WASHINGTON -- One of the first flash mobs appeared in New York City in 2003, when 130 New Yorkers were called together in messages on social media to converge upon the 9th floor rug department of Macy's. There, they bewildered salespeople for a few minutes, dancing around, and then they disbanded.
In San Francisco that same year, a flash mob, organized through email and online forums, gathered in Dolores Park, and at exactly 2:07 p.m., leapt to their feet and formed giant standing circles, holding hands as they danced for 10 minutes before running off as unexpectedly as they ran in.
Being San Franciscans, who have a better vocabulary than most Americans, they called the gatherings "inexplicable mobs," which certainly they were.
But flash mobs can also come across as very dark and threatening, indeed.
Philadelphia, particularly in 2009 and 2010, experienced flash mobs that included widespread destruction of property, rioting, violence and personal injury, with police using pepper spray against the crowds. In the lexicon of this mixture of social protest and outright crime, these are sometimes called "flash robs," and "flash mob crimes" or "flash mob violence."
Similar acts of violence have occurred in Minneapolis, Cleveland, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Ottawa, among other North American cities -- and also in London, where they nearly burned down part of the city, and in Moscow, where such individualistic expression rent the horrified Kremlin's sense of propriety.
One reason flash events have become popular in Russia is that such expressions of popular culture or anger (or whatever it is) are not covered by legal restrictions on holding demonstrations in Russia. Flash mobs don't need permission because they are not listed officially as "demonstrations."
Some scholars look upon this little-analyzed phenomenon as an example of a new "social anarchy." They fear these mobs may be pointing the way to the future, and exemplify the lack of belonging in a country with so few central principles accepted by the majority of diverse peoples. Just consider the role of social media in the Arab Spring, and how crowds coming together in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere, while chanting for freedom and democracy, at times seemed on the verge of explosion.
William S. Lind, one of America's best military analysts, has recently studied the gangs in America's inner cities. Admittedly, the gangs, most of whom are today Latino and highly organized, are different from flash mobs, which are not structured at all. Yet there are revealing comparisons.
Lind found, for instance, that in the California city of Salinas, which is overrun by Hispanic gangs and has a homicide rate three times that of Los Angeles, half of the gangs today, the "Nortenos" or "those from the North," are completely unstructured and far different from the older gangs, which at least gave their members a perverted sense of belonging. The Nortenos don't know their victims; they are anonymous "hunters" of human trophies.
Calling this "one of the classic results of state breakdown and chaos," Lind goes on to say that, in 2009, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were brought in to advise Salinas police on counterinsurgency doctrine -- for an American city! Thus, the experience acquired in overseas wars against "enemies" whose culture and tactics we little understand is now being brought home to deal with crime against fellow "citizens" we little understand.
In London, as well, the terrible rioting in August 2011 started with messages on mobile phones reading, "Start leaving ur yards. Bring bags, trollys, cars, vans, hammer the lot. Just rob everything."
That is what they did. Prominent newspaper correspondent Ed Vulliamy wrote later in Harper's magazine that the resultant "rioting and looting began to feel more like a political uprising, as police lost control of entire districts of the city to a wave of fire and anger."
Without carelessly placing blame, Vulliamy nevertheless noted that "a UNICEF report placed Britain last among 21 developed countries for the well-being of children. British children were last in 'subjective well-being,' last in the quality of family and peer relationships, but first overall for 'risk behaviors,' including drug use, bullying and drinking -- a national phenomenon that turns the centers of British cities into a bedlam of vomiting and fighting every Saturday night."
Britain is not America, of course, but this phenomenon of young people out in the street either demonstrating with some creativity against their society or else going out to destroy anything and everything in it is no longer the characteristic of any one country.
And if it turns out to be the modern-day response to national decline -- or whatever it turns out to be -- it is surely something we must try to understand and control.
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