February 06
The March Harper’s has a piece by the creator of Flash Mobs, Bill Wasik, one of the senior editors at Harper’s. What’s interesting is that he created them as a kind of latter-day authority experiment in the tradition of Stanley Milgram to, uh, uh … prove that hipsters are subject to “deindividuation”, i.e. mob mentality???? Say it isn’t so! You mean (gasp) that uber-individualist hipsters are just as prone to mob-think as your average SUV mom?
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.
The fact that Wasik would even stage these cheeky events as situtationist hipster booby traps makes him both clever AND the consumate meta-hipster snob — one who so despises the culture he is complicit in creating that he must cannibalize it to prove his hipster cred. Smug as Fug on a drug.
Wasik seems to be equally willing to leave out the problem of context — at least until the very end of the piece when he acknowledges that it’s more of an “anti-authority” experiment (or a theatrical revolution) than an expose on hipster fascism (you’ll have to go buy a copy to read the whole thing). Proving that a bunch of bored urbanites are willing to show up to a mildly transgressive public get-together in the spirit of fun hardly seems to justify the level of condescension it took for Wasik to equate them with the subjects in Milgram’s electro-shock experiments, which he never really gets around to anyway.
If, on the other hand, he’s merely exposing the hyprocrisy of a culture of supposed individuality that happens to have its own insidious norms, well … I’ll be a witches britches.
Anyhow, all this caught my attention because of the Wal-Mart Dance Party we did this past November. I had never heard of flash mobs, and I certainly don’t remember believing we were going to do anything more than have a lark in a Wal-Mart on the busiest shopping weekend of the year. What was most surprising, aside from the bounce the video got on the web (we got some 50,000 visits in a week), were the many absurdly impassioned debates people were having in our comments section about the ethical ramifications of our tard party — everything from “you’re just fucking with the poor slobs who work there” to “this is a new, truly radical form of protest.” Several people mentioned that what we had done was a flash mob. Given that we’re in Colorado Springs, I was hardly surprised that my hipster gaydar had missed the zeitgeist by a country mile. And so what? Despite Wasik’s most condescending intentions, there’s still something about these Kabuki revolutions that hits a nerve.
But next time I’ll be sure to stay home and read Festinger.
Posted by: darksandal in Pranks | Permalink
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2 Responses to “Flash Blob”
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OUCH!
looks like hispsters got hacked!
AE06
Yeah yeah, so YOU were the guy who actually invented the Flash Mobs. Stellar. And I was listening to the Strokes back in 2000 when you could only get their stuff on cassette and would actually get shit for wearing a studded white belt on the subway, etc.
Anyhow, the real reason I’m here is that I have a blog of my own. I just interviewed Wasik for it and thought you might enjoy reading the interview. It’s up at http://www.vulturedroppings.com. Fare thee well, Toilet Paper.