Flash mobs started out innocuously enough. Groups of people would pre-arrange to meet at a particular location and engage in what was essentially a form of street theater, ‘spontaneously’ breaking into opera arias in department stores or Handel’s Messiah in shopping mall food courts at Christmastime, or performing some sketch and the like, with the bystanders initially taken by surprise but enjoying the performance once they caught on. It was fun and meant to entertain and educate and enlighten.
The advent of social media has enabled people to arrange for flash mobs to appear with very little notice and no prior organization and this has led to new forms of flash mob behavior. This has been of considerable value for organizing protest demonstrations in repressive countries, as we saw with the Arab spring. These were not for fun but had a serious social purpose.
But a darker side to flash mobs is now emerging and Cleveland has seen its share of them. Large numbers of young people are being notified at short notice by social media to gather at a location purely for the sake of disrupting the lives of people in that area. Recently we had a case where a street fair in the suburb of Cleveland Heights was suddenly invaded by a large number of young people who are reported to have rampaged through the crowds attending the fair, knocking over people and stalls, stomping over people’s property in the surrounding neighborhoods, and seemingly bent on just destroying the enjoyment of the people attending a local community event. As a result, that city has imposed a curfew that prohibits young people being on the streets in the evening unless accompanied by an adult.
Soon after, the Fourth of July fireworks display that is put on in my town also suddenly saw the arrival of about 500 youths who again tried to rampage through the large crowd assembled to see the show, but apparently the police were ready for them and managed to control to situation before it got out of hand.
What complicates the situation is that the young people in these mobs are almost all black and not from the small communities where the disruptions occurred (which are both racially integrated) but from the neighboring large city of Cleveland, so this has raised racial tensions. There are concerns that the curfew policy is racially motivated and will only be enforced against unaccompanied black youth. It seems that the city of Philadelphia has adopted a similar curfew policy to deal with flash mobs there.
In one of the community meetings that followed one of these incidents, a young man tried to explain the actions by saying that young people had nothing to do because the community did not provide adequate outlets for them, and that this kind of behavior was a backlash to that state of affairs. I must say that I have very little sympathy for this point of view. I do not think that it is the obligation of the community to provide amusements for young people and am baffled that they feel entitled to it. When and why and how did this feeling originate? Is it because young people today grow up with their parents taking them hither and yon to organized events so that they have not developed the ability to amuse themselves?
At the risk of sounding like a cranky old man (which I am but that is neither here nor there), when we were young the thought that our parents or the community had to provide avenues for our entertainment never occurred to us. When we had free time, we young people would get together and organize our own amusements, which often just consisted of hanging around talking or organizing pickup games on vacant lots or going to see films, and the like. We were pretty much left to ourselves and yet I do not recall being particularly bored.
Frankly I simply cannot understand the mentality of the young people who are taking part in these destructive flash mobs. There seems to be no motive other than to spoil the enjoyment of ordinary people taking part in a community event. What enjoyment does one get disturbing the peace and frightening and even injuring total strangers? After all, the events that were disrupted were free and open to everyone so it is not as if they were being excluded.
Now there are reported cases where flash mobs are being created for the purpose of looting, taking advantage of the fact that they can send out the call to the mob, gather, loot, and disperse before the police can arrive.
In some ways, the phenomenon of flash mobs that form purely for the purpose of disrupting events and attacking people is more disturbing than those which either have theft as their explicit goal or where some people use demonstrations and other forms of social protest as an opportunity to create chaos and then steal, as seems to be what is happening in England right now. These are disturbing but at least they seem to have some rational basis, however slight.
My sense of bafflement as to what is gained by these purely disruptive flash mobs is similar to my reaction to vandalism. What does one gain by simply defacing and destroying things? It does not benefit you in any way. It merely degrades the very community and the environment that the young people themselves live in, making their situations even worse. Destroying things and creating trouble and fear among ordinary people just because you think you can and want to, with no other purpose in mind, bespeaks a seriously antisocial mindset. It reminds me of the disturbing dystopian futuristic Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange (later made by Stanley Kubrick into a film), where the young toughs terrorize people just for the fun of it.
It is a bad sign when young people start destroying their own communities and daring the authorities to come after them for no apparent reason but seemingly just to show that they can.
Shalom Mano,
Well said.
B’shalom,
Jeff
p.s. and on behalf of statler and waldorf, welcome to the loyal order of curmudgeons. 🙂
First off, I wonder if you’ve seen the video of someone in London who was attacked, then had the contents of their backpack stolen while they were being ‘helped.’
Its been revealed that the victim Ashraf Haziq, a finance student in London who is a native of Malaysia.
That out of the way, is it any more absurd to think a group of teenagers might ‘invade’ a community to have some fun than a country invade a nation to control some oil?
I understand your bafflement at kids destroying things because they’re bored, but I would guess that this is a larger reaction based in system inequalities that these kids are facing.
Youth unemployment has been elevated during the recession, services are being cut, and libraries are being closed or reducing service hours to name just a few things. A lot of these kids are probably seeing their parents out of work for extended periods of time and are likely having a difficult financial time.
It’s been a few years since I’ve lived in Cleveland so I don’t know the particulars of what’s going on there now, but I think a lot of the youth revolts we’re seeing across the world right now are sparked by a lack of hope and difficult economic situations.
Just a thought.
To add to what Savannah said- as I’ve taken to saying lately, social peace is a good which, like other goods, has to be paid for. We can pay by financing a social democracy, or (with dubious effectiveness in the long run, and lots of unpleasant side effects) we can pay for ever more stringent(and often brutal) policing. I know which one I’d rather pay for.
“What does one gain by simply defacing and destroying things? It does not benefit you in any way. It merely degrades the very community and the environment that the young people themselves live in, making their situations even worse.”
On the surface I understand your bafflement Mano, however, reading your statement reminded me of a situation that is called ‘Tragedy of the Commons’. I came across this concept in Garret Hardin’s ‘Creative Altruism: An Ecologist Questions Motives’ (an excellent quick read by the way!). Basically it explains certain behaviors that seemingly don’t make sense because of the negative utility it brings to all. Instead of trying to explain it in general terms, I’ll use examples because they illustrate this concept best.
I live with several other friends in a large house. I cook a meal for myself and leave all of the dirty dishes in the sink. I can wash the dishes, but that takes effort and since I’m a thoughtless, lazy bum, I leave the dishes and go play video games. I don’t like to see dirty dishes just as much as the next person so it provides negative utility for my housemates and me. Why then do I leave it? We all share this negative utility of looking at dirty dishes, however, I gained some amount of positive utility from the meal I ate and playing video games instead of using the time to wash the dishes. I came out a little bit ahead by not doing the dishes. This can quickly get out of hand if my housemates adapt the same selfish behavior.
This applies to all sorts of scenarios essentially because we share this ecosystem/globe. Pollution is one that quickly comes to mind. I own a factory that produces widgets, unfortunately the production of widgets pollutes the air. The cost of producing one more widget is more pollution. The pollution is a negative utility, but the effects are shared by all people. The widget produces a small profit for me, and me only. Adding together the positive and negative utilities, my rational course of action is to produce more widgets, as long as the pollution is not too horrible. Similar to the dirty dishes situation, this can quickly get out or hand if there are no pollution restrictions.
The individuals conducting these destructive flash mobs may be degrading their own environment, but they come out ahead after all of the positive and negative utilities are accounted for. The fun and recognition (albeit negative) they receive outweighs the negative consequences that we all have to share. And since it appears that the youth are from different communities, unless they get caught, they incur an even smaller negative utility since they are not ‘pooping in their own nest’. Like the other situations, a system of checks and balances must be put into place before things get out of hand.
Bringing others down is an easy alternative to bringing yourself up. In both cases, your relative position in society improves, and it’s the relative position compared to those around you that matters. That’s why poor people don’t really derive much comfort by comparing their situation to that of stone-age hunter-gatherers, but do derive some satisfaction from hearing about rich people who lost their fortune in the stock market crash. Being broke and hopeless is much worse when you have to live near people who are successful, so you can soothe this frustration somewhat by making them feel some pain too. It makes perfect sense to me, sadly.
Tadas,
I see your point but the situation here is slightly different from the analogies you provide. It takes time and effort to wash the dishes. Combating the pollution from widgets also costs time and money. So not doing those things does provide some tangible positive utility that is not purely psychological.
But in the case of the mobs that I wrote about, they actually expended time and effort to disrupt events that they could have simply ignored. So the positive utility seems to be purely in terms of the enjoyment they seemed to derive. That mindset is what puzzles me
Robert,
It is not clear that there was much of rich-poor gap in the events I described. Street fairs and public fireworks are events that attract a lot of ordinary people because they are free entertainment.
The rich-poor theory also does not seem to apply to vandals who deface their own communities. They are not attacking country clubs and swanky hotels.
Mano,
Perhaps people need the feeling of power you get from destroying. If you feel frustrated and powerless to control your life, maybe it produces some short-term relief to feel in control and powerful for a few minutes. Most people I know feel like smashing their computers when they can’t get some software to work properly. That’s completely irrational but also something we can all relate to. Maybe a similar mechanism is at work in these flash mobs, just on a longer time scale.
Robert