on abusy Manhattan sidewalk and all atonce looked up to the same sixth-floorwindow. The results can be seen inFigure 4, a chart from his paper "Noteon the Drawing Power of Crowds ofDifferent Size."

Stanley Milgram deserves recogni-tion, I believe, as one of the crucialartists of the preceding century.Consider his crowd experiment,which, it must be admitted, is fairlythin gruel as science: everyoneknows that such an effect would beobserved, and what value is there inquantifying it? No, the value of thisexperiment is entirely in its perfor-mance, the unadorned audacity of it,

60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2006

adding little to our scientific under-standing of who conforms or why.

Other of Milgram's creations seemmore akin to collaborative art. He hadParisians draw "mental maps"of their city that he then him-self collated into a consensuswork-prefiguring, for example,the contemporary artists Komarand Melamid's brilliant "fa-vorite painting" projects of the1990s. In yet another premoni-tion of Ray Johnson, Milgramalso fixated on the mail as amedium; this was chieflythrough his famous "lost letter"technique, in which dozens ofsealed, stamped letters addressedto controversial-sounding orga-nizations (e.g., Equal Rights for Ne-groes, Friends of the Nazi Party) wereleft such that they would be found bypassersby and mailed (or not) to theirdestinations. In this manner he evenattempted to predict the outcome ofthe1964 presidential election, leadingto a remarkable coup de theater in whichhundreds of letters in support of each

IS

candidate were dropped onto Worces-ter from a prop plane.

The Milgramite tradition in artwould be defined, I think, by the fol-lowing premise: that man, whom wenow know to respond predictably to so-cial forces, is therefore himself the ul-timate artistic medium. This is cer-tainly the primary force of Milgram'sauthority experiments: others had doneresearch on conformism and authori-ty, but what set Milgram's apart was thevertiginousness of the narrative hemade out of men. On the faux shockmachine itself, with its manufactur-er's label (SHOCK GENERATOR, TYPEZLB) from the fictitious "Dyson Instru-ment Company" in Waltham, Mass.,was a series of thirty labeled switches,beginning with SLIGHT SHOCK and end-ing with EXTREME INTENSITY SHOCK,DANGER: SEVERE SHOCK, and, simply,X X x. This final switch, so ominouslymarked, was nevertheless quite will-ingly employed, even after the sub-ject's screams had subsided into si-lence. This was what stirred thepublic-the sheer barbarity of whatMilgram had made men do, and howeasily he made them do it.

There isalso a virulent counterstrain "-of this tradition, one that Milgramhim-self characteristically foresaw: realitytelevision, which seeks to entertainthrough simple documentary voyeur-ism. In one of his last published papers

MILGRAMWITH HIS "SHOCK GENERATOR"

before his death, he co-authored an es-say on the subject of Candid Camera,which could fairly be called the ur-reality-TV show. His essaywas largelyand justifiably laudatory-the show"gives us a new vision through the dis-ruption of the habitual," he wrote, in aneat summation of the Milgramite aes-thetic. And yet: "Above all, Candid

Photograph courtesy Alexandra Milgram

Camera is a commercial acrivity. Theoverriding goal of the producer isto create materials that can be soldto a network or a sponsor .... Thescientific"-and here we may as wellsubstitute artistic-"deficiencies of theCandid Camera material stem from itsorigin as commercial entertainment."

His most telling example of suchdeficiencies is in the way the show ismanaged down to a simple, digestiblenarrative message-in Candid Cam-era's case, for laughs, but the pointcould have been as easily applied tothe cheap drama of The Apprentice orthe luridity of Trading Spouses. "[T]heviewer is instructed by the narratorabout exactly what to look for; hiscomments reinforce the notion thatwhat we are about to see will be fun-ny," Milgram wrote. "Studio laughteraccompanies each episode as a way ofcontinually defining the actions asfunny, prompting the home viewer toexperience the scene as amusing,rather than feeling sympathy or com-passion for the victim's plight, orsearching to understand it." It is pre-cisely here that we who would makeMilgramite art must keep vigilant: inresisting simple story lines and em-bracing, instead, the ambiguities inour data.

PHASE 4: CO-OPTATIONTo the many demerits of City Hall

Plazain Boston I can add this: it isa sin-gularly poor spot to hold a flash mob.It is as if the space were calibrated torender futile any gathering, large orsmall, attempted anywhere on its aridexpanse. All the nearby buildings seemto be facing away, making the plaza'seleven acres of concrete and brick feellike the world's largestback alley.Thereisno nearby community to speakof, thehistoric neighborhood there-the oldScullySquare, a convivial knot of tight-ly packed apartment houses and popu-lar burlesque theaters-having beenentirely razed in the early 1960s. In itsstead was laid down a plaza so devoidof benches, greenery, and other sign-postsof human hospitality that even onthe loveliest fall weekend, when theCommon and Esplanade and otherpublic spaces teem with Bostonians atleisure, the plaza stands utterly emptysave for the occasional skateboardergrinding a lonely path across its long,

shallow steps to nowhere. The Hall it-self, hailed at its construction as aparagon of what then was approvinglycalled the "New Brutalist" movement,approximates both the shape and thecharm of an offshore oil platform; itsconcrete facade is now pocked withspalls and dulled by weeping darkpatches of smut.

I had traveled to Boston last summerto observe a "Fusion Flash Concert"-a marketing campaign I had firstlearned of two weeks earlier, through aFinancialTimes column emailed to meby a friend. A "series of flash mobbingevents," the FT had reported, was "be-ing staged by Ford Motor with SonyPictures Digital to promote the launchof the new Ford Fusion car." Weren'tyou always concerned about this? myfriend had written in the subject head-ing. I had never been concerned aboutit but rather had expected and evenwelcomed it, since co-optation of theflash mob by the nation's large con-glomerates would, I reasoned, be itsfinal (and fatal) phase. Up to thispoint, the only sign of co-optation sofar had been a 2004 episode of CSI:Miami, one of the five-tap-rated tele-vision shows in the nation, that cen-tered around a flash mob. Entitled"Murder in a Flash," the episode beginswith a flash mob that leaves a deadbody in its aftermath, but by the end-and here is where the writers reallyearn their residuals-we learn thatthe stiffhad been there already, the mobsent later by an honest teen to clue po-lice in to the deed.

That had been a mere reference toflash mobs, whereas Fusion Flash Con-certs was a true co-optation: Ford wasitself appropriating the trend, and wasdoing so in order to make a productseem cool." Bypresenting myself as aninterested member of the news media,I was able to confirm this latter point

5 I have been alerted to an even more ambitiousco-optation of the idea by Swatch, the watchcompany. This winter and spring it is run-ning a competition in which contestants stageflash mobs and send videos of them to the com-pany; the winner will be awarded a free trip toSWitzerland. A Swatch press release explains:"By using 'Flashmobbing'-spontaneous gath-erings that act out humorous and fun exercis-es-a simple yet strong synergy with theSwatch brand was unearthed and an oppor-tunity to become the 'Flash Mobber's watch ofchoice' was there for the taking."

with Ford directly. Ford was, aspokesman told me by phone, "lookingfor cool ways to connect with theirtarget audience," at both a "pricepoint" and what he called a "coolpoint." The flash concerts idea, he said,had "a spontaneity and a cool factorthat was attached to it."

He invited me to come and see aflash concert for myself, and of courseI agreed. The featured act would be aband called Staind, whose upcomingalbum Rolling Stone had described as"a unique combo of AA-meeting bal-lads and fetal-position metal." Mostconcertgoers would have to registerat the site and wait to receive the de-tails just beforehand, but to a re-porter in good standing he was will-ing to reveal the secret show date. Itwas a week and a half away, in earlyAugust-the same date, as a matterof fact, that Staind's new album wasto be released.

Wandering the site two hours be-fore showtime, I was struck by howevery vestige of "flash" had alreadybeen stripped from the evening'sevent. The "last-minute" emails hadin fact gone out six days beforehand.Two radio stations had been tappedto promote the show with ads ("justto pump everything up," anotherFord rep had told me). Newspapershad listed the concert in their dailyarts calendars. Here at City HallPlaza a tremendous soundstage hadalready been erected, its prodigiousbackdrop displaying the cover artfrom Staind's new album. Phalanxesof motorbike cops rumbled around,eyeing the hundred-strong klatch ofdiehard Stainders lumped directlybefore the empty stage. Ford had al-ready set up a hospitality tent, hadcordoned off a VIP area, and, atopyard- high stands in the near dis-tance, had perched two new FordFusions, the eponymous guests ofhonor, tilted widthwise as if bankinggnarly rums.

While we waited for the soundcheck, BarryGrant, a Ford rep, offeredto show me around the product. Bar-ry was a sunny fellow whose face hada pleasingly Mephistophelian aspect,with a neat goatee and a shaved headatop which unnecessary sunglasseswere perched. I knew that recent yearshad not been kind to Ford; its auto

EXPERIMENT 61

operations were losing nearly a billiondollars a quarter, and in May its bondswere reclassifiedas junk. Its stock pricewas down by a third since the begin-ning of the year, and soon (during thecourse of the Fusion Flash Concertsseries) it would drop by even more.

As Barryand I cut through the crowdtoward the Fusions, I asked him in verygeneral terms who Ford thought thecar's ideal customer was likely to be.As it turns out, he said, the companyhad done a great deal of "psychographicprofiling" on just this question.

"What we're looking at here issome-one who's moving ahead in their lives,they're moving forward in their ca-reer," he said. "It's a person who's en-trepreneurial, thinking outside the box.They're generally young, they're ei-ther in a relationship now or are get-ting married sometime soon, andthey're into activities like music,technology, exercise."

Really, I reflected, he was describingno one so much as myself, whose ownmarriage was then only six weeks awayand who was, at least at that moment,in possession of a gym membership.s

"See the contrast stitching, and thenice chrome accents and details, thepiano-black finish-all for less thantwenty and a half." Barry gesturedthrough the window at the dash. "It's allabout how this vehicle looks, how itfeels,how it moves, you know?" He de-livered his final judgment with genuineawe: "1think we've hit on all the sens-es with this one."

As we talked, a roadie onstage hadbegun to test the drums individually.With each stroke a deafening clap shotout across the plaza, caromed off a Bru-talist wall, and rebounded past us again,barely diminished. I looked around atthe crowd, the average age of whichwas perhaps nineteen, a motley col-lection of wan goth girls, leathery semi-drifters, wiry North Shore bullies inwifebeaters.A bleach blonde wanderedby in a tight Tvshirt reading NO BAR'STOO FAR. I remarked to Barry that, psy-chographically speaking, the crowddid not seem to be what he and Fordhad in mind.

It was true, Barry acknowledged,that the Fusion was "really going forpeople who are mid-twenties to, say,

6 Since canceled.

62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I MARCH 2006

late thirties," but he added, "We knowthe vehicle has youth appeal .... Thisvehicle, it kind of shakes things up alittle bit. I mean, look at the blackone-I think it looks a little bit dif-ferent from an Accord or Camry." Histone implied severe understatement.

I looked at the black one. In pointof fact, the vehicle shook nothingup. Its design was supremely generic,as if an Accord, a Camry, and everyother sedan on the market had beenmeticulously averaged together. Icould safely say that no one presentat this concert hoped ever to have tobuy this car. A word began to hoverin my mind with respect to the Fu-sion Flash Concerts program, andthat word was desperation.

SUBJECT POPULATIONBoston's first flash mob, in July

of 2003, had been entitled "Ode toBill." In it, hundreds had packed thegreeting-card aislesof a Harvard Squaredepartment store, telling bystanderswho inquired that they were lookingfor a card for their friend Bill in NewYork. Although the gesture was ren-dered somewhat hollow by the factthat I failed to receive a single card, Inevertheless approved of Boston's mobon strictly artistic grounds. Nothing ismore defining of hipster ism than semi-ironic coronation of its own celebrities,and by making a half-hearted, jestingattempt to elevate me to celebrity sta-tus, Boston had given its mob an ap-propriately sly turn.

Although the field of hipstercelebrities is constantly changing, Ihave attempted a partial version ofthe current schema in Figure 5. Thisphenomenon is, I think, a simplecorollary of the drive toward deindivid-uation as postulated above. I made ex-plicit reference to this in MOB #7,where participants were instructed tomaterialize suddenly as an immensesingle-file line leading from a disuseddoor on the side of Sr. Patrick'sCathedral. The line, which wouldeventually stretch a quarter-milearound the entire block-sized church,was to be unaccountably present forprecisely five minutes; and if, duringthis time, a bypasser asked the mob-bers what they were lining up for,they were to respond that they "heardthey're selling Strokes tickets." The

Strokes were a then-popular rockband among the hipsters.

Almost all of the mobs I organizedhad been, in some sense, jokes on thesubject of conformity. MOB #4 pre-tended to be a tour group from Mary-land (my home state) so excited to bein a New York shoe store that theyhad to pull out their cell phones andtell their friends about it. There was#6,with the genuflecting in the corporatetoy store, and then #8, of course,wherein essence the mob followed ordersmade by speakers on a pole-nothingmore straightforward than that, Ithought. In #7, though, my point wassharpened somewhat, in that the mobwas enacting obedience not just insome generic sense but in specific ref-erence to hipster culture, so that theself-ridicule was made explicit. I waspointing out that hipsters, our sup-posed cultural avant-garde, are in facta transcontinental society of culturalreceptors, straining to perceive whichshifts to follow. I must hasten to addthat this is not entirely their fault: theInternet can propagate any flashy no-tion, whether it be a style of eyewear ora presidential candidacy, with such in-stantaneity that a convergence on the"hip" tends now to happen unself-consciously,as a simplematter of course.

But hipsters, after becoming awareof this very dynamic, have respondedin a curious and counterintuitive way.Even as they might decry this drivetoward unanimity, they continuallyembrace it and re-embrace it in an en-thusiastic, almost ecstatic fashion. Nophenomenon of recent years illustrat-ed this point as clearly as the afore-mentioned Strokes, who for most of2002 held the top-band spot in hip-sterdom. This was a band that, albeitenjoyable and skilled, had been clear-ly manufactured precisely for hipsterdelectation. Moreover, the hipsterswere well aware of this fact, and theycomplained about it incessantly evenas they cued up the record at partiesand danced with special abandon. In-deed, one could perceive somethingpalpably different, something animal,in the hipster specieswhen the Strokescame over the speakers; and it was, Ithink, the reckless, self-abnegating joyof this simple unanimity, of onenessfor its own sake. The Strokes made anatural object of this unanimity be-

cause their sound--derivative candy,1970s punk simplicity dressed up withsome 1990s indie-rock aloofness-wasan easy common denominator. Theywere no Pixies, no Fugazi, no Joy Di-vision, no band to which pledging al-legiance implied the endorsement of aprinciple. They were, moreover, easi-ly discarded, and the top-band mantlehas been passed many times since then,in rapid succession-to equally deriv-ative groups possessing the requiredsheen of sophistication, such as FranzFerdinand, Interpol, Bloc Party, and, asof this writing, an outfit called ClapYour Hands Say Yeah. .

ever been forced at a reading to watchRick Moody play guitar, you have Mc-Sweeney' 5 to blame.) Its minimalistgraphic design, sometimes down evento its Garamond typeface, was fastborrowed by publications ranging fromwebzines to major book houses. Andits elliptical prose stylings were dulyparroted by what seemed at times to bean entire generation of writers."

Like the Strokes, McSweeney'spromised a cultural watershed for hip-sters while making no demands onthem. Readers accustomed to a choicebetween low entertainment and seri-ous literature did not, with this journal,

FIG. 5-SELECTED HIPSTER CELEBRITIES, CIRCAWINTER 2005-6

•I ~

Jonathan Safran Foer •

• Jedediah Purdy Sufjan Stevens •Sarah Vowell •

Will Oldham.

Miranda July

• •Benjamin Kunkel

• Wes Anderson

•Vincent Gallo

Jack White •

• Neal Pollack

David Cross •

• James Frey

....••........ MOCKING APPRECIATION EARNEST APPRECIATION ........•.

Popular music, perhaps, has alwaysbeen a fickle thing. So let us tum to lit-erature. The most significant literarymovement the hipsters have producedis McSweeney's, which itself had es-sentially the characteristics of a pop-music fad. Soon after Dave Eggersstarted the journal/website/publishinghouse in Brooklyn, its writers becamenot just sought-after publishingprospects but also minor celebritieswhose readings across the country soonoverflowed with devotees. The style ofthese readings, which blended at-tempts at semiserious prose withcomedic flourishes and live music, wasitself widely mimicked. (If you have

have to make such a choice at all. Andfor would-be writers, buckling underthe weight of the literary task, Mc-Sweeney's mapped out an easier andfar more pleasurable route. In its pagesliterature appeared as a sort of pot-luck barbecue where the young litter-ateur, merely by whipping up some ab-surdist trifle or other, could throw theFrisbee with established authors whowere publishing their castoffs there.

7 I should mention here that I myself made afew minor contributions to McSweeney'sand its website. Also, with regard to the pre-ceding paragraph, lawn records by all thebands mentioned and, have seen some ofthem live in concert.

Almost none of the young writerscould deploy McSweeney' 5 style to any-where near the effect that Eggers, agenuinely affecting writer, could; onesuspects that most would have beenbetter (if less well known) writers to-day if the journal had never existed.

Inevitably, even asMcSweeney' 5 hasmatured and gained more seriousnessof purpose, it has receded in hipsteresteem, just as did trucker hats, HushPuppies, the mullet. Like starlings ona trash-strewn field the hipsters alighttogether, peck intently for a time, andat some indiscernible signal take wingagain at once. If they are the Ameri-can avant-garde it is true, I think, inonly this aspect-the unending chumof their tastes, this adult faddishness inthe adolescent style.

PROPAGATION TOOL: THE BLOGWhile waiting for the sound check,

I was given the opportunity to chatwith Howie Cockrill, who wrote theofficial weblog on the Fusion FlashConcerts website. I had very muchhoped to meet Howie and had famil-iarized myself with his work before-hand, because I hoped to make furtherstudy of the blog's utility as a propaga-tion device. The role that blogs hadplayed in the spreadof flashmobs camevery much as a surprise to me; at thetime, I had thought word of the mobswould spread through forwarded emailsalone, so that the mobs themselveswould be cross-sections of an unbro-ken network of acquaintanceship-Le., any mob attendee would sit at theend of an email chain that stretchedback directly, ifdistantly, to myself.I re-fusedto put up a website for the project,or to reveal the project's email addressto reporters who had not yet learned it,in order that the mob would be madeonly by this sort of direct person-to-person contact, extended out expo-nentially. Each person who forwardedthe email was, in my view, taking onthe project as their own; in enlisting hisor her own social network each was asresponsible for the mob, earned asmuch praise or blame for it, as I.

Yet when people had begun to ask ifthey might post the mob emails ontheir blogs, I concluded that the an-swer should be yes. It is true that blogs,like all websites, are inherently undi-rected, in that anyone can navigate to

EXPERIMENT 63

them as he or she pleases, and this wasdefinitely a concern: I did not wantanyone to learn the mob details with-out making human contact with an-other mob member. But blogs are bytheir nature such intimate endeavorsthat even the most widely read amongthem seem to foster a sense of closeconnectedness among their readers.This stems, perhaps, from their inher-ently arcane content-s-i.e., the blog-ger's ceaseless mental minutiae, ofwhich any avid reader will be a trulycompatible soul. A mob spread partlyby blogs was still, as I had intended, avirtual community made physical.

Howie's Fusion Flash Concertsblog, though, was a somewhat morecomplicated case. He normally wroteon a group blog called "Crazy Talk,"where he offered such comments asthe following:

[Wjhen bands start to get noticed, allsortsof peoplecome out of the wood-workwith contracts& pens;lookingto"helptheircareer"-record labels,man-agers,publicists,publishers,producers,distributors,accounting firmsand let'snot forgetlawyers.... [Mjostartistslivecompletelyin the dark about the termsof the contracts they sign, the moneycoming in and goingout, their obliga-tionsto the differentpartiestheysignonwith and vice versa.... [M)usiciansaresofuckedits not even funny.

But on the Fusion Flash Concertsblog, one encountered a differentHowie:

I'm out ofbreath fromtypingsomuch,but there'sjustsomuchto say!Sohere'sthe details for the next flash concert:JERMAINEDUPRIwillhit the stage@8 PM @ CENTENNIAL PARK inDowntown Atlanta! (Doors open at6:30 PM).Youthink itshot in Atlantanow .... just wait 'til tomorrownight!

Or:

The JerrnaineDuprishowin Atlantawasjust plain nuts! HisSo So Defcrewstirred it up good, and the crowd gotdownso hard that it rained.

Now its time to pass the torch forthe next flashconcert!

When I met Howie, I brought upthis issue of tone and found him ad-mirably self-aware on the subject. Hecalled his posts "experiential reviews',"by which he meant"not, this is what

64 HARPER'S MAGAZINE J MARCH 2006

I think of the band, or this is what Ithink of how the show went, but thisis what the audience thought of theshow." He made his point a little moreexplicit: "I try to infusea little bit ofhy-perbole into it. Make it a little bit of ashort story, you know what I mean?" Inorder to chat, he and I had retreatedfrom the din of the crowd into thePlaza's modernist tundra. Howie is anaffableArkansan with half-tinted glass-es and a full but well-maintained blondbeard; when not blogging he was a lawstudent at the University of San Fran-cisco, and had been set up with thegig, which he called "the most sweetsummer job of all time," by a friendwho worked at Sony. On the subject ofStaind, Howie was noncommittal, buthe added: "It's popular for a reason, Iguess-you know? And that's sort ofwhat I have to tap into when I writethe reviews. These people obviouslylove Staind, and there's a reason thatthey love Staind.'

The sound check finally went on atnearly 6:30, and afterward I returned tothe media desk to wait for the show. Agiant Ford rep with a graying goateeasked me about my story. I was writingabout what happened to flash mobs, Itold him.

He looked at me intensely. "They'redead," I thought I heard him say.

I staredback at him. Here, finally,wasa Ford rep willing to throw down.

"The Dead," he said again. "They'ddo concerts like this. And raves. Flashconcerts are pretty much like raves."]could barely hide my disappointmentat this turn. We looked out at the rest-less crowd of "flash mobbers" packingup against the stage, their boredomhaving prompted them to throw a hail-storm of increasingly dangerous ma-terial into the air: balloons, then emp-ty water bottles, then full water bottles,then aluminum cans. Sporadic fist-fights had begun to break out.

The Ford rep shook his head at thescene and smiled. "Everybodywants tofeel like an insider," he said.

SOCIAL RAMIFICATIONS: .HOWARD DEAN AND "THE PERFECTSTORM"

In the media coverage of flashmobs,the most curious undercurrent was thenotion, almost a wish, that they wouldsomeday become something serious.

A very smart person named HowardRheingold happened a year before thefad to have published a book calledSmart Mobs, about the phenomenalsocial ramifications of mobile-phoneand other miniaturized computingtechnologies-ideas that the "flashmob" frankly seemed a nihilistic per-version of, but Rheingold let himself bedrawn into the media serum never-theless. Without fail it became his roleto supply a quote alleging that thiscompletely puerile fad was in fact aharbinger of something important. "[A]symptom of a phenomenon that has along-term and large-scale effect," saidRheingold tactfully in the Dallas Mom-

. ing News, which also referred to him asa "futurist"; "early signs,of somethingthat's going to grow much bigger," hesaid in the Christian Science Monitor.

Bloggerstended to share this vision,and as the Mob Project persisted in itsabsurdism they began to chafe. Eventhose who did not want the mobs to es-pouse explicit politics neverthelesshoped they might begin to demonstratein some way to the surrounding spec-tators. For example, MOB #6, in theTimes Square Toys "R" Us, was thelargest and arguably most successful ofall the mobs, but almost unanimouslythe bloggers panned it. "Another MobBotched," was the verdict on the blogFancy Robot: "[I]nstead of setting theFlash Mob out in public on TimesSquare itself, as everyone had hoped,The Flash Master decided to set it inToys 'R' Us, with apparently dismalresults." SatansLaundromat.com (aphoto-blog that contains the most com-plete visual record of the New Yorkproject) concurred-"not publicenough," the blogger wrote, withoutenough "spectators to bewilder." Chrisfrom the CCE Blogwrote: "I think thecommon feeling among these bloggerreviews is:where does the idea go fromhere? .. After seeinghundreds ofpeople .show up for no good reason, it's obvi-ous that there's some kind of potentialfor artistic or political expressionhere."

The idea seemed to be that flashmobs could be made to convey a mes-sage, but for a number of reasons thisdream was destined to run aground.First, as outlined above, flash mobswere gatherings of insiders, and as suchcould hardly communicate to thosewho did not already belong. They were

intramural play; they drew their ener-gies not from impressing outsiders orfreaking them out but from showingthem utter disregard, from using theoutside world as merely a terrain forprivate games.Second, flash mobswereby definition transitory, ten minutesor less, and thereby not exactly suitedto standing their ground and testifying.Third, in terms of physical space, flashmobs relied on constraints to create anillusion of superior strength. I neverheld mobs in the open, the bloggerscomplained, in view of enough on- .lookers, but this was entirely purpose-ful on my part, for like Colin Powell Ihewed to the doctrine of overwhelmingforce. Only in enclosed spaces couldthe mob generate the necessary self-awe; to allow the mob to feel smallwould have been to destroy it.S

Four months after the final NewYork flash mob, there was a series ofgatherings in Iowa whose dismal out-come supported my theory on thesepoints. Those gatherings were the "Per-fect Storm," four weekend-long push-es by the Howard Dean campaign inIowa in advance of that state's January19 caucus. In keeping with their name(which, like "flash mob," employed aproperlymeteorological metaphor), thePerfect Storm weekends brought in3,500 out-of-state Dean supporters towalk door to door and stump for theirman. The volunteer headquarters oc-cupied an entire city block; the out-of-town storm troopers all wore match-ing orange stocking caps, precisely toaccentuate their number, to flaunt theirubiquity. They were, like a flash mob,a virtual community made physical, inthat the great preponderance of themembers had developed their rela-tionship with the campaign online.?Indeed, Dean's klatch of cybergurushad come to envision the enrire cam-

8 This also is why the plan for the NuclearOption is so grand: huge numbers (hundredsof thousands) of attendees will be required tomake a mob-style gatheringfeel largeenough outin the open.

9 Unsurprisingly, those who believed flashmobs should become political often thoughtthat the beneficiary of this advocacy should beHoward Dean. In a particularly surreal devel-opment, after the comic strip Doonesburyfeatured a character planning a "flash mob forDean" at Seattle's Space Needle, the mob ac-tually took place as a result.

paign as a form of "social software," inwhich supportersdwelledin a virtual 10-cale called "DeanSpace." When Wiredmagazine asked one of these gurus (atech entrepreneur named joi Ito) howthese online masses would be led; hereplied, "You're not a leader, you're aplace. You're like a park or garden. If it'scomfortable and cool, people are at-tracted. Deanspace is not really aboutDean. It's about us."

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order stymied; at silently infiltratingthis pseudopublic space, this corpo-rate space, these chain stores and shop-ping malls, and then rising at once tooverrun them.

The acme of this feeling was (iron-ically, given its subsequent panningon just these grounds) MOB #6, whichfor a fewbeautiful minutes stifled whathas to be the most ostentatious chainstore in the entire city: the Times

That is: just like flash mobs, theDean campaign was also pure scene,the appeal having become less aboutthe candidate than about his chatrooms, and about how connected onefelt inside his youthful and seeming-ly numberless throng. To allow theDean campaign to feel small-out-numbered, embattled-was to destroyit; and during those four weeks inIowa, as the orange-hatted 3,500 dis-sipated out into the frozen plains,spilling out their passion to the polit-ically benumbed, the candidate'schances collapsed (see Figure 6).

EXPERIMENTAL EFFECT ON SUBJECTSThere was, however, one successful

element of politics in the flash mob-a vague and dark thing, a purely chaot-ic impulse that (surprisingly enough,for a fad born of the Internet) wastinged almost with Luddism. It couldbest be seen at the very moment thata mob came together: a sort of funda-mental joy at seeing society overtaken,

Date

Square Toys "R" Us, whose excessesare too many to catalogue here but in-clude, in the store's foyer, an actualoperational Ferriswheel some sixtyfeetin diameter. Up until the appointedtime of7:18 P.M. the mobbers loiteredon the upper level, among the GI [oesand the N intendos and up inside theglittering pink of the two-floor Barbiepalace. But then all at once the mob,five hundred strong, crowded aroundthe floor's centerpiece, a life-size ani-matronic Tyrannosaurusrex that growlsand feints with a Hollywood-class life-likeness. "Fill in all around it," themob sliphad instructed. "It is like a ter-rible god to you."

Two minutes later, the mob droppedto its knees, moaning and cowering atthe beast behind outstretched hands;in doing so we repaid this spectacle,which clearly was the product of notonly untold expenditure but many man-months of imagineering, with an en-masse enactment of the very emo-tions-visceral fright and infantile

EXPERlMENT 65

fealty-that it obviously had been de-signed to evoke. MOB #6 was, as manybloggers pointed out pejoratively,"cute," but the cuteness had beenmassed, refracted, and focused to sucha bright point that it became a physicalmenace. For six minutes the upper lev-el was paralyzed; the cash registers werecocooned behind the moaning, kneel-ing bodies pressed together; customers.

MOB #6, AUGUST 7, 2003

were trapped; business could not bedone. The terror-stricken store person-nel tried in vain to force the crowd out."Is anyone making a purchase?" onewas heard to call out, weakly. As themob dispersed down the escalators andout into the street, the police arriveddownstairs, telling us to leave, but wehad already accomplished the task, haddelivered what was in effect a warning.

Did these dark impulses remainwith the participants, I wondered, ordid they dissipate with the mob?This question, as it happens, alsotroubled Stanley Milgram long afterhis authority experiments were com-plete; he was bedeviled his entire lifeby critics who claimed he had per-manently changed his subjects, hadin fact victimized them. One suchcritic, the Welsh poet D~nnie Abse,wrote a play entitled The Dogs ofPavlov that was loosely based on Mil-gram's authority experiments. Beforeits publication as a book, he sent hisintroduction, which was directlycritical of Milgram, to the professorhimself for comment.

In the subsequent exchange, Mil-gram relates the story of a young manwho had been through the study in1964 and six years later sent a letterto Milgram telling him that, as a result,

66 HARPER'S MAGAZINE! MARCH 2006

. he was seeking CO status to avoid fight-ing in Vietnam.

He was going to be sent by our govern-ment to Southeast Asia to drop napalmon innocent villagers,to despoil the land,to massacre. He informs me, as manyothers have done, that the experimenthas deepened his understanding of themoral problems of submitting to malev-olent authority. He has learned some-

thing. He takes a stand. He becomesa conscientiousobjector, Has he beenvictimized by the experiment, or hashe been liberated by it?

In the same letter, Milgramoffers Abse a rationale for theexperiments that is stunning inits utter lack of scientific disin-terest:

, The obedience experiment is not astudy in which the subject is treat-ed as a passive object, acted uponwithout any possibility of control-ling his own experience. Indeed theentire experimental situation hasbeen created to allow the subject

to exercise a human choice, and thusexpress his nature as a person.

Was this not what flash mobs couldhave done, in some purer and moreideal form? I had meant them as anauthority experiment, in the Mil-gramite style, but was not their promiseinstead to have been the mirror im-age--an anti-authority experirnent.t''a play at revolution, an acting-out ofthe human choice to thwart order?

CONCLUSIONI myself left the "flash concert"

ten minutes after it began: the maxi-mum length of a flash mob. I re-mained, to my own surprise, a flash-

10 This isprecisely what the Nuclear Option isintended to be. When first hearing about theproject, each person is presented with a pri-vate choice: to join the list and thereby becomean insider, privy to the detaits in advance, orelse to face being left out. Even strident oppo-nents, I expect, would reason their way to-ward joining the list-to monitor its activities,for example, or to wage a counterdemonstra-tion on theappointed day-al).d thus contributeto its growth. Similarly, once the numericalthreshold is crossed and the world awakens tofind the Nudear communique in its inbox,each of us will again be faced with a choice: tostay inside, stick to the day's agenda items aslaid out in the planner, or watch as civic orderis cut off at the knees. Could a society of spec-tators resistbearingwitness to its own undoing?

mob purist, even though the day'sevent had abandoned every preceptof the original idea. For the subwayride back to my car I had bought theday's Globe, and prominent in theArts section I found a story aboutthe evening's show. .

It began: The "flash mob" conceptwhere people gather on short notice af-ter contacting each other through e-mails and text messages has come torock 'n' roll. This summer's FusionFlash Concert series ...

And this, I realized, was the ex-tent of the co-optation, and perhapsits only point. Ford and Sony did notcare to steal the concept, or even tosap' its essence.' To place stories likethis, they needed only to take theterm, even if in so doing theystripped it entirely of its meaning.Ford and Sony had managed to takemy fad, an empty meditation onemptiness, and to render it evenmore vacuous. They had become,that is, the new and undisputed mas-ters of the genre. _

March Index Sources1-3 Prison Policy Initiative (Northampton,Mass.): 4 Office of the Clerk, U.S. House ofRepresentatives; 5 The Brookings Institu-tion (Washington); 6 American EnterpriseInstitute (Washington); 7 M.LT. PublicOpinion ResearchTraining Lab (Cambridge,Mass.}; 8 Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia Univer-sity (N.Y.c.); 9 Manion's International Auc-tion House (Kansas City, Kans.), 10 CourtTV (NYC.); 11 Robert Pape, University ofChicago; 12 Harper's research; 13 EdwardN. Wolff,NewYorkUniversity; 14 Tax Pol-icyCenter (Washington);' 15,16 Sanjiv Gup-ta, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor); 17National Center for Health Statistics (Hy-attsville, Md.), 18,19 Donor Sibling Reg-istry (Nederland, Colo.); 20 U.S.Adminis-tration for Children and Families; 21FKK-Saunaclub Artemis (Berlin); 22 Hu-man Security Centre (Vancouver); 23,24Paul Collier, Centre for the Study of AfricanEconomies (Oxford, England); 25,26 APTEnterpriseDevelopmenr (Moreton-in-Marsh,England); 27 Stephen Gwilvm, John Rad-cliffe Hospiral (Oxford, England); 28 Harp-er's research; 29 LocusMagazine (Oakland);30 Harris Interactive (Rochester, N.Y.); 31Asuka Shinsha (Tokyo); 32 Shinyusha(Tokyo); 33,34 Karl MacDorman, IndianaUniversity School of Informatics (Indi-anapolis); 35 GoldenPalace.com (Kah-nawake, Quebec); 36 Kruse Inrernational(Auburn, Ind.): 37 Ontario Consultants onReligious Tolerance (Kingston); 38,39 JayD. Wexler, BostonUniversity School ofLaw.

Photograph (detail) courtesy Mike Epstein!www.satanslaundtomat.com