One Person Makes a Crowd

There's an excellent and entertaining article in the latest edition of Harper's magazine, here divided into four installments, in which Bill Wasik explains how he invented flash mobs, those gangs of idiots congregating in selected locations, as a result of mass text messages, for a few minutes before dispersing.

I've been spending the past few weeks belatedly familiarizing myself with the Baffler and the works of Thomas Frank, and Wasik's article taps into that same bemusement with "hipsters":

"In recent decades, the concept of deindividuation has fallen into scientific neglect, and yet I believe that it possesses great theoretical usefulness today. Consider the generational cohort that has come to be called the hipsters—i.e., those hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes. 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. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned, as abandoned—whether Friendster.com, Franz Ferdinand, or Jonathan Safran Foer—it inevitably will be. Once abandoned, it is never taken up again."

And before you say anything, yes, I do realize that he's just sooooo behind the times. Everyone knows that these days it's the Arctic Monkeys, Zizek, Badiou, and . . . well, I was going to say David Eggers, but he's already passé, and I wouldn't want look like a total idiot, would I, not in front of you cutting-edge fascionistas.

Amusant, non?