Riot in a crowded street

November 25th, 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti

Over the past year or so, Crowdsourcing has proved to be great in a crisis. As Ushahidi have shown in Haiti and Pakistan, with a decent software platform, you can channel the crowd into an efficient and powerful force for good.

But, as Yoda might put it: “power of the crowd, dark side it has”. If it’s possible to organize the crowd into fixing a crisis, what’s to stop someone doing the opposite? Imagine a shadowy, sinister figure (think Tyler Durden from Fight Club, only with a twitter account) who, at the click of a mouse, can incite thousands of virtual followers into carrying out his personal Project Mayhem.

Disco Inferno
Steve Dahl, a Chicago DJ in the late 70’s, would be electrified at the idea. Dahl was known for his outrageous stunts and burning hatred of all things disco (we can only speculate the reason for this disco-phobia, a traumatic childhood incident with a glitter ball perhaps?).

Tired of waging a lonely, one-man war against the bell bottomed lifestyle, in July 1979 Dahl set to work organizing Disco Demolition Night (a kind of giant flash mob) at Chicago baseball ground, Comiskey Park. On-air, Dahl rallied baseball fans to his cause by promising 98 cents entry to that week’s game for anyone who came with a disco record to sacrifice.

On the day, over 75,000 people showed up, armed with stacks of albums (which must have given the Bee Gees quite a healthy boost in sales). When the stadium’s firework team blew up crates of records the over-excited crowd went crazy, storming the field and creating a raging bonfire.

Be there or be (four)square
Fast forward to November 2nd 2010, the day residents of San Francisco decided to celebrate the Giants (another baseball team) World Series title with a little more (ahem) vigor than average. Tech savvy fans created a “Giants Riot” location on Foursquare. Around 300 people checked in with tips like “Pick up cars” and “Set things on fire!”. That night, live video and audio streams were followed by thousands online, while Twitter was bursting with hashtags like #sfsscanner and #sfriot.

The idea of cyber riots certainly gave the prophets of doom in the media something to write home about (a quick Google news search returned over 14,000 articles). But, as Mashable founder Pete Cashmore pointed out: “if San Franciscans instead chose to phone a friend…would we then decry the rise of cellphone rioting?” And, as Steve Dahl showed over 30 years ago, you can whip baseball fans into a Saturday night fever with nothing more than a radio.

My instinct says it’s not the tech that matters, but what you do with it (I’m aware that I’m starting to sound a bit like the NRA saying this). Take Foursquare itself: in November, as well as the rioters, the site was used by the American Red Cross to encourage blood donation and Feeding America to raise awareness about hunger relief over Thanksgiving. But still, it’s both inevitable and disturbing that, once you release powerful, mass management, crowdsourcing tools like Groundcrew and Foursquare, somebody, somewhere’s going to use them to mastermind riots and mobilize revolts. Of course, protest isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in some places – I’m thinking of Kashmir and Iran – you might want to give people all the help they can get.

Whether technology is harnessed for good or evil is up to us: only we decide where to lead, and who to follow. Once again, the future is in the hands of the crowd – let’s just hope it’s not a crowd made up entirely of baseball fans.

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