Piranha-oia: Are Flash Mobs evil?

“There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.” - PJ Orourke

207 seemingly unexceptional people going about their daily lives suddenly and inexplicably freeze, like statues, in the heart of Grand Central Station. People in the middle of conversations, coffee sips and hastened stride standing like modern wives of Lot. Three minutes later they simultaneously unfreeze and go about their daily business as if nothing had ever happened. No, I’m not describing the plot of Clockstoppers II, but rather the latest demonstration of a recent social phenomenon known as a Flash Mob.

What’s a Flash Mob?
Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English defines Flash Mobs as “a group of people who organize on the Internet and then quickly assemble in a public place, do something bizarre, and disperse”. The Internet, text messaging and cell phones have made it possible for individuals to opt into a living, breathing network of like minded individuals to become, essentially, a cyber flock that acts with one mind. Finding their roots in the performance arts, Flash Mobs tend toward the fantastic and surreal. Massive public pillow fights, a seemingly random crowd spontaneously breaking into applause in the lobby of a hotel and countless other ‘wouldn’t it be cool if a 1,000 people did (Something Bizarre) at (Some Specific Time) in (Some Public Place)’ have set the early precedence for future Flash Mobs. To this point, these Flash Mobs have been benign but there is new evidence that more nefarious powers have recognized the opportunity of the Flash Mob and are trying to harness the power it wields.

The Dark Side
In the animal kingdom it appears that groups of individual fauna working together as ‘Mobs’ fall into two general categories:

1. Flocks: less powerful individuals organizing together primarily for companionship and defense. For example: Elephants surrounding their young to protect them from predators.

and…

2. Swarms: less powerful individuals organizing together primarily to overpower and prey on the weak and unsuspecting. For example: Piranhas de-boning a baby bird that has fallen into the Amazon.

So far we’ve been lucky enough to see the vast majority of Flash Mobs fall into the first category, bringing groups of people together in harmless experiments of fun, but how long will it be until we start seeing the second and darker category introduce a new era of Flash Mobs? If recent news reports are any indication, it’s already here.

“A Jacksonville, Oregon, man was shocked to find people rummaging through his personal belongings on the weekend as the result of a fake advertisement that someone had placed on the popular Internet classified ad site, Craigslist. The ad stated that a homeowner, Robert Salisbury, was forced to immediately vacate his house and move out of the country. As a result, the ad went on to say, the sheriffs department had declared the contents of the home, as well as Mr. Salisbury’s horse, abandoned. It urged anyone who was interested in the home’s contents to drive to the house and take whatever they wanted.”

Read the full Ottawa Citizen Article
Watch the video report

In a state of ‘Paranaha-oia’ a swarm connected only by Craigslist and their shared opportunism stole the better part of an innocent man’s material wealth. The instigators who incited the swarm to cover their own robbery got caught, but only because of their own hapless blunders (police were able to track their IP address to there home). The copy cat mobs that are coming, and they are coming, will inevitably learn from these initial mistakes and plan accordingly. If we take the time to think about it, the real shocker with this new Flash Mob is not that it happened but that we had 25 years to prepare for the ‘evil’ hordes:

“In 1973, the story Flash Crowd by Larry Niven described a concept vaguely similar to flash mobs. It described how, with the invention of popular teleportation, an argument at a shopping mall, which happened to be covered by a news crew, swells into a riot. The broadcast coverage attracted the attention of other people, who use the widely available technology of the teleportation booth to swarm first that event — thus intensifying the riot — and then other events as they happened. In actuality, flash crowds are used to start up and heighten riots. When a riot begins and is televised, others join in, resulting in the participation of millions of people. Commenting on the social impact of such mobs, one character in Niven’s story, articulating the police view, says, “We call them flash crowds, and we watch for them”. - Wikipedia

Word to the wise
The take away here is not that Flash Mobs are bad or even that you shouldn’t participate in them, for the vast majority the opposite is true; they’re good fun void of malice and victimization. The real take away is simply a reminder of something you’ve known all along; think about what you’re doing. Don’t assume that just because it has a spiffy web 2.0 interface or even the adoption of your community that it’s legal or more importantly right. Do your due deligence and dig a little bit under the surface of the group, and what motivates them, especially the leaders. In the end it still comes down to the concious decisions of individuals that determines the nature of any group, especially Flash Mobs.