Bill Wasik

Who is Bill Wasik?

Bill Wasik is a senior editor of Wired Magazine, and was previously a senior editor at Harper's Magazine. He has also contributed to McSweeney's and served as Editor of The Weekly Week. Mr. Wasik revealed himself in 2006 to be the inventor of the flash mob, having anonymously organized the first recognized examples in New York City during the summer of 2003.

Wasik is the author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture and, with Monica Murphy, Rabid, which was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He is also the editor, with Roger D. Hodge, of Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine

Bill Wasik is credited with introducing the notion of a flash mob in 2003, said in 2010 that he was surprised by the violence of some of the gatherings. He said the mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could. “It’s terrible that these Philly mobs have turned violent,” he said.