The Short Life of Flash Mobs

By Francis Heaney, Stay Free! Magazine. Posted October 17, 2005.

Someday, I'll be talking to my grandchildren (which is what my wife and I will call the creatures cloned from our genetic material, grown in a vat, and raised by robots) and they'll say, "Tell us again about flash mobs!"

And I'll say, "You lazy kids, why don't you just read that interview I did with the guy who came up with flash mobs?"

"You mean the one where you started with that tortured introduction and where it sounded like you were never going to explain what the hell flash mobs were?"

This is why I don't want children.

Anyway, a flash mob is an event where a large group of people, having received instructions in advance, converge upon a place, do something odd there, and leave peaceably within minutes. For instance, at an early flash mob in Manhattan, participants descended upon Macy's rug department and claimed to be members of a commune in Williamsburg shopping for a "love rug." Sounds amusing, yes? Enough people evidently agreed that what started out as a single forwarded email inviting people to join an "inexplicable mob" turned into a sprawling, global fad practically overnight--and then largely faded away almost as quickly as it appeared.

To find out how and why it all happened, Stay Free! talked to the fellow who sent out the first email, Bill -- or, as he is often known to journalists, "Bill."

Stay Free!: How did you first come up with the idea for flash mobs?

Basically, it started with an email. I created an email address--themobproject@yahoo.com--and forwarded an email to myself, and then I forwarded it to about forty or fifty friends on the premise that they would think, "Oh, Bill's heard about this interesting thing."

I didn't realize it had started out as kind of a con job.

Bill: Yeah, I wanted it to appear like one of those things circulating around the internet.

If you'd just sent it from the Mob Project, they would wonder: how did they get my email address?

Exactly. The original idea was to create an email that would get forwarded around in some funny way, or that would get people to come to a show that would turn out to be something different or surprising. I eventually came up with a lazy idea, which was that the thing would just have one simple, in-your-face aspect to it--there wouldn't be any show, and that the email would be upfront about the fact that it was inviting people to do basically nothing at all.

Well, it wasn't nothing. It was inviting people to have the opportunity to confuse other people.

That's true. But the idea was that the people themselves would become the show, and that just by responding to this random email, they would, in a sense, create something.

They become the show and the audience.

Exactly. I had conceived it specifically as a New York thing. People in New York are always looking for the next big thing. They come here because they want to take part in the arts community, they want to be with other people who are doing creative stuff, and they will come out to see a reading or a concert on the basis of word-of-mouth. Partly they want to find out what everybody else is so excited about, but partly they just want to be a part of the scene. You have this in other places too, but I feel like there's something in New York that makes it kind of a city-wide pastime. Part of what I liked about this idea was that it would be very frank about the pure scenesterism of it. What is it that would make people come to the flash mob? Well, it would be the fact that if it went off as planned, lots of other people would be coming. The desire to not be left out was part of what would grow it. I didn't have all of these grandiose notions about it at the time; I mostly just thought it was funny. But I thought of it as a stunt that would satirize scenester-y gatherings.

In a lot of ways it's so much better than other scenester activities because you don't get stuck in a club for an hour and a half. You're in and out in five minutes.

True. There was something purposely cynical even about the five-to-ten minute constraint, in that I wanted the thing to be readily consumable. "Oh, I can do that, it's only ten minutes, it's right after work, and it's near a major subway line ..."

They were all in the midtown Manhattan area?

Some of them were downtown near Broadway-Lafayette; they were all really accessible. The first mob was going to be at Claire's Accessories at Astor Place. I used to walk by places and think: where would it be really funny if one day there just happened to be a mob of people there? And Claire's Accessories fit that description. It's just this little sleepy store, kind of a hole in the wall. So I picked that place.

And then you got ratted.

About ten minutes before the first mob, I get a call from Eugene, and he's like, "There are seven cops and a police wagon out in front of Claire's Accessories." So I get there and they're not letting anybody stand in front of the store. They made it look as if a terrorist had threatened to wage jihad against Claire's Accessories.

Which, in a way, is just as funny.

But it made me mad. The first email said "Mob #1" and at the bottom I wrote, "Await instructions for Mob #2," or something like that. But at the time, I wasn't necessarily convinced that there would ever be a Mob #2. But now I see the cops, and I'm like, "I've got to find a way to get around this, because we've got to get a future thing." So for Mob #2, I hit on the notion of meeting in pre-mob locations, and then people would come through at the last minute and hand out flyers with the mob location. That worked fine for the second mob, which was at Macy's.

Francis Heaney is the author of The Holy Tango of Literature.

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