I’d like to emphasize one of the recent entries at flashmob.com because it is so pregnant with meaning and happens to echo some of my own frustrations with the state of electronic culture.
As some of you may know, flash mobs are for bourgeois people from MIT only. We want to change this and organize a flash mob in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
On Saturday 26th of May 2006, make sure you arrive at Ndjili Airport in Kinshasa, run to Ituri Province, and plant one banana tree.
Then go back to what you were doing before, that is, organizing flash mobs or creating guerilla wifi spots for your iPod.
The interesting thing about this post, and most other posts to the site, is that they will probably never result in a flash mob, and many of the submitters know this. They exist as the crystallization of some collection of frustrations attempting to be actualized through the notion of physical action, expressed in short poetic calls to action.
In this case its a reference to the feeling that flash mobs are a luxury of developed nations, where a group of people collected in some ludicrous activity isn’t a threat to the state. This is true. But where I would disagree is in the association of flash mobs with the techno fetishism of the iPod, since flash mobs are primarily organized by email (hardly a bourgeois technology). Nevertheless, I often feel that geeks in developed countries need to reevaluate how they see the developing world. I’ll scream if I see another wacky proposal for water purification or the other 10 or so percieved problems that plague the developing world (and this almost always means Africa).
