The Permanent Floating Riot Club.

Well, it seems that there are people who like riots. 

Larry Niven, Flash Crowd

One of the most difficult things for a science fiction author to do is to extrapolate all the possible end results of an innovation in technology.  As an example, a good science fiction writer in 1930 might have successfully anticipated the eventual mass acceptance of the motorcar, and probably seen the inevitable need for freeways and gas stations that would result. An extra-ordinary 30s SF author would have also projected traffic jams, parking tickets, gas wars, road rage, and six-dollar-an-hour parking meters.

Science fiction and fantasy author Larry Niven has always been very good at exactly that sort of if-this-goes-on extrapolation.  Niven's semi-organized Known Space future includes, among other things, the invention of the teleportation booth, and Niven beautifully explores the various effects that such an invention would have on our culture. This exploration includes the disturbing phenomenon of the "flash crowd", which in his stories is portrayed as something far too close to what Vancouver experienced last Wednesday after the Canucks lost Game 7 of the playoffs.

Niven's stories have the advantage of instantaneous travel - people are able to be on the scene of a disturbance literally within seconds, ergo the title Flash Crowd for his first story dealing with this problem.  In Flash Crowd, a roving wireless cameraman reports a disturbance, which instantly makes its way to network distribution, leading to a instantaneous influx of viewers who happen to be curious, angry, or just plain bored enough to jump into the centre of a riot.

What Niven doesn't anticipate in his flash crowd scenario is the Internet - in other words, social media.*  When you think about it, between cell phones, texting, Facebook, blogs, and YouTube, how hard would it be to assemble a group of, say, five hundred people in relatively short order?  We don't have the advantages and disadvantages of teleportation booths, but the added ease with which news of an event can be disseminated makes up for the lack of being able to get there in fractions of a second.  (And apparently this is exactly what happened after the trouble started here:  people invited their friends to head downtown and join in the fun.)

More interestingly, Niven also anticipates a more disturbing aspect of riots:  the fact that some people like them.  In The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club, a followup to the original 1983 story, Niven described a group of criminals who specialize in taking advantage of flash crowds and the opportunities offered therein for theft and looting.  Disturbingly, Vancouver seems to have played host twice now to the Canadian equivalent:  black-masked anarchists, last seen causing trouble at an Olympics protest parade last February**.

However, if Niven fails to anticipate the Internet, he also fails to anticipate the other side of human nature.  The Facebook-organized volunteers who spent Thursday morning cleaning up Granville Street never make an appearance in any of his flash crowd scenarios, but let's be fair, "The Permanent Floating Kindness Club" doesn't have the same impact as a title for a story.

- Sid

* As with the Spanish Inquisition, no one expected the Internet, although I'm willing to perjure myself on that after a little research.  Maybe Arthur C. Clarke - there's a bit in 2001 which is pretty close.

** I have to be fair here.  Reports vary as to whether the instigators of the post-playoff rioting were part of the same group that caused the problems at the Olympic protest.  I suspect that the great majority of the rioters last week were just drunken idiots - but I also suspect that they may have been joiners rather than initiators.