Flash mobs are hardly new – they first popped up onto the scene a few years ago and have quickly become somewhat of a craze. It involves people meeting up at random spots to do random things. For instance, gigantic pillow fights. Or a hundred people waltzing at a train station at exactly 5:15pm during rush hour for three minutes before carrying on like nothing happened. Things like that. It’s pretty cool to watch if you’re not aware of the fact that those people pre planned everything.
However it looks like San Francisco might be cracking down on the flash mobs. After an apparently disastrous gigantic pillow fight which lasted six hours and involved about 3,000 people, the final cleanup bill for the city was in the vicinity of $35,000.
Due to the rain and due to, well, sheer luck, the tiny feathers in the pillows clogged storm drains which backed up due to intermittent rain, flooding a nearby Thai restaurant. It took almost 70 people almost a day to clean up.
On the other side of the coin the event was hailed as a huge success. Other’s will be organized, according to reports, and the recent complaints by the city of San Francisco will not be seen as a setback. At the time of publishing, Manolith counted over 20 different flash mobs going on that week alone. While they may not reach the 3,000 person mayhem that the Valentine’s Day pillow fight produced, one never knows how many who’s and how many what’s when it comes to flash mobs. And that’s half the fun.
Flash mob’s got their start around four years ago in London and quickly spread across the globe. Effectively, anyone can start one, and anyone can participate. One of the more organized events takes place in Bloomington, Indiana where there is a zombie march through the streets around Halloween. This caused several Bloomington residents to actually believe the heavily costumed and made-up participants were ACTUALLY zombies and that they were having a full blown zombie attack.
The city is asking that organizers pay for a permit – roughly $1,750 – and supply security and toilets and cleanup crews. However, they can’t even get ahold of the organizers of the event due to the self imposed anonymity of social networking tools Twitter and the Internet in general. It seems flash mobs will still live on due to their very nature: organized and random fun.
They have an interesting back story, too. From Wikipedia:
The first flash mob was created in Manhattan in May 2003, by Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper’s Magazine. The origins of the flash mobs were unknown until Wasik published an article about his creation in the March 2006 edition of Harper’s. The first attempt was unsuccessful after the targeted retail store was tipped off about the plan for people to gather. Wasik avoided such problems during the second flash mob, which occurred in June 3, 2003 at Macy’s department store, by sending participants to preliminary staging areas—in four prearranged Manhattan bars—where they received further instructions about the ultimate event and location just before the event began.More than 100 people converged upon the ninth floor rug department of the store, gathering around an expensive rug. Anyone approached by a sales assistant was advised to say that the gatherers lived together in a warehouse on the outskirts of New York, that they were shopping for a “love rug”, and that they made all their purchase decisions as a group.
Subsequently, 200 people flooded the lobby and mezzanine of the Hyatt hotel in synchronized applause for about 15 seconds, and a shoe boutique in SoHo was invaded by participants pretending to be tourists on a bus trip.Wasik claimed that he created flash mobs as a social experiment designed to poke fun at hipsters and to highlight the cultural atmosphere of conformity and of wanting to be an insider or part of “the next big thing”. The Vancouver Sun wrote, “It may have backfired on him… [Wasik] may instead have ended up giving conformity a vehicle that allowed it to appear nonconforming.”
(Photo By: Picadilly Wilson and Bob Cat Rock)
Comments
madroxxx
March 16th, 2009 - 2:05:18 PM
what was that Philip Seymour Hoffman quote? something about how gossip is like batting the feathers out a pillow atop a city rooftop on a windy day, then trying to clean it up. looks like we finally got the price tag on that: $35,000 ching, ching