I'm a bit late on this by internet hipster standards, but Harper's Online is serializing Bill Wasik's very interesting essay from its latest issue on the not-entirely-in-earnest origins of the "flash mob," which Wasik invented more or less as a test to see what sorts of silly things he could get hipsters to do for no good reason. It turns out to be rather a lot; the conformist impulse is alive and well in Hipstertown.

Parts 1 through 3 are up so far; two parts remain. It's quite good. My favorite passage has been the discussion of Stanley Milgram in Part 2:

When a British art magazine asked me who, among artists past or present, had most influenced the flash-mob project, I named Stanley Milgram—the social psychologist best known for his authority experiments, in which he induced average Americans to give seemingly fatal shocks to strangers. As it happens, I later discovered that Milgram himself did a project much like a flash mob, in which a “stimulus crowd” of his confederates, varying in number from one to fifteen, stopped on a busy Manhattan sidewalk and all at once looked up to the same sixth-floor window. The results can be seen in Figure 4, a chart from his paper “Note on the Drawing Power of Crowds of Different Size.”

Stanley Milgram deserves recognition, I believe, as one of the crucial artists of the preceding century. Consider his crowd experiment, which, it must be admitted, is fairly thin gruel as science: everyone knows that such an effect would be observed, and what value is there in quantifying it? No, the value of this experiment is entirely in its performance, the unadorned audacity of it, a small crowd in simple unison bucking the city's flow—a Fluxus-style “happening” but without the blinkered optimism, and in that respect closer, perhaps, to a Ray Johnson “nothing.” Milgram's crowd study was far less explanatory than it was expressive, serving as an elegant metaphor for conformism while adding little to our scientific understanding of who conforms or why.

On an unrelated note, the current issue of Harper's also has a long article by Celia Farber that is the first AIDS denialist piece I can recall seeing in a mainstream outlet. You can't read the article without buying the magazine, but you can read the angry responses for free.

I wish I knew the science better so I could make a more informed judgment about the merits of the AIDS denial movement. The article seemed very persuasive, but of course deceptive anti-science rhetoric usually is. It can sometimes be very hard for a layperson to draw a line between "reasoned, intelligent criticism of the mainstream scientific community" and "crank pseudoscience." UPDATE: Just noticed Jess at Bookslut has a good roundup of key links in the Harper's-AIDS-denialism controversy.