“Flash Crowd” is a short science-fiction story written by Larry Niven in 1973. The story unfolds in a time where inexpensive teleportation has become popular enough to replace all other means of transportation. Niven explores the social consequences of having “displacement booths” that could transfer one anywhere on Earth
instantaneously. The protagonist, Jerryberry Jensen, is a journalist who broadcasts a
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fight at a shopping mall that quickly evolves into a riot facilitated by the technology of the teleportation booths. Jensen is blamed for the event, as the broadcast coverage quickly attracts the attention of more and more people who teleport to the spot
immediately, intensifying the riot. He struggles to prove how technology is to blame for the scene, as telecommunication and teleportation networks together allow innumerable people to immediately gather at the spot of anything interesting, potentially creating confusion and disorder. In 2003, Sean Savage, a thirty-one-year old graduate student in Berkeley keeping a blog named Cheesebikini (Savage) named the Flash Mobs after Niven’ s story, previously called “Mob Projects” by their creator, Bill Wasik (Wasik, 2009, p.21).
While the Flash Crowd story begins in Los Angeles, it unfolds globally due to the displacement booths, at an age not very long after the abandonment of the conventional transportation system: “At twenty-eight he was old enough to remember cars and trucks and traffic lights. When the city changed, it was the streets that had changed most.”
(Niven, 1973, p.101). Remains of this past era are still to be traced all around the city.
The streets are exclusively used as walkways and the airports as terminals for the “long-distance booths”:
“Once there had been white lines on concrete, and raised curbs to stop the people from interfering with the cars. Now the lines were gone, and much of the concrete was covered with soil and grass. There were even a few trees. Concrete strips had been left for bicycles, and wider places for helicopters carrying cargo too big for the
displacement booths.
...Wilshire was wide for a walkway. People seemed to hug the edges, even those on bikes and motor skates. A boulevard built for cars was too big for mere people.
...Outlines of the street still showed through. Ridges in the grass marked where curbs had been, with breaks where there had been driveways. Some stretches in Westwood had a concrete centre divider. The freeway ramps were unchanged and unused.
Someday the city would do something about them.” (Niven, 1973, p.99)
People go to their short-distance destination on foot or cycling, and use the booths for any longer displacement. Their everyday movements are largely restricted to and from the booths so that random encounters in the street are very rare; besides, “meeting
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people was for the clubs” (Niven, 1973, p.100). The once full-of-traffic roads are now usually empty. Therefore the riot that breaks out at the shopping mall suggests
something long forgotten to people, the possibility of a spontaneous public gathering.
The idea of creating an instant crowd soon attracts people’s attention, so that Flash Crowds soon evolve into a new cult that takes advantage of the current technology.
Eventually people embrace this new trend, they find out about places and teleport there forming different sorts of crowds, aiming at protesting and demonstrating on the one hand or engaging in social activities and having fun on the other. The phenomenon seems to concern the authorities as well, as a teleporting crowd can easily get out of control and threaten the social order.
“Craziest damn thing.” Wash Evans lit a cigarette and talked around it. “You know Gordon Lundt, the ‘zine star? He was on the Tonight Show, and he happened to mention the red tide down at Hermosa Beach. He said it was pretty. The next thing anyone knows, every man, woman, and child in the country has decided he wants to see the red tide at Hermosa Beach.”
“How bad is it?”
“Well, nobody’s been hurt, last I heard. And they aren’t breaking things. It’s not that kind of crowd, and there’s nothing to steal but sand, anyway. It’s a happy riot, Jansen.
There’s just a bitch of a lot of people.” (Niven, 1973, pp.162-3)
The Flash Crowd story might have offered a precedent to the theorisation of Flash Mobs, but the world it describes can be equally seen as an analogue to Second Life, where avatars principally use teleportation to transfer from one place to the other. What is at stake here is the relation between physical contact and digital communication.
Within Niven’s futuristic environment, physical interaction is largely determined by the characteristics of this new technological age: it is mostly ephemeral (although it is almost always digitally recorded and as such, it can be infinitely reproduced), it depends very much on connectivity and it is based on the increased mobility of the times. In effect, the story articulately describes the emergence and the unpredictability of an instant crowd at an age where massive street gatherings have long been forgotten. A Flash Crowd is a crowd for no reason, maybe a “happy riot” or a demonstration, and a crowd out of nothing. Although by definition crowds constitute temporal formations, since they are always organised for a finite period of time, a Flash Crowd is even more
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an instantaneous and self-generated mass assembly. It builds up through people’s tendency to get interested in things that they see others getting interested in. The bigger the crowd, the more individuals it attracts within it. Moreover, it comes out of nowhere, or equally, from everywhere. The only thing that matters here is not each individual’s starting point, but the crowd’s final destination. Hence it constitutes a conscious and immediate displacement of people from practically any possible place to a very specific location.
Although a science-fiction story from the 70s, Flash Crowd predicts the significance of electronic communication in human interaction. Electronic communication not only challenges physical presence, but it also increasingly constitutes a prerequisite for physical co-presence. People’s need to find themselves with others at a place and be a part of a collective body materialises through connectivity. Similarly, a Flash Mob becomes a gathering activated by an electronic medium, either an email or a text message. Just as in a Flash Crowd, the participants have nothing in common apart from their interest in this particular event, and at the end of it they disappear as fast as they appeared. Due to their connectivity, Flash Mobbers first assemble digitally and then become real, at a specific location. Thus they form a virtual crowd before realising it in the city. Based on the virtuality of their formation, they create an event-based landscape, exploring the characteristics of digital culture.
What could happen if anyone could live at any place in the world and transfer anywhere instantly and at a low cost? Would there be any reason for the existence of the cities as we know them today, or would that cause their dissolution? The fictional idea of teleportation here stresses the concept of mobility within the contemporary cities to the extreme. If we are to blame increased mobility for the decline of public space and the loss of the opportunity for unpredicted encounters in the city, this story, conversely, suggests that the decline of the transportation system and the use of teleportation would render the world into a collection of fragments, places within an undefined “nowhere”
(fig.1). But even in the case where the world is deconstructed into potential event-places and transit points in-between, Niven’s story and virtual worlds like Second Life suggest that the desire for co-presence remains. Flash Crowd and mass assemblies in Second Life illustrate people’s need to be found with others in public and be part of a
collectivity by all means. The instant crowd metaphor here becomes an opportunity to
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rethink about mobility in the city, and to understand public gatherings and meeting spaces as a result of both physical actions and digital connections.
Figure 1: The world as a collection of fragments: screenshot from the Second Life map.