The flash mob, a seemingly benign social experiment, can easily become a lynch mob.

Conan: The riddle … of steel.

Thulsa Doom: Yes! You know what it is, don’t you boy? Shall I tell you? It’s the least I can do. Steel isn’t strong, boy, flesh is stronger! Look around you. There, on the rocks; a beautiful girl. Come to me, my child [coaxes the girl to jump to her death]. That is strength, boy! That is power! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it? Look at the strength in your body, the desire in your heart, I gave you this! Such a waste. Contemplate this on the tree of woe. Crucify him!

– Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Its day now past, steel no longer holds many mysteries. Updated for our times, Conan’s riddle would find steel replaced with silicon. But the answer is unchanging: flesh is stronger than silicon. Still, we to our eternal folly fail to learn the lesson and, like the barbarian / future governor of California, find ourselves in a Tree-of-Woe time-out.

The technological and digital revolution ballyhooed by Boing Boing, Wired and an ever growing throng of “futurists” has come to seem as though it were the result of technology’s actions upon us. The prose is always breathless: the computer in all its forms, and the ongoing liberation of information are changing us rapidly and irrevocably. The new possibilities are unlimited, freedom is on the march, and the new world will allow degrees of individual liberty never before imagined. Technology promises to do what politics, religion, labor and colonial armies could not. History will end, bringing with it peace and the end of all our toils.

Technology, which is the product of human labor and social relations, assumes a phantom objectivity that conceals the fundamental nature of technology so that technology seems to be acting upon humans rather than the reverse. The manifold wonders that seem to come out of the ether to change the structures of our thought and the patterns of social order are actually the products of human hands and brains. Through reification, these products take on a mysterious existance of their own and relations between people become relations between software and gadgetry. The result is that technology begins to seem an essential and indispensable aspect of human life, and we view our own lives and human relationships as dependent upon technology. As this process advances, technology becomes the natural order of things, and technologies that should be optional become required for the bare maintenance of social life. We begin to think that our gadgets “make” us, rather than the reverse. In short, our various technologies, which are contingent upon human work, make the human seem contingent.

The process of reification is reinforced at every stage in the “life” of every technology — from design, to marketing, to sale, consumption, and eventual obsolescence. When the “genius” retrieves our newly purchased iPod or iThing from the adytum of the Apple Store, it seems to have come from on high. The sealed plastic and Styrofoam packaging offer a guarantee that this is an object that has not been defiled by human hands. The smoothed-over plastic and metallic object that lurks inside, whether iPod or laptop, offers the same promise. The design and marketing reinforce this illusion: the latest wonder is always presented as born of and from itself against the stark monochrome backdrop of the advertisement. And when we put the object to use we are alone with it, shut off from the world of social relations. Deep in concentration we stare into its screen at the messages and images that seem to come from it, while we block out the sounds of enemies and friends alike with our earbuds. When the device fails we return it to Best Buy or the Apple Store where it is taken from our hands and returned to the inner sanctum without ceremony, while the acne pocked genius launches into a sales pitch for a new device that represents the latest cutting edge.

When our online relationships culminate in fleshy and uncomfortable meetings with others, we celebrate this as technology’s victory as much as our own.

Our blobjects, and the silicon and circuitry that they mask were made, marketed, sold and consumed by men. The hieratic computer languages that allow for the production of beautiful sounds and the spanning of time and space through instant messaging are also the products of the distant men and women in Shanghai or Bangalore who wrote the code that makes it all possible.

If the human power that produces our dazzling technology is hidden and mystified at every point from design to obsolescence, the “effects” that new technologies have on our lives are always loudly trumpeted as transcendent or revolutionary. Simply read Tyler Cowen’s Three Tweets For the Web to see this in action, or look at the commentary surrounding the technology employed by Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign (and not-quite-so successful presidency). Our first black president does not represent a victory for civil rights so much as a victory for Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging. The human element is effaced and removed in order to be replaced by the abstract and reified notions of technology and progress.

Once the specter of human labor has been exorcised, we are able to be carried away by technology, imagining that the things we do are made possible by technology rather than flesh. We engage in chats with random strangers, post on message boards or visit online dating sites. It is technology that permits these marvels of social connection and togetherness. When our online relationships culminate in fleshy and uncomfortable meetings with others, we celebrate this as technology’s victory as much as our own.

The social world, which appears so alien to us precisely because it is mediated by the technological, seems simultaneously to have been given to us by technology. The technological posits life as sickness and alienation with itself as the only solution. But the sickness and alienation are themselves the products of both modern and earlier technologies including the automobile, the division of labor, and the cell phone. Whether in gadget or pharmaceutical form, technology is always the solution to the problems created by technology. If we feel coerced by wage slavery or strangled by a haunting social scene, we feel some comfort knowing that the new technologies offer liberation from those very things.

And that is just the sort of liberation that the flash mob seemed to offer. A sort of guerrilla theater that would harness technology in order to destroy the mechanistic problems of contingent life, the first flash mob was organized in 2003 by Harper’s editor Bill Wasik. Approximately 100 strangers, organized through text messaging, showed up on the ninth floor of Macy’s Manhattan flagship store and shopped for a “love rug” to decorate their communal living space.

The flash mob was a happening à la Rauschenberg, updated for the lattè-sipping netizens of post-9-11 Brooklyn. Its participants were complete strangers, brought together by social networking for a single performative event that promised transcendence, liberation and rebellion. The event itself was always a sort of prank that tweaked or bent reality. When the flash mob’s purpose was completed, participants dispersed, and returned to the reality from which they had come.

The original flash mobs were well-reported and generally successful. For a few moments they delivered a spectacle or event that brought humans together and manipulated reality.

So it came as a surprise when Wasik eventually made an about face, announcing (gated ) that the entire project was a social experiment intended to reveal the desire to conform that lay at the heart of the hipster. But the genie was out of the bottle, and the flash mob continued without him, most famously in the flash mobs organized by a group called Improv Everywhere, whose earliest efforts actually pre-date Wasik’s flash mobs. Improv Everywhere’s mission was something like the reenchantment of everyday life with the sort of childlike wonder one associates with The Believer and Dave Eggers. Unlike Wasik’s multilayered metacritique, Improv Everywhere was in earnest, recognizing that the new technologies of rapid communication and social networking offered the possibility of spontaneous, or almost spontaneous actions that could detourn and interrupt not just the products of culture, as Situationism attempted to do, but the drabness of administered life itself.

Flash for fantasy: conformist hipsters in bed with the mob.

If Wasik seemed more interested in the production of inexplicable crowds and the psychology underlying participation in those crowds, Improv Everywhere put the emphasis on the performance and creation of spectacle. Since 2001, Improv Everywhere has created dozens of spectacles and situations, from a rooftop performance by U2 imposter that coincided with an actual U2 concert to a takeover of Best Buy by marching charging blue-shirted hipsters. But perhaps the most well-known of Improv Everywhere’s stunts was the “Best Gig Ever.”

For the Best Gig Ever, Improv Everywhere’s agents attended a Manhattan performance by a struggling and little known out-of town-band called Ghosts of Pasha. Before the show the agents learned the band’s songs by heart and created homemade band t-shirts. When the band came on they were surprised to find themselves living the rock and roll dream with tens of adoring fans. When the lights came on and Improv Everywhere’s agents filed out, the members of the band were left wondering what happened. If it was the most talked about Improv Everywhere event, it was also the most personally devastating. In a popular episode of the Public Radio program This American Life devoted to Improv Everywhere’s activities, members of the band chosen by Improv Everywhere recounted the personal tumult and paranoid ideation that resulted from the Best Gig Ever.

The lesson of Improv Everywhere seems to be that when flash mobs are aimed at society at large, a pleasant effect is achieved, and daily drudgery is changed, even if only for an instant, into a thought-provoking parody or critique of daily drudgery. But when the tactics of the flash mob are aimed at particular individuals, the results are terror, psychosis and paranoia. The flash mob, it turns out, is far more ambivalent than first thought.

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.

The human flesh search engine is a versatile and useful technology capable of focusing thousands of vengeant thoughts on any target that arouses our anger.

This truth was once again demonstrated when the flash mob arrived in Shanghai. Enraged by video footage of a Chinese school girl brutally bullying another school girl (in the video the tormented girl wears a shirt that says, in English, “I am so lost in your love”), Shanghai netizens launched a “human flesh search engine.” A poetic turn of phrase, the human flesh search engine is a sort of online manhunt or Amber Alert that uses human brains rather than computer processors to identify other humans as the objects of terrifying and swift vigilante justice. Flesh, it seems, is stronger than silicon. Within hours, the human flesh search engine identified the bully as one Ziong Jiaqing, a student of railway sciences at Nanhu Vocational School’s No. 2 Branch Campus. The bully’s identity revealed, a flash mob was decreed (text as found):

The angry netizens unanimously condemn at such behavior and call for the human flesh search engine to find out the identity of the naughty girl. Her personal information is soon released and many people threaten to take the justice into their own hands to punish the girl for such horrific behavior. Monday, October the 26th is considered by these people to be the “judgement day” for Xiong Jiaqing, the violent girl who is believed to be attending a vocational school in Shanghai.

In what was perhaps a nod to Improv Everywhere, the organizers even gave the event a name: “Bear Slaughter Meeting.” On the appointed date, an angry flash mob of five hundred or so “netizens” descended on Nanhu Vocation School’s No. 2 Branch Campus demanding justice and the head of Jiang Xiaqing.

Bear Slaughter Meeting was only the most recent human flesh search engine to take place in China, and, evidently the first to result in a flash mob. It will probably not be the last. Past targets of this innovative technology melding human and machine have included a narcissistic student, a dissident student, a student who dated foreigners, a kitten gouger, and a British expat who was a serial womanizer.

If it is true that information and innovation abhor chains and wish to be free, the inescapable conclusion is that the technology known as the human flesh search engine will soon show up on other shores, perhaps nearer to here. It is a versatile and useful technology capable of focusing thousands of vengeant thoughts on any target that arouses our anger. When combined with the flash mob it is a definite improvement over the old and outdated lynch mob.

It should not be a surprise that the current technologies offer such dark possibilities. They did not fall from the lips of heaven, but were created by humans. As such, our technologies can never be transcendent. They can only be as good as we are. The gun that liberates is no different from the gun that oppresses, and often the hand that grips it is one and the same.

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