BROOKE GLADSTONE: In the summer of 2003, the world witnessed a new type of e-mail-generated constituency when a couple of hundred people materialized one June evening in the rug department of a Manhattan Macy's. They told the sales attendant that they all lived together, were in the market for a love rug and were especially interested in the large Persian over in the corner. After exactly ten minutes, they left. In reality, they did not live together or even know each other. Rather, they had all received forwarded e-mails with simple instructions about when, where and how to congregate. A reporter covered the event, and a blogger gave it a name - Flash Mob. Six more Flash Mobs took place in New York that summer, and countless more in other cities - and countries. Two weeks earlier, the very first Flash Mob was stymied by police, apparently tipped off. Also tipped off was Dean Olsher of the late public radio show "The Next Big Thing," who was in the mob.

DEAN OLSHER: So have you watched what's happening?

MAN: Yeah. Apparently a mob is forming - a very calm, collected, literary [LAUGHS] mob. [LAUGHTER]

WOMAN: Bill's the one who organized the mob.

DEAN OLSHER: Oh, you know the organizer of the mob?

WOMAN: Oh, my gosh. [LAUGHS]

DEAN OLSHER: Do you know Bill's last name?

WOMAN: Well, I don't want to say his last name. In case he wants to remain anonymous, I respect that.

BOB GARFIELD: Just point him out.

WOMAN: I will point.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In fact, he did want to remain anonymous, identifying himself to reporters simply as Bill, a New Yorker who works in the culture industry. But in the March issue of Harpers magazine, Bill outs himself. Turns out he's Bill Wasik, a senior editor of that magazine. He explains that Flash Mobs were both a performance piece about a New York culture of conformity, and an absurdist riff on viral marketing.

BILL WASIK: Normally with viral marketing there's something at the center of it, whether it's a product or a funny website - something at the middle of it. And I thought, well, what if you did a viral marketing campaign where essentially there was nothing at the middle of it? The only thing that would be there would be the people who came to see it, and by being there, they themselves would become the event. So the idea would be to, you know, take the buzz around an art project and remove the art project - [BROOKE LAUGHS] - and all you have left is the buzz, and that was the idea. My original notion was that the project would spread entirely through e-mail, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it got picked up in the media, and that helped to fuel the spread of the fad to other cities. It spread to other countries. And then inevitably there was a backlash, and in my piece I sort of date the backlash to this New York Times article that came out in October of 2003.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you explain that probably the motivation for the backlash piece is that the Times was too late to cover the beginning of the fad, and so called an end to it perhaps prematurely [LAUGHS] in order to have the headline.

BILL WASIK: You know, I stand by that allegation. [LAUGHTER] No, I mean, I think a lot of this stuff goes on, on the parts of journalists subconsciously, because the idea is, you know, if you're going to advance the story, then you need to have an angle. I mean, it's Journalism 101. And for people in other cities, the angle was, hey, this crazy fad's coming to our town. In the Times, I think their angle was this fad has spread so much that now there's a backlash growing against it. Of course, the great irony about that Times backlash story is around the time that that story appeared was when the phenomenon really was at its height, and we really had spread to not just, you know, U.S. cities but I was getting reports of them in Latin America and in Asia and that kind of thing. And here comes this backlash story -

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

BILL WASIK: - which I just thought was ironic beyond belief. But a couple of months later, it would have been a fine piece, so [BROOKE LAUGHS] - you know, don't get me wrong.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So in that Times story, a civics expert at Harvard's Kennedy School is quoted as saying this: "From our point of view, it's a wasted opportunity, that is, the Flash Mobs. It's great to have fun, but it would be a lot more interesting if the people organizing this tried to think of ways to utilize it to have people come together to build social networks." That's a real buzz kill, but -

BILL WASIK: [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: - what do you think? Was that a common response?

BILL WASIK: Oh, yeah. It was an extremely common response. A lot of people saw the Flash Mob as somehow being a parody of the protest movement or something that was sapping energy away from the protest movement, which was not my intention at all. But I do think that the idea behind Flash Mobs was something that just couldn't really be turned towards any kind of political ends, because they were really about a certain kind of insider-ness. People were using the outside world as a kind of terrain for private games. The mobs were very much about the mob participants. It wasn't really about showing off to a larger group of people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So tell me about when you knew it was definitively dead. Tell me about the Fusion Flash concerts.

BILL WASIK: Well, this summer I got an e-mail from a friend and she said, in the subject heading she said, "weren't you always worried about this?" And I opened it up and it was a column describing this marketing promotion - Fusion Flash Concerts, where in order to promote this new car, the Ford Fusion, Ford had partnered with Sony to create this series of Flash Mob concerts in cities all across the country. And it was something that I had expected, and I actually thought that it would happen sooner, because, you know, corporations co-opt anything that they think young people like. And they said in the press release this is a "fresh interactive take on the underground Flash Mobbing phenomenon." This I thought was especially funny, because the Flash Mob phenomenon had basically died as an underground phenomenon, you know, about two and a half months after it started.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] So in the end, you provided corporate America with another tool for winning hearts and minds, and you assumed that that's where it would ultimately end. But was that pretty much it? Was it really, as you describe in your article, just an empty meditation on emptiness or were you after something bigger?

BILL WASIK: Well, it was a comment on the culture, but, to a certain extent, it was a comment on the emptiness of the culture, so in that regard, yeah, that's basically what I was after.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS]

BILL WASIK: But I was, by the end, a little bit touched by people who had brought political ideas to it, and I did begin to feel like there was something there, that there was the germ of some political consciousness inherent in it, even though I myself didn't really see it and didn't really see that it had any future.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Can you give me a reason why you chose to do this experiment now, at this particular moment?

BILL WASIK: Well, I feel like the internet has allowed people to converge more quickly on the same ideas about what the cool or most interesting, you know, cultural product is, and that there's a kind of feedback loop that exists among the sort of self-consciously cultured people, at least of a certain age - and I say a certain age simply because, you know, it's the group of people that I know. I mean, it's - [OVERTALK]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And what age is that?

BILL WASIK: I'm 31.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

BILL WASIK: That there's a dynamic where they'll quickly converge on a thing and then they'll abandon it. I sort of wish that I had kept doing them until they were so uncool that no one would come any more -

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHING]

BILL WASIK: - because really that would have been the natural endpoint of it, for the thing to become cool and then to become so uncool that there just wasn't a soul there except for pathetic little me. But I think my pride got in the way of me taking it to that endpoint, the long, sad, tail end of the abandonment of a fad.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Bill Wasik is a senior editor at Harpers Magazine. His article, which appears in the March issue, is called "My Crowd." Thank you so much.

BILL WASIK: Okay. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]