Flash mobs have gone corporate, writes PETER CRAWLEY
It all started with a love rug. One summer day in Manhattan, 200 people crowded around a carpet in Macy’s department store and told baffled sales assistants that this was what they were looking for. Then, just as quickly, the crowd dispersed without a purchase. The world’s first flash mob wasn’t about to get commercial.
By the time of the second flash mob in June 2003, when a few hundred people burst into spontaneous applause in the atrium of a swish New York hotel, these guerrilla performances were beginning to cluster in almost every city in the world. Each had its own spin.
The New York invasions became gigantic outdoor games in San Francisco, silent discos in London Tube stations, mass pillow fights in countless city squares – and, in Dublin, microblasts of surrealism. One horde barged into a shoe shop, proclaiming “I like cheese!” before leaving.
Soon flash mobs were everywhere: style supplements, news reports, and, by 2004, the dictionary (“A public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again”). But by the time they were banned in Mumbai, they were simply boring in New York. As Warsaw’s Zombie Walk recognised, in every flailing lurch the phenomenon was already dead on its feet.
To add brain-eating insult to injury, the creator of flash mobbing unveiled himself only to dismiss the whole movement. “Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad”; wrote Bill Wasik, “it was, in its very form (pointless aggregation and then dispersal), intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.”
For anybody as fond of the wit and subversion of the phenomenon as I was, this was like getting a telephone call from God telling you that heaven was a hoax.
But flash mobs weren’t pointless or apolitical. New York in 2003 was a city living under colour-coded terror alerts and a civil liberty-trampling Patriot Act. Wasik may have had a disdainful exclusivity, but his international followers didn’t: people told their friends, the scene rarely turned ugly, and the meeting was the message.
Now, though, mob mentality might be changing. When 100 people engaged in synchronised snogging in the ILAC centre last October, the massive public display of affection was not a flash mob, but an example of “Theatrical Espresso” organised by the Performance Corporation for the Dublin Theatre Festival.
Last month the same company held a “flash Céilidh” outside the Central Bank for the St Patrick’s Day Festival. Both were fun events that missed the point of flash mobbing. The participants were actors, the “top-secret” shows were heralded by press releases, and the meticulously edited YouTube footage was trimmed with company logos.
Not as corporate a corruption as Ford Motors’ Fusion Flash Concerts, maybe, but when such crowd control resembles a clever promotion, flash loses its dazzle.
That’s the way of every fad, but it’s sad to see this one reach its zombie period so quickly. Like the best example of flash mobs, the phenomenon was too good to last.
