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The idea seemed to be that flash mobs could be made to convey a message, but for a number of reasons this dream was destined to run aground. First, as outlined above, flash mobs were gatherings of insiders, and as such could hardly communicate to those who did not already belong. They were intramural play; they drew their energies not from impressing outsiders or freaking them out but from showing them utter disregard, from using the outside world as merely a terrain for private games. Second, in terms of time, flash mobs were by definition transitory, ten minutes or fewer, and thereby not exactly suited to standing their ground and testifying. Third, in terms of physical space, flash mobs relied on constraints to create an illusion of superior strength. I never held mobs in the open, the bloggers complained, in view of enough onlookers, but this was entirely purposeful on my part, for like Colin Powell I hewed to a doctrine of overwhelming force. Only in enclosed spaces could the mob generate the necessary self-awe; to allow the mob to feel small would have been to destroy it.

The following week, the interview request from the New York Times finally arrived. On the phone the reporter, Amy Harmon, made it clear to me that the Times knew it was behind on the story. The paper would be remedying this, she told me, by running a prominent piece on flash mobs in its Sunday Week in Review section. What the Times did, in fascinating fashion, was not just to run the backlash story (which I had been expecting in three to five more weeks) but to do so preemptively—i.e., before there was actually a backlash. Harmon’s piece bore the headline GUESS SOME PEOPLE DON’T HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO, and its nut sentence ran: “[T]he flash mob juggernaut has now run into a flash mob backlash that may be spreading faster than the fad itself.” As evidence, she mustered the following:

E-mail lists like “antimob” and “slashmob” have sprung up, as did a Web site warning that “flashmuggers” are bound to show up “wherever there’s groups of young, naïve, wealthy, bored fashionistas to be found.” And a new definition was circulated last week on several Web sites: “flash mob, noun: An impromptu gathering, organized by means of electronic communication, of the unemployed.”

Two e-mail lists, a website, and a forwarded definition hardly constituted a “backlash” against this still-growing, intercontinental fad, but what I think Harmon and the Times rightly understood was that a backlash was the only avenue by which they could advance the story, i.e., find a new narrative. Whether through direct causation or mere journalistic intuition, the Times timed its backlash story (8/17/03) with remarkable accuracy:

FIG. 1-3—MEDIA REFERENCES TO FLASH MOBS, BY WEEK

PERMUTATIONS

Whether the backlash was real or not, it almost didn’t matter: there was no way for the flash mob to keep growing, and since the entire logic of the mob was to grow, the mob was destined to die. It couldn’t become political, or even make any statement at all, within the prescribed confines of a ten-minute burst. After six mobs, even conceiving of new enough crowd permutations started to feel like a challenge. We had done consumers collaborating (MOB #2) and consumers not collaborating (MOB #4). We had done an ecstatic, moaning throng (MOB #6) and a more sedate, absurdist one (MOB #5, in which the mob hid in some Central Park woods and simulated animal noises). In MOB #3, we had formed an inward-facing ring, and the idea of another geometrical mob appealed to me. I decided that MOB #7, set for late August, should be a queue.

Scouting locations had become in many ways the most pleasant task of the experiment. Roughly a week before each appointed day, having chosen the neighborhood in advance, I would stroll nonchalantly around the streets, looking at parks and stairways and stores, imagining a few hundred people descending at once upon each: How would such a mob arrive? How would it array itself? What would it do? Could it be beautiful? For MOB