Mischief 2.0
Today's Youth Use Tech-Savvy 'Smart Mob' Tactics to Terrorize
[Note: An edited version of this story appeared in the Nov. 12, 2002 edition of The New York Sun]
For residents of Dongan Hills, a quiet residential neighborhood located on Staten Island's eastern side, Halloween 2002 started off with the usual teenage hi-jinks: a tossed egg here, a shaving cream bomb there.
Sometime around 6 p.m. things changed.
"Kids started coming in groups of 30," said Frank Deconzo, 13, a Dongan Hills resident out trick-or-treating that night. "A bunch of kids called their friends, and their friends called their friends, and so on. Down the line."
By 8 pm, local streets had become an albumin-soaked free-fire zone. More than 300 teenagers, some coming from as far as Tottenville, converged on the unsuspecting neighborhood. Armed with eggs, paint ball guns and cell phones, they hunted down unsuspecting locals and evaded police capture throughout the evening.
"It was scary," said Deconzo. "All of a sudden a truck would pull up. You'd hear 500 paintballs whiz past your head, and you had to drop to the ground."
Although no complaints were filed and no arrests made, the momentary mob scene left some residents shaken. Even those who saw it as a simple case of youthful exuberance run amok had to admit it was an unprecedented display of bravado and organization.
"People were scared, because there were so many of them," said Susan Sottille, a resident of one of the hardest-hit blocks. "You know why? Because every kid nowadays has a cell phone."
Indeed. As any keg party veteran will tell you, it doesn't take much to get 300 teens to show up at a single location. What has changed are the tools used to do it. Where past generations relied on the rumor and pre-determined rallying points, today's teens have cell phones, two-way pagers and the Internet to stay two steps ahead of the adult world.
The end result is a heightened capacity for mischief, speed and organizational flexibility. Thanks to wireless communications, Staten Island teenagers have simply become the latest practitioners of "swarming" ‹ a tactic defined as "the convergent attack of five (or more) semi-autonomous units...on a targeted force" according to Sean J. A. Edwards, author the 2000 RAND defense study Swarming on the Battlefield: Past, Present, and Future.
Others see an even larger phenomenon at work. Take away cell phones from soldiers and you still have soldiers capable of making war or doing damage.Take away cell phones from ordinary teenagers, and you have the type of Halloween behavior most neighborhoods have tolerated since the 1950s.
"It's not just new technology helping you do things more efficiently," says technology reporter Howard Rheingold. "It's new technology helping you do things you couldn't do before."
Rheingold offers his own term for this larger phenomenon: smart mobs. Since early 2000, he has been collecting data and anecdotes detailing exotic group behavior made possible by wireless technology. This month, he released it in the form of a new book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution [Perseus Publishing].
"Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other," writes Rheingold in the introduction. "The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities."
An early member of the WELL, the seminal online community that, together with Wired Magazine, provided a springboard for the 1990s "digerati" scene, Rheingold likens smart mob behavior to the early Internet. In both cases, you have communication-driven technologies meeting a crticial mass of experimental users, triggering dramatic new forms of group activity.
"People at the grass roots discover something and start building. Pretty soon it snowballs and everybody wants to join in," Rheingold says.
How far does the smart mob phenomenon go? Rheingold's book points to large scale examples such as Seattle, 1998, where anti-World Trade Organizationprotestors used swarming tactics to outwit local police, and Manila, 2001, where Filipino cell phone users circulated text messages calling for an anti-government rally. Within a week, more than a million demonstrators had gathered in the capital city, toppling the government of President Joseph Estrada.
The real heart of the phenomenon, however, occurs at the ordinary user level. In Japan, where NTT DoCoMo was racking up a million new subscribers a month last year for its iMode Internet-enabled cellphones, teenage girls have created a veritable cult of the cell phone, sending animated cartoons and ring tone jingles back and forth and congregating in virtual "thumb tribes."
In Sweden, meanwhile, more than 7,000 cellphone users have signed up to play "BotFighters," a game developed by the Stockholm-based company It's Alive! The object of the game is to use your cellphone's text-messaging software to determine an opponent's physical location, to close in and, finally, to send a message disabling or "killing" the opponent's cell phone.
U.S. teens may lag behind their overseas counterparts when it comes to such exotic behavior, but market watchers say it won't be long before similar crazes hit U.S. shores. Becky Diercks, principal analyst for technology research firm InStat/MDR, sees the number of U.S. teenage cellphone owners to reach 30 million, or 50 percent of the total U.S. teen population, by the end of 2004. Where the phones go, look for features and applications to follow.
"Most of the features won't even be talk-related," says Ms. Diercks. "Things like
messaging, ring tones, games. Some carriers are even working on devices that appeal as a fashion accessory."
So what to make of early secondary-effects such as the recent Battle of Dongan Hills? Rheingold sees it as a reminder that not all technologies get used toward beneficial ends and not all technology-enabled groups come together with the best interests of society in mind. "A smart mob isn't necessarily a wise mob," Mr. Rheingold says.
For firsthand witness of smart mob behavior, the lesson is a little different. Mr. Deconzo, the teenager who spent most of Halloween, 2002 running away from his swarming neighbors, the experience was both shocking and impressive.
"They knew what they were doing," he says, alluding to the outsiders who temporarily ruled his neighborhood. "We went out in a group, but their group was bigger."
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