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By Root 837 0

illness (“viral”) and apiology (“buzz”) are secrecy, exclusivity, covertness—hence “guerrilla marketing,” the Pontiac Underground, the Diesel Cult, the “field teams” of “agents” or “brand insiders.” There are now whole networks of consumers recruited to do unpaid marketing work, and remarkably these have drawn crowds of willing participants. Perhaps the best known, BzzAgent, has more than 400,000 members who have agreed to talk about products with their friends and then write detailed “BzzReports” enumerating their chats; a group called Streetwise, which focuses on urban teens and twentysomethings, boasts 70,000, whose pro-product activities range from rating songs and movie previews to stickering city streets on behalf of corporate block-busters; the site Tremor, created by Procter & Gamble for teen buzz-making, has signed up 250,000 youngsters to market things to their friends and one another. All of these networks strive, in their language, to foster a sense of exclusivity: to be an “agent,” a member of “the Crew.”

It was exactly this sense of secret agentry that was the flash mob’s greatest appeal. At least as thrilling as the fleeting events themselves were the buildups in the bars beforehand, as the mobbers milled around eyeing one another, waiting for the instructions, fully aware that they were there for the same devious purpose and yet nevertheless pretending, out of obedience toward the mob rules, not to realize this fact. Insiderness seemed to be its own reward—a lesson that has been learned by BzzAgent, too. In his book Grapevine, BzzAgent founder Dave Balter described the great deal of thought the company put into its rewards program, where agents received points they could redeem for free items—only to find that literally three out of four agents never redeemed their points at all. When Balter surveyed agents as to why this was, he got back creepy responses like this: “It’s cool to get involved with thousands of other people around the country.” “I like to be the first to know about things.”

What is it about being an insider, a guerrilla, an agent, that possesses such intrinsic allure? In the mid-1970s, with the revelations of Watergate plumbery still in the air, concerned social scientists ran some experiments that demonstrated the appeal. In one, researchers at Carleton University in Canada had undergraduate subjects conduct clandestine surveillance of people supposedly chosen at random (but who in fact were confederates of the researchers). For fifteen minutes, each subject tailed a target who would sit in a chair fidgeting, then get up and wend her way through university tunnels to the library, then take a book from the shelves, then get inexplicably teary and wipe her eyes. Afterward the subjects were given a list of emotional adjectives and asked to rate, from 1 to 7, how much of each emotion the experiment had made them feel; and although the subjects’ “aversion index”—which researchers derived from how “nervous” or “guilty” the exercise had made them feel—rose from a normal state to 2.61, the subjects’ “thrill index” (“fun,” “involving,” “exciting”) spiked to 5.30.

In another, even more ambitious study, a team of researchers at Florida State created a fake conspiracy to burglarize a local advertising firm and then enticed students to take part. Over dinner at a local eatery, the experimenter would open his briefcase to the student and reveal elaborate plans, including “aerial photographs of the building and the surrounding area, lists of city and state patrol cars, their routes and times, and blueprints of the advertising office.” The experimenter said the heist was at the behest of the IRS, to which (he claimed) the firm owed a considerable sum of money. Nine of twenty students agreed to participate—an admirably high rate for any collegiate extracurricular activity, one imagines. (Interestingly, an alternate plot in which the IRS was not invoked, but the students were promised $2,000 for their role, drew only four of twenty subjects to agree—further confirmation of BzzAgent’s discovery that thrill,