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What the lure of the agent role confirms, of course, is in part the constant pull of obedience, the disposition to defer to authority, a fact Stanley Milgram so ably documented in his notorious experiments. Far less known, and perhaps more interesting for our word-of-mouth spymasters, is a follow-up study to Milgram’s conducted seven years later by researchers at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Put off by Milgram’s deceptive practices, Charles O’Leary, Frank Willis, and Edward Tomich recruited forty subjects to duplicate Milgram’s authority experiments to the letter, except with one crucial difference: the subjects were let in on the premise. Told they would not actually be delivering shocks, the students were asked nevertheless to “behave in the same way that [you] would behave had [you] not been informed”; the subjects, that is, were self-consciously playing roles. And yet, startlingly enough, the results achieved were almost exactly the same:

FIG. 4-3—COMPARISON OF DISTRIBUTIONS OF MAXIMUM SHOCKS ADMINISTERED

This is a similar result to that achieved by Philip Zimbardo in his Stanford Prison Experiment, where students picked to play inmates and guards began, over the course of days, to act out their parts with sometimes cruel fidelity: even when we are knowingly playing a role, we are likely to inhabit that role. So merely the act of allowing oneself to be called an “agent,” whether covert or overt, of a corporate brand, may encourage us to act like one, regardless of how cheeky we take that appellation to be.

But online skullduggery hardly needs to be compelled; for the secret agent is, in a sense, the main role we play in viral culture as a whole. When we all can make media, when we can propagate culture and see that propagation succeed, then we inherently become undercover agents of a strange sort: actors embedded in the audience, salesmen flyering our own stoop. As we post our arguments and ideas, our films and photos and songs, then count our hits as they pile up, we are gathering hard intelligence on our audience and, ultimately, on ourselves.

THE AGE OF THE MODEL

In 2000, a bestselling book came along to initiate average Americans into the mysteries of the meme. The book was entitled The Tipping Point, and across disparate contexts ranging from crime to education to fashion and fads it laid out the precepts of what its author, Malcolm Gladwell, called “social epidemics.” The extent to which this book has captivated the American audience can hardly be overstated: it has stood for almost the entire decade among the nation’s top-ten bestselling books, on first the hardback and then the paperback list, where as of this writing it remains. Gladwell is a lively and lucid writer, to be sure, but even his prodigious talent cannot account entirely for The Tipping Point’s peculiarly boundless success. The book tapped something latent in the culture, and any attempt to understand this decade will need to reckon with just what that something was.

Has a number-one book ever before been built on such an abstraction? A bestseller at the level achieved by The Tipping Point generally tells some grand American story (of a long-dead president or a particularly Great generation), sells some concrete how-to (make a million dollars, keep your man, find spiritual peace), or plumbs the life insights of its famous author, whether a movie star, a famous CEO, or the Dalai Lama. The Tipping Point, to the casual book browser approaching its ideas for the first time, seems not even to have a proper subject, its subject matter ranging from business to culture to government and politics. What the book offers its readers is not a subject but rather a pattern, a series of scientifically grounded rules that can be seen to hold across a collection of disparate stories.

In fact, The Tipping Point offers its readers precisely the social-scientific insights that businesses, together with academic research departments, have been developing and harnessing for decades. Gladwell is