Author of the week: Bill Wasik

last updated 8 January 2015

The inventor of “flash mobs” has turned against the technologies that made his stunts possible, said Jeff Howe in Wired. Bill Wasik, a Harper’s magazine editor who in 2003 launched a global fad by authoring the anonymous e-mail that created a pointless crowd outside a Manhattan trinkets store, isn’t sorry that he initiated the experiment. In his first book, And Then There’s This, Wasik confesses that he has continued meddling with viral culture. Once, he mounted an online campaign to deflate an indie rock band’s reputation—just to see how effective the effort would be. Still, he says, the new book is “a work of self-loathing.” It “was written out of a terror in seeing what the Internet had done to me.”

The central worry in Wasik’s book, said Vincent Rossmeier in Salon.com, is that our lives are increasingly squandered on trivia because public discourse in the Internet era is simply moving too fast. “So many blogs need refreshing,” and so many hours of cable news need be filled, Wasik says, that we “seize upon these tiny little things and try to elevate them into sensations.” The pattern appears unlikely to change, he adds, because people need some kind of mass culture just to have things to talk about—like, say, British talent-show contestants. “That, to me, is the reason you have 10 million people becoming obsessed with Susan Boyle,” he says. For individuals, he adds, “the challenge is to try to find ways to partially unplug ourselves.”