Generation Bubble

Funny Games: Flash Mobs, Lynch Mobs, and the Human Flesh Search Engine

When technology meets the crowd, it is the crowd that wins. This should come as no surprise. The crowd is an organism of its own and only incidentally a collection of individuals. The crowd is neither wise nor foolish. It uses technology for its own purposes, and when the crowd comes into being, it is beyond the power of any individual to question those purposes. Similarly, technology has no moral content; it neither knows or cares what uses it is put to. It is a tool in the hands of humans, and subject to the reasons and instincts of flesh and mind. This is what the ideology of technology would like us to forget. We would prefer to believe that the latest marvel is “improving” our life, when we are improving or impairing our lives depending on what technologies we use and how we employ them. At its best, technology is morally neutral. But there may be certain technologies that are inherently destructive and repressive. The jailhouse, the handgun, the atom bomb have seemed at various times to be useful tools, but it is difficult to find moral neutrality in any of them. Instead, technologies tend to be the reflection of the men and women who produce them. Individual technologies, then, are unlikely to be any better than we are at the time when we use them. If the flash mob is benign in the hands of urban prankster, in other hands it is not so benign.