Flash Mobs

...were invented by a senior editor of Harper's Magazine. Read about it here. Juicy excerpts follow.

As first defined by Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb (1952), deindividuation is “a state of affairs in a group where members do not pay attention to other individuals qua individuals”...

Consider the generational cohort that has come to be called the hipsters–i.e., those hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes. Have so many self-alleged aesthetes ever been more (in the formulation of Festinger et al.) “submerged in the group”? The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned, as abandoned...it inevitably will be...

Over those who would sell to the hipsters, then, hangs the promise of instant adoption but also the specter of wholesale and irrevocable desertion...With a rising generation so mercurial, one wonders whether even the notion of “branding,” i.e., the building of long-term reputations, which has remained the watchword among our corporations for more than a decade, will itself come to lose its luster...the corporation will be content merely to hitch itself to a succession of their whims.

...Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad; it was, in its very form (pointless aggregation and then dispersal), intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.

I know this because I happen to have been the flash mob’s inventor...

What the project harnessed was the joining urge, a drive toward deindividuation easily discernible in the New York hipster population.

The basic hypothesis behind the Mob Project was as follows: seeing how all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism, the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows deriving less from the work itself than from the social opportunities the work might engender, it should theoretically be possible to create an art project consisting of pure scene...

The mob was all about the herd instinct, I reasoned, about the desire not to be left out of the latest fad...

What the Times did, in fascinating fashion, was not just to run the backlash story (which I had been expecting in three to five more weeks) but to do so preemptively–i.e., before the backlash actually had materialized...

Nothing is more defining of hipsterism than semi-ironic coronation of its own celebrities...

I was pointing out that hipsters, our supposed cultural avant-garde, are in fact a transcontinental society of cultural receptors, straining to perceive which shifts to follow. I must hasten to add that this is not entirely their fault: the Internet can propagate any flashy notion, whether it be a style of eyewear or a presidential candidacy, with such instantaneity that a convergence on the “hip” tends now to happen unself-consciously, as a simple matter of course.

But hipsters, after becoming aware of this very dynamic, have responded in a curious and counterintuitive way. Even as they might decry this drive toward unanimity, they continually embrace it and re-embrace it in an enthusiastic, almost ecstatic fashion. No phenomenon of recent years illustrated this point as clearly as the aforementioned Strokes, who for most of 2002 held the top-band spot in hipsterdom. This was a band that, albeit enjoyable and skilled, had been clearly manufactured precisely for hipster delectation. Moreover, the hipsters were well aware of this fact, and they complained about it incessantly even as they cued up the record at parties and danced with special abandon...The Strokes made a natural object of this unanimity because their sound–derivative candy, 1970s punk simplicity dressed up with some 1990s indie-rock aloofness–was an easy common denominator...They were, moreover, easily discarded...

The most significant literary movement the hipsters have produced is McSweeney’s, which itself had essentially the characteristics of a pop-music fad...

Like the Strokes, McSweeney’s promised a cultural watershed for hipsters while making no demands on them...In its pages literature appeared as a sort of pot-luck barbecue where the young litterateur, merely by whipping up some absurdist trifle or other, could throw the Frisbee with established authors who were publishing their castoffs there...

Inevitably, even as McSweeney’s has matured and gained more seriousness of purpose, it has receded in hipster esteem, just as did trucker hats, Hush Puppies, the mullet. Like starlings on a trash-strewn field the hipsters alight together, peck intently for a time, and at some indiscernible signal take wing again at once. If they are the American avant-garde it is true, I think, in only this aspect–the unending churn of their tastes, this adult faddishness in the adolescent style...

In the media coverage of flash mobs, the most curious undercurrent was the notion, almost a wish, that they would someday become something serious....

The idea seemed to be that flash mobs could be made to convey a message, but for a number of reasons this dream was destined to run aground. First, as outlined above, flash mobs were gatherings of insiders, and as such could hardly communicate to those who did not already belong...Second, flash mobs were by definition transitory, ten minutes or less, and thereby not exactly suited to standing their ground and testifying. Third, in terms of physical space, flash mobs relied on constraints to create an illusion of superior strength...

just like flash mobs, the Dean campaign was also pure scene...