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Berens, Bob
PARTICIPANTS WITH birthdays between the months of July and September were told to congregate at a bar and grill off Broadway in Midtown, a few minutes before 7 p.m. and to await further...
...Until then: no point, no foul...
...More impressive than the successful planning and timing, though, was the number of participants: there must have been three hundred mobbers present...
...Security guards managed to shut the dinosaur off only seconds before 7:24, our preappointed end...
...All a person can really say about a flash mob is that it happened...
...Their appearance may lend credibility to the claim that flash mobs, with their conspicuous lack of political or economic demands, their reliance on expensive technology for organizing, and their effect on their surprised and confused bystanders, are a subtly elitist phenomenon...
...Going in, I had expected the usual motley of antiglobalization radicals, but the group I was with was a fairly polished, young professional-looking bunch...
...and at 7:20 fall to our knees in front of it, raising our arms in fear and awe, screaming like terrified worshippers for exactly four minutes...
...After a few minutes, a man made his way through the crowd, slyly distributing scraps of paper with our instructions...
...The trend clearly owes some debt to Situationist ideas, guerrilla theater, and other tactics of creative civil disobedience, but where the Situationists were on some level attempting to extend a Marxist critique into a post-consumerist, leisure-class age—their spraypainted slogans on the sides of buildings in Paris in 1968 may have been elliptical and self-consciously vague, but they were at least identifiable as anticapitalist cri112 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 tique—these flash mobs seem designed to resist such interpretation...
...Or maybe these mobs will prove to be good and useful training for future forms of protest and political organization...
...We were to enter the Toys "R" Us superstore on Broadway at 7:14...
...However they were rallied, the participants showed up, it appeared, not for the creation of a pocket of quasi-public space within a proudly commercial space, but for kicks...
...There are several sites on the Web devoted to initiating them, but although each event is clearly the brainchild of a particular organizer, none have gone out of their way to lay authorial claim to them...
...This was the sixth such event in New York...
...When I received a call from a friend who had seen me on television, kneeling and screaming in Toys "R" Us, I felt a petty surge of media-age exhilaration that the act itself simply couldn't match...
...Similarly absurd mobs have sprung up in cities all over the United States and in Europe...
...BOB BERENS...
...The mob I participated in did take place in a giant toy store, and the monster we ironically celebrated was one of the few objects in sight not for sale, but the event seemed intended primarily for the sake of public absurdity...
...and that ever-reliable gauge of the faddish and innocuous, the AOL Welcome page...
...gather around the animatronic T. Rex in the Jurassic Park section at 7:18...
...and to await further instructions...
...As we left Toys 'R' Us, I heard more than one person claim that the "best part" had been watching the confused expressions on staff members' faces...
...The experience—its calculated mystery, its silliness—was fun, but the whole phenomenon begs the question: what for...
...When I arrived, the bar was packed, but not enough to attract the suspicion of management...
...Reports on the event cropped up during the following week on the BBC...
...Perhaps flash mobs will have the unfortunate side effect of slaking some young people's thirst for activism...
...The obvious advantage of using proteststyle tactics without choosing a specific object of criticism or outrage is that there is no measure of an event's success or failure...
Vol. 50 • September 2003 • No. 4
