>The Untold Tale of His Magnificent Flash Mob Hoax

>How You Too Can Write Email That Gets Forwarded

2005 was a tough year for Harper’s Magazine. If Vanity Fair was our starchasing aunt from Los Angeles and the New Yorker our pretentious, overbearing father-in-law, Harper’s 2005 would have been our brainy older brother who spends his days coming up with new reasons to hate the unstoppable locomotives of history; globalization, technology, the rich getting richer, etc.

With its rambling screeds against invincible presidents, Harper’s seemed to mock the last remnants of our fading idealism. Its lack of charts, cartoons, and fashion spreads pushed our IM-depleted attention spans well past their outermost limits. Why, we wondered, can’t they just make the whole thing into bite-sized Indexes and Readings? Like the back of a cereal box—we read those! The magazine lacked the three Vitamin Zs of publishing: Sizzle, Buzz, and Pizzazz. It was, in other words, in desperate need of a brand overhaul.

Enter senior editor Bill Wasik, and his now infamous Flash Mob essay. Written as a faux-scientific report, the piece describes how Wasik caused a series of purposeless happenings to spring up all over Manhattan, events designed to attract the roving herd of culture industry clerks who attend gallery openings and readings not to look at the art or hear the literature, but for the sole sake of rubbing elbow against argyle elbow, of seeing and being seen. “Pure scene,” is what Wasik calls it, a phenomena his Mobs highlighted by proving that the hipsters would turn out even if there was nothing to see at the center. Along the way he gives his take on why today’s marketing isn’t working and delivers the obligatory nameslaps to McSweeney’s, Jonathan Safran Foer, and other well-beaten whipping boys of the Ivy-schooled hater elite.

Wasik knows how to get a hipster’s attention: First, play to his vanity with references to his favorite bands. Second, entertain him with amusing charts. Finally, go for the jugular by giving voice to the deepest unspoken fears he holds about him self.

Such as:

Does he really like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah? Or would he rush out to buy a Monkees box set if Pitchfork gave it a 9? If he’s such an individual, why does he see so many clones riding the L Train on the way to work in the morning? What will he wear after Urban knocks off his latest thrift store discovery? What’s with the hair? And finally, if he’s smart enough to be a winking accomplice in his own commodification, shouldn’t he be smart enough to resist it?

In between puffs of Parliament and sips of Sparks, this was a piece that got the orange tongues a-wagging. For the Harper’s brand it’s 1860 all over again, gleaming under the gaze of new eyes who saw themselves in Wasik’s mob.

All kidding aside, we’ve glossed over about five percent of Wasik’s fine philosophizing about what life’s like in the big city right now, so if you haven’t read the piece yet, check it out here.

( That’s http://www.harpers.org/MyCrowd_01.html. )

Then read our interview with Wasik below:

>WHY FLASH MOBS WORKED

V: Every single person in this part of the universe sets out to jumpstart a fad or a viral social phenomenon, be it their DJ night, their band, their blog, their special way of wearing a belt buckle or what have you. Most fail. You set out to start the flash mob. You were incredibly successful. Why?

W: It worked for a lot of the same reasons that a good guerilla marketing campaign might work. It was funny. It was something nobody had done before. I wrote the emails in such a way as to be forwarded as widely as possible. It wasn’t for some weird revolutionary purpose or political purpose. It was just like “hey, we’re all going to get together and see what happens.” People looked at it and said “Yeah, I want to see what happens too. So I’m going to forward this thing on.”

V: Talk a little more about the emails. How did you get peoples’ attention?

W: Forwarding the email was essentially the same as taking the project on as your own, as if you were the person behind the viral email. You don’t want to forward an email in the service of somebody else’s project. You want to forward an email that becomes your project the moment you forward it. That was part of the reason behind the anonymity. I knew that if I were a visible figure, people would speculate as to my intentions, and then there would be a disinclination to forward the email. In their wording, the emails assumed this weird tone that was funny and absurd but also weirdly specific. There were all these weird demands on what people were going to do, how to approach this site. The emails had this weird technical quality to them. I think that people immediately understood that this wasn’t some fly-by-night affair, that whoever was behind this project wasn’t messing around. Therefore you could be assured that if you came out you were at least going to see something.

V: You didn’t have a flash mob website. People would get the email, say “what the hell is this?” and they’d Google it and come up with nothing. Did this appearance of secrecy or exclusivity contribute to the glamour, and ultimately to your draw?

W: Yeah, it sort of made people feel like secret agents, that was part of it too. Also there was the fact that it was purely for fun, nobody was making any money off it. That’s part of the reason I’m always wary when people say corporate viral marketing is the wave of the future. Nobody wants to forward an ad. I mean, they will if it’s funny enough, but I don’t know how much you’ll get out of that if you’re a corporation. I wouldn’t necessarily bet the farm on viral marketing if I were on the corporate side.

>WHY NEW YORK CITY IS THE CENTER OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE

V: What kind of reactions has your piece been getting?

W: One reaction I don’t like is “Yeah, somebody finally stuck it to the flash mobbers!” Some people are reading it as being a kind of mockery of anyone who ever took part in a flash mob. There’s an element of that, but I feel like that overlooks the fact that the mockery was so self-consciously a part of the project.

V: So most of the flash mobbers were in on the joke?

W: Yeah, absolutely, at least in all the ones I did. I think the whole idea of going to some place for no reason was just so absurd.

V: If you’re standing outside a church in Manhattan and asking each person who walks by for Strokes tickets, you’re not exactly a patsy.

W: Yes, in New York there was an awareness of it. There’s definitely a self-mockery in the piece insofar as I was mocking an impulse that I see in myself, and in my friends, and in a lot of people that are like me. I was sort of taking that impulse and turning it into a weird kind of performance art.

V: What impulse?

W: A lot of people move to New York because they have a subconscious sense that they want to get closer to the center of the culture. Which of course means getting close to the next big thing—

V: —and sometimes even participating in making it.

W: Yes, I don’t mean in an entirely passive way. It’s exciting. People who move to New York go through this process in whatever area that excites them—books, magazines, indie rock, dance, theater, any of these things—there’s this process where you become embedded in the creative groups of people who live here. You’re self-consciously trying to wend your way closer and closer to this bright hot center. You only know it’s there because you see people who appear closer to it than you are, and you’re like “I want to be that close.” And you get that close, and you’re like “I want to get even closer.” And so somebody you know tells you about some reading by some writer, and maybe you’ve never even read them or maybe you even don’t necessarily think they’re that good, but you’re like, “Well, it’s the thing to do, so I’m gonna go.”

V: It seems that might attach itself more to New York hipsterdom than hipsterdom in other cities. New York is really big. Here in Philly, for example, you can get to the point where it feels like you know literally every single person putting out every single thing.

W: Sure, but when I pick up The Stranger in Seattle, say, and I look at the arts section, it’s got the same goddamn bands that everyone’s talking about in New York.

V: So New York is defining a slice of the culture for every other city?

W: Yeah, but they’re not all New York bands! Take Pitchfork—which is based in Chicago, by the way. Whatever Pitchfork decides is the next awesome band that everyone should listen to after Clap Your Hands Say Yeah … that band could be from Philly or from anywhere.

V: But New York’s the one that makes the call, ultimately, or has a big part in making the call.

W: That’s true to a certain extent, and I think that’s one reason the piece rings a little bit truer as a description of New York than it does elsewhere. But I would maintain that the cultural echo chamber I’m describing is a national thing. When the McSweeney’s readings come into town, when the big band that all the indie rock sites and magazines are talking about comes to town, what’s the force that pulls you there?

V: That’s the force you’re trying to pin down and isolate.

W: Right. The flash mob project was trying to show that you could even be self conscious about it. I had this frequently asked questions thing at the top of every email. Question: Why would I want to join this inexplicable mob? Answer: Tons of people are doing it.

>SMART CROWDS, BLOGS, THE INTERNET & OTHER HOT MEMES OF THIS VERY MOMENT

V: To play the devil’s advocate for a bit, haven’t people always wanted to join stupid mobs that do stupid things? Take the Nazis, for example.

W: There are two differences: First is this weird post-ironic quality, the self-consciousness. This is part of why I’m disappointed that people are reading my piece and think that I’m saying hipsters are a bunch of sheep. It’s not like selling a Top 40 hit to a teenie bopper back in the 50s or the 60s. What’s especially interesting in this case is that people are aware of the process, and will lampoon the idea of an it-band even as they find themselves getting swept up in the fervor of it. Second is the Internet, which causes the cycles to tighten. We don’t have big bands that stay around for more than an album, really. The same thing happens with writers. Once somebody gets built up they’re inevitably torn down. Part of the problem is that things are getting built up that are disposable from the very beginning.

V: I really like in the piece how you liken hipster fans to a swarm of creatures, like a flock of birds lighting on one spot in the field and then taking off all of a sudden at some invisible signal. The Internet has definitely helped them tune into one another a lot faster and rove around the field with greater speed.

W: There’s such a profusion of media. Once a meme gets into the system, everybody knows about it faster, everybody realizes that it’s ubiquitous faster, and everybody realizes faster that that everybody else likes it too and wants to get off and onto the next thing.

V: Plus the Internet lowers the cost of finding the next thing.

W: Yeah, and there’s something about the structure of blogs that’s parasitic. You get props in the blog world for finding the thing that other people are going look at. The props go to the culture finders, not the creators. To a certain extent, everyone is in the trendwatching business now. Everybody’s engaged in what you’re engaged in on this site. This is truer on a deeper level than some people are willing to admit. Take politics. I read the Daily Kos. Some of these politics sites are very focused on meme creation. They’ll be writing about the Dubai port scandal. The won’t use the word “meme,” but the way they’ll be couching it is: “Here at last we have the meme that will spread and take down the president of the United States!” They’re overly focused on these contagious things that are going to spread, and then they wonder why they haven’t gotten rid of the president yet even though they came up with all these awesome memes. I think part of the answer is the echo chamber that makes all these things seem more important that they do in the outside world.

>THE HIPSTERS. WHO ARE THEY? WHAT MAKES THEM HIPSTERS? AND WHY DO THEY (WE?) HATE THEM SO?

V: I’ve talked to some friends who liked your story, and some who hated it. As far as the haters go, I think you may have broken a major hipster taboo here, which is don’t use the word “hipster,” don’t try to define hipster, anyone who purports to understand the hipster doesn’t understand the rules of the game and therefore must not be a hipster. You seem to have waded into territory where there’s a code of silence, where you’re supposed to knowingly nod and wink but not really talk about who we are, what we stand for, and why we go out. Why’s that? Is the truth that embarrassing?

W: Right, the one weird thing about “hipster,” is that it’s a word that nobody applies to themselves, or openly admits to being.

V: So hipsters are those guys over at the next table that dress like us but aren’t quite getting it.

W: Yeah, I thought a lot about whether or not that was the word I was going to use. Other than the fact that nobody seemed to take the term on as their own, it did seem to accurately describe the phenomena I was talking about, so I decided I would use it. I wouldn’t have used the word “hipster” a year and a half ago, but recently I’ve started to hear people use it in a way that does sort of begrudgingly describe themselves in a broader sense. It’s not just “those assholes who live in Williamsburg” or “this mean little clique of people who aren’t at all like me.” The broader sense means like “the self-consciously cultured people of a certain generation, who are trying to get closer to the culturally central thing, trying to feel like they’re up on matters.” That doesn’t just include people who wear tight corduroys but also a lot of the Internet culture and people who are all into the same shit.

V: Are you a hipster?

W: I definitely include myself and most of the people I know. I don’t mean it as a big insult. As I put it in the piece, I mean educated urbanites who have this kind of consensus about the things they are into. It’s strange to me that nobody’s writing about this group, because there is a remarkable consensus among them, not just in New York but from city to city. There is an incredible amount that these people have in common. So I do feel it’s weird that people feel that that particular group of people shouldn’t be written about.

V: One reason why people don’t talk about hipsters is that they’re very slippery. They have these very advanced and fluid forms of consciousness that are designed to resist definition. Your article is one of the first attempts to give this a group a clear, neutral analysis.

W: People have seized on the hipster part of it a lot more than I expected they would. I meant to write a commentary on a certain demographic of people, but I also wanted to write about the way things propagate on the Internet, how they’re built up and torn down by the media, and about this echo-chamber phenomenon.

>WHY AND HOW PROJECTS CURE BOREDOM

V: You begin the story of your first email with the words “On May 27, 2003, bored and therefore disposed towards acts of social-scientific inquiry, I sent an email to sixty-some friends and acquaintances.” You don’t give too much of a reason here of why you sent out the first email, or the reason you give seems tongue-in-cheek. Was it really just boredom that was behind this?

W: That sentence is closer to being accurate than you think. I had wanted to do some kind of project for the summer. I had the idea, and once I had the idea I wanted to know what would happen when I sent out the email. So in some ways once I had the idea I was being drawn to it by the same kind of force that made people want to forward it along. It was like, “what would happen if you put this out there?” I did a previous project along similar lines. It was a reading designed to be all hot male fiction writers. I wrote this ridiculous ad copy about how awesome they were. This was around the time when the New Yorker was doing all this debut fiction.

V: Such as the issue with the McSweeney’s barbecue photo spread?

W: Yeah, but I was thinking even more of the short stories. They would do all these tarted-up pictures of the writers next to their stories. They’d have a picture of the twenty or thirtysomething female writer in her bedroom, et cetera. There was something about this personalization and sexualization of fiction that was both disgusting and hilarious. The writers at my event then, in the P.R. copy I wrote for the reading, were these authors “who sliced through the conventions of fiction with a sharpened claw,” or something like that. It was all believable enough. People did write-ups on it beforehand. It was the pick of the week in Time Out.

V: What happened at the event?

W: We had comedy writers and stand-up comics reading preposterously awful works of fiction. So bad that you couldn’t believe it. One of my friends wrote this thing called “The Nicest Captain in the World,” about an airline pilot who let the passengers do whatever they want. It’s written in the style of a fairly tale, and degenerates into people having sex with hookers.

V: How did the crowd react?

W: It was great. I got there early, before people started to file in. First it was the real diehard reading-type people, with dour looks on their faces as they staked out spots and took out their notebooks. Then there were the skeptical literary types, then later all the standup comedy fans. In the end, everybody had an awesome time. I was trying to make fun of something that everyone was in on, on some level. I don’t mean that everyone was literally in on the joke beforehand, but once everyone got there they got something enjoyable, and what it became was its own. It had an own aesthetic pleasure above and beyond the prank aspect of it. That was something I was trying to do with the flash mobs as well.