As I read this article about using Facebook to organize dances, I started to think of the Larry Niven’s flash crowds, and wonder how in the world we will manage unexpectedly large crowds in the future.

“We had 1,000 kids trying to get in at once,” Sheckles said, recalling his April event, which had a GI Joe theme.

“It was a bad situation.”

This also makes me wonder about the emergent properties of this ability to instantly organize large numbers of people What happens in scenarios such as:

• some one proclaims a great injustice and called for like minded people to swarm an area
• Rumors spread of free housing in areas heavily impacted by the decline in the price of crappy homes. Nobody is going to buy these houses, so be in WayTooHotToLiveHere, AZ on this date…
• A real injustice occurs and people swarm on their own

Given 6 billion people on earth, how soon until 100 million swarm? What if you were willing to lose 100 million “soldiers” in a swarm (1 billion -100 million is still a LOT of people).

I’m kinda scaring myself.

respond, or trackback.