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The first Flash Mob event was created by Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper’s Magazine. It happened in New York City in 2003. Back then, it was called “the Mob Project," an emailed art happening specifying the date, location, and time of the event. At Wasik’s 2003 event, hundreds of mostly strangers wound up converging on the rug department at Manhattan’s Macy’s Department Store, and just hanging out. When approached by salespeople, the flash-mobbers said that they all lived together in a warehouse and were shopping for a “love rug.” Then, at a given signal at a given time, the Flash Mob burst into spontaneous applause and then immediately dispersed to the astonishment of Macy’s. Seeing that his experiment had worked, Wasik then wrote a defining essay in Harper’s and so the Flash Mob was born. Since 2003, there have been other Flash Mob events, some with absurd purposes; others with specific serious purposes. For example, there’s a variety of Flash Mobs that are also known as Smart Mobs, as coined by Howard Rheingold, an expert on positive mob rule spawned mostly on the Internet.