by Brendan Kiley

You've probably already heard of flash mobs--their eccentric gatherings have been well documented in media vehicles from the New York Times to Good Morning America, with mobs materializing as far afield as Hungary, South Korea, and Austin. Weird and seemingly purposeless, flash mobs converge and disperse to perform simple acts of mass absurdity in metropolitan centers. Forming fleeting secret societies, flash mobbers join the club for a few minutes before dissolving again into obscurity. Nobody, not even their leadership, knows who the members are. And on August 12, the flash phenomenon added Seattle to its list of conquests.

Here's how it works: Would-be mob leaders post an e-mail address on a mob site for interested parties to contact. People pass the address along to their friends, who pass it along to their friends, linking a society of strangers. Eventually, central command instructs them to meet at a public place and act casual--they will receive further instructions on-site. Then the weirdness begins. In Manhattan, one flash mob crammed a mid-market shoe store, claiming to be flabbergasted tourists. A Roman mob invaded a bookstore, requesting volumes by fictional authors.

The first major Seattle mob conjured roughly 100 anti-protesters in Westlake Center, carrying blank placards and chanting, "Protest protest!" They hollered for exactly six minutes, drawing TV crews, amused bystanders, and a few thickheaded reactionaries who missed the point altogether. The misguided party poopers crowded mobbers being interviewed for local TV news, calling the "protesters" anti-American and telling them to go to Afghanistan to see how long they would last.

"It's the local stereotype," one of the organizers said in a post-event debriefing. "What do we do well? We protest. Seattle is the home of the empty protester." Pleased with mob number one, he assured me that more are already in the works.

I asked the group the dreaded question mobbers seem to hate and debate--what is the significance of a flash mob?

"If there's any importance or significance, it's always bestowed on us," another said. "It's in the eye of the beholder--we want people to come to their own conclusions."

Some observers have concluded that flash mobbers are irrelevant twits who will be half-remembered as cute faddists from the early 21st century. But let's play pointy-headed social scientist for a moment and take them seriously--more seriously than they take themselves. (The mob illuminati have already dismissed attempts at serious analysis as missing the point, with many mobbers seemingly irritated by all media interest, worrying that too much coverage will destroy the spirit and originality of the events.) If they refuse to tell us, we must try to answer for ourselves--what does all this mobbing mean?

In some ways flash mobs resemble terrorists. They are highly mobile and secretive, using e-mail to conspire, recruit members, and disrupt workaday urban life. Though fundamentally goofy, the mobs' success reflects the power of an inscrutable secret society enabled by the anonymity of the Internet. Their terrorism, however, is harmless and nihilistic. Assembling and behaving for the sake of it, mobs conspicuously lack aims and ideologies--at least it appears that way.

Most writers on flash mobs have invoked Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, who argues that new communication technology was responsible for the success of the Seattle WTO protests and the "people power" movement in the Philippines. Rheingold's claims--that mobs enabled with mobile Internet service will be the "next social revolution"--are too grand. A politically motivated mob with cell phones is still just a mob. Furthermore, his conclusions shed no light on the flash-mob phenomenon. While "smart mobs" are a faster, twitchier version of their old counterparts, flash mobs, in their sheer uselessness, are a thing apart, whose significance might be illuminated by slightly older theorists.

In his essay "Walking in the City," social theorist Michel de Certeau described the fragile rigidity of modern cities' spatial and behavioral regimes. Simply moving through a city can redefine it by vandalizing public spaces with the private poetry of memory and imagination--this corner is a first kiss to one, a fistfight to another. According to de Certeau, "things extra and other insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order."

To a public-sex troller, for example, a city park is an erotic playground, where the lines blur between strolling and catching a quick hump in the bushes. The park's intended function (strolling) melts into its actual function (humping). "One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order," de Certeau wrote. "The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order."

A spatial-behavioral order is only as strong as its least imaginative practitioners--a crosswalk is for crossing as long as we don't use it for anything else. Whether or not they admit it, flash mobs are part performance art and part anarchistic civil disobedience. They lampoon the mundane by turning uncontroversial places into sites of bizarre delight.

Flash mobs have become explosively popular. According to one website (www.flashmob.info), Google queries for "flash mob" have jumped from 1,210 on July 13 to 40,600 in under a month. And, like any fad, they attract derision.

One anonymous critic has already called flash mobbers knuckleheads "with the great noble purpose of puzzling shopkeepers.... Stop wasting your time and start making the world a better place." Such critics fail to recognize the genius of the flash mob--like streaking and drunkenness, they are, more than anything, fun. Flash mobs clearly don't aim to democratize North Korea or legitimize gay marriage or redistribute resources. America is already swarming with pundits, loudmouths, and lobbyists. A flash mob is first and foremost a six-minute party. That these parties happen in the unlikeliest places is a subtle, perhaps unconscious protest that runs deeper than any single issue. The mobs are a playful critique of everyday life--a critique so general and strange, it can only happen under the umbrella of art.