“The video-store clerk is a dying breed in every city,” she said.

It’s certainly not breaking news that as New York gets more expensive—and does it ever—it becomes less habitable for the artist types who have been migrating here from Scranton, Kansas City and Middletown to try and “make it” (or, at least, to hang out with people who are trying to make it) for eons. These young folks don’t just play in the bands that you see on a Tuesday at the Mercury Lounge, or publish the zine that you pick up by chance and cherish forever after. They also curate your life. Standing at the cash register or lurking among the stacks, they influence what movies you see, what sounds you hear, what books you read. They suggest Black Books when I’m Alan Partridge is out of stock, or Rachel Ingalls when you’re sick of Patricia Highsmith. That obscure folk record by the teenage burn victim that you push on all your friends? Admit it: It was a staff pick at Earwax.

But it’s getting harder for New York’s slacker tastemakers to get by. Ten years ago, young musicians and aspiring novelists could scrape by—like the Ugly Video Store Guy in Walking and Talking or Parker Posey in Party Girl—but today it takes two or even three jobs to make ends meet. Rent party? Forget it. Who has enough friends to pay the rent? As stores like TLA fall victim to Netflix, BitTorrent and rent increases of their own, clerk jobs don’t just pay crap: They pay crap, and they’re harder to find. Even a behemoth like Blockbuster can’t survive to employ the castaways from indie shipwrecks—stores on Third Avenue in Manhattan and in Carroll Gardens and Greenpoint in Brooklyn have all closed.

Everyone knows that the 70’s and 80’s were glory days for New York bohemians, living in the Village or squatting on the Lower East Side, lining up around the block with Basquiat and Richard Hell to buy their nose powder and Chinese rocks. (Know? They won’t shut up about it!) Rent was cheap, and streets were dirty. But the 90’s weren’t half bad, either. Money trickled into the arts: Kids cashed in dot-com stocks for rare vinyl—even Charles Saatchi funded Young British Art. Then the bubble popped.

“The entire New York slacker culture is related to the flight of the dot-com boom,” observed lanky, curly-headed Dan Berchenko over drinks at the Pencil Factory in Greenpoint. Mr. Berchenko, 30, is a writer who has paid his bills by working at an online books retailer since the late 90’s. He remembers the bubble years as a time when “it was totally unnecessary [for slacker types] to get jobs at record stores because there was so much fucking money flying around.” Read: If you can pull in $50 an hour in a corporate playland so cushy you can scribble short stories on the clock, why suffer for street cred?

Those flush days were a slacker’s paradise. Mr. Berchenko—who writes about art and architecture for magazines like Prophecy and Mute—heard about companies hiring people just to sit in cubicles when the board of directors showed up. But after 2000, “things got progressively less slackified. I had to start coming in on time.” The doors swung shut, and those pushed out of Internet companies left the city for cheaper pastures, like Philadelphia and even (gulp) Los Angeles.

Office workers turned off their games of online Jeopardy! long ago, and now record-store clerks are tightening the belts of their skinny pants. The humungous downtown Tower Records on Fourth and Lafayette went out of business (along with every other Tower) and, across East Fourth Street, the cultural gatekeepers at Other Music aren’t celebrating. Since 1995, Other (as it’s known)—with its unusual categorization of albums into groups like “In,” “Out,” “Then,” “Psych/Prog” and “American Roots”—has been the go-to spot for assorted music-nerd specialties. It’s, well, other music. But it still wishes Tower, with its Justin Timberlake and Dipset and Rachmaninoff, didn’t have to go.

Daniel Givens, 34, a friendly musician and six-year Other veteran, had his first job at Tower in Chicago. “A lot of our customers who come in feel like we championed over the big guy. But for me, it’s definitely a sign of the times. It’s not really something to celebrate and be like, ‘Oh, we won, we won, we won …. ’ A store like Tower should be able to exist.”

But in order to make it as a bricks-and-mortar store these days, you’ve got to wage war online. (See Blockbuster’s recent Netflix mimicry.) That’s why Other is launching a digital outpost in mid-April. The site will have high-quality MP3 downloads, exclusives and a lot of writing—a bigger, better version of the famous Other Music e-mail update, a weekly bible written by employees that clues its readers into what’s hot at the store. It’s where you read about Japanese noise freaks you’ve never heard of, the latest Numero Group collection of unreleased soul sides or reissues from Joanna Newsom’s folk hero—the one with the good version of “When a Man Loves a Woman.” People from all over the world read the e-mail and—this is the important part—buy what’s recommended.

“A lot of our customers in the store come in with that printout,” said Josh Madell, 36, one of Other’s owners, as we sat in his cluttered back office, surrounded by boxes of stock and promo posters. But in the online store, reading and purchasing are only a click away. Pitchfork, meet Amazon.

Mr. Madell’s not cutting his staff anytime soon. In fact, the Web site means hiring opportunities. But it’s not just a simple matter of moving clerks up the ladder. “We always try to promote from within, but the reality is that writing and managing a site, those are not necessarily the same skill sets that are involved in being on the floor and selling.” In other words, the shy savant who introduced you to Josef K., like, years before Franz Ferdinand ripped off their style, might not make the best reviewer or editor.

“I think about some of these guys out here, and I’m just like, ‘You can’t stay here forever,’” he said. “These are guys who I think are great, and I hope that they stay here forever, but … I know that there’s a limit to what we can pay our staff, and I know that there’s only so much we can do for people.”

The Pros and Cons of Slackerdom

It’s not the end of the world. Humans do adapt (hello, opposable thumbs). And if every record and video store in every borough closed, our beloved clerks would find another hustle. But something would be lost.

“I feel like, educationally, I’ve grown just by being here,” said Other Music’s Mr. Givens. Besides, there are more immediate perks to the retail grind. “Working in a record store, you save on other things,” explained former Other Music employee Rob Hatch-Miller, 25, over iChat. “Like, you can buy music for yourself pretty cheaply, and for entertainment you can usually go to shows for free …. Plus you get to know people at clubs who’ll give you free drinks and stuff. There are incentives.” Even a big city has small celebrities.

Let’s be blunt: “There is a cachet to working at the cool video store,” Ms. Giblin said. Sadly, though, “TLA was not the cool store. That was Kim’s.”

But what misery is borne by the elite! Employees at the St. Mark’s Kim’s stare out from behind the third-floor counter with dead eyes. Kim’s, where vinyl and DVD’s for sale wind around the second floor, where the small staircase that creeps up to the video store is lined with to posters for Automatons and The Exterminating Angels. Kim’s, where you might overhear a director explain that she wanted to disorient the audience, or spy someone from a competitive video chain combing the shelves—perhaps for the anime that only Mr. Kim stocks?

Anime, let it be known, doesn’t come cheap. Mr. Kim must put all his profits right back into the stock because, according to one former employee, he only starts his clerks at $6.70 an hour. Benefits are reportedly nonexistent. And the security guards are apparently treated even worse than the floor staff—Mr. Kim doesn’t ask them to feed the meter for his rented S.U.V.’s. Why would anyone stay at such a “sweatshop,” in the words of one bearded, shaggy-haired former Kim’s clerk who now pays his Bed-Stuy rent as a freelance reviewer for iTunes?

Maybe it’s because of the solidarity shared by the last video-store samurai. Brian, 28, a skinny, shaggy-haired bike messenger in a ratty white T-shirt who has done five years of Kim’s time, explained that “ever since I was a kid, I’ve always gone to a video store.” Asked what he’ll do when he eventually leaves, his eyes blinked back blankly behind his rectangular black glasses. “Ride my bike some more,” he guessed. Netflix might eventually kill Kim’s and force Brian to reconsider his fate, but it won’t happen tomorrow: Brian thinks business has been up since TLA went under. A sign on the door advertises free membership for former TLA and Tower Video members.

The moral of this story might just be that it sucks to work at Kim’s, and that Manhattan is cruel indeed to independent stores and the Brooklynites who staff them. (Bruno, a longhaired, bearded Brit, said of Kim’s: “It kind of destroys your self-esteem.” He now bartends in Williamsburg when he’s not playing with his band, the Woods.) Across the East River, video-store clerks are happy, well fed and downright optimistic. At Photoplay, a shop on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint down the block from where the new Starbucks is going in, Jayson Green—vocalist for the MC5-esque rock band Panthers—has been content for three years. In fact, he left a better job as a video editor for the freedom to take time off to tour. He tossed his shaggy-brown hair aside and scoffed at the idea that the city was getting harder for artists like him. “I’ve never had a problem finding a way to make money here. There’s lots of opportunity to. If you can’t find a way to make money in New York …. ” He trailed off. A pregnant silence hung in the air.

Jayson’s soft-spoken boss, Mike—one of few men interviewed for this story whose hair cannot be fairly described as “shaggy”—stood by, reshelving. A former programmer at Film Forum, he opened Photoplay six years ago. His 22 years in New York have been “a migration east,” from Bleecker and Macdougal to Houston and Prince to Sixth Street and Avenue B to South Third and Berry to Manhattan Avenue. He can’t imagine how anyone could survive on a clerk’s salary in the city today.

Williamsburg: Cheap Labor Camp?

Perhaps the consummate stomping ground for New York City slackers seeking a steady paycheck is the Strand. Its miles and miles of books, wound around the stacks at 12th and Broadway, occupy a score of, yes, shaggy-haired boys and girls who wear glasses. It’s often the first stop for those looking for clerk work—and given the frequent turnover, maybe the easiest place to find it. But there’s a catch.

“You have to work a lot of overtime just to get by,” explained Ryan, 26, who has been there a little over a year. (Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of Strand employees.) Employees have health benefits and a union (take that, Mr. Kim!), but they have to work at least 40 hours a week (part-timers need not apply) and can barely even live on that. His colleague of eight months, Seth, 26, agreed. “It’s a nice halfway point. It’s a hobby job.” But “it kind of consumes you.”

Ryan and Seth, like other young men with soulful eyes, spend a lot of time talking about how the cost of the city is the biggest impediment to getting anywhere in it. Sometimes, Ryan said, it feels like he “moved up here just to work and pay rent. It gets really frustrating.”

Who can be blamed for these hardships? Greedy landlords, rich bastards, Bloomberg? Maybe. Or perhaps it’s something more nefarious, and much harder to stop, let alone slow down. Maybe it’s the scene.

The scene demands a lot. But the scene also eats a lot, and so you’ll find musicians, filmmakers, photographers and tattooed hangers-on behind the counters of fine restaurants all along Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue. Autry, 24, is a waiter at Diner—no, not an actual diner, it’s just called that—and plays bass in the up-and-coming soul-punk-freakout group Dragons of Zynth and guitar in Shock Cinema. (He also does time at a bookstore and is a band consultant.) He thinks it’s harder to find time to make art than it should be, but he doesn’t hold some invisible economic hand to account. He blames the johnnies-come-lately who have driven up rent in Williamsburg and made it into a “cheap labor camp” where artists and musicians must “serve” their hangers-on.

“It’s almost set up: The roles are quickly reversed, and we have to work harder for the people who are driving the rent up,” he explained in between customers during the Friday lunch rush, his voice pushing against the Neil Young that Jeff Hanson, Diner’s photographer-bartender, used to soothe his hangover. “We’re here to basically support those who came here to drive up the rent.” Autry’s lived in the neighborhood for six months.

At some point, people tend to cut their hair and get a job. “This is a tough town,” Other Music’s Madell observed. “You know, you move farther into Bushwick, and then farther out and farther out, and share a place. The thing is, when you get a little bit older, that becomes less and less appealing to a lot of people. It’s one thing if you’re 19 and you’re just in town and you don’t care, you’re just psyched to be here, and if you’re making 10 or 12 bucks an hour, and you’re sharing a place with a bunch of people. But, you know, when you get to be in your 30’s and you maybe are settling down with someone—some people are thinking about having kids—it becomes different.”

The slow death of work for slackers, artists and general nogoodniks is not a distinctly New York phenomenon. Small shops are closing in every city, pushed out by global conglomerates, squeezed tight by new technologies. But the distinctly New York rental market, and the distinctly New York light-speed pace of gentrification, are making the city harder to live in for cinephiles, musicians and philosopher kings. Some day, it may get too hard. They might move back to Austin, decamp to Iowa City or pack up for Berlin. They don’t necessarily need New York—but New York needs them.

Still, opportunity might lay waiting outside the glass doors of the corner video store. The thing about inflated rent is that it might be able to do what no fit of maternal rage can: motivate a chronic underachiever. For, in the end, making $7.50 an hour is not something to hold onto forever. Working for film festivals or nonprofits, or going off to travel in Thailand, or becoming a mailman at Pratt, as former TLA employees have done—things could be worse. It’s a big world. Clerks can do lots of things. “There are tons of options for them,” Mr. Hatch-Miller typed. “I mean, they could start blogs, they could write for any number of publications.”

And if blogging doesn’t pay the bills, there’s always American Apparel. The Williamsburg branch is hiring.

Mr. Coupland, meanwhile, is adapting his work for television and, when the pressure gets to him, he takes a boat to his “hideaway” in the Queen Charlotte Islands. At least, that’s his day according to the new BlackBerry Pearl campaign: Mr. Coupland is its “generational” spokesman, the kind that makes it O.K. for sensitive types to adopt the accoutrements of investment bankers and Web designers.

This evolution from critic of “accelerated culture” to its face is perhaps the latest movement in the repackaging of the generation that Mr. Coupland helped to define. Those who were once sores on the body of the system are now selling its Band-Aids.

“Generation X” has come to mean more than just a specific group of post-boomers, more even than a marketing demographic—people who will go see Last Days one evening and drop $5 on a pumpkin-spice latte the next morning. It has also come to serve as a marketing model, in this post–Reality Bites world, for how all young Americans should live out their 20’s. Now we are all Generation X.

According to OnPoint Marketing and Promotions (whose clients include Ford, Microsoft and Pepsi), Gen Xers are 50 million strong, make up 17 percent of the population and spend $125 billion on consumer goods each year. Whereas Mr. Coupland’s characters removed themselves from families, schools and potential career paths to tend bar and dwell in bungalows in Palm Springs, grown-up Gen Xers retreat into gated communities, planned developments and luxury loft condominiums. They used to be obsessed with other people’s money; now, they obsess over their own.

The 90’s came, but they never really went. CSI: Miami has acquired the right to use Nirvana songs on a future episode about “evil military recruiters,” and with Courtney Love’s blessing, the company that controls its catalog is looking to license its music for commercials. (Kurt Cobain is now the top-earning dead celebrity, having surpassed Elvis, Warhol and Dr. Seuss.)

Recent movies like Thumbsucker and Junebug owe a debt to The Ice Storm (1997), which captured the darkness of the 1970’s suburbia that reared and nurtured Gen X. The Lindsay Lohan flick Mean Girls was a poor man’s Heathers; Heathers’ tale of a backstabbing clique and murderous revenge not only paved the way for 90210 and Melrose Place, but catapulted Winona Ryder from Beetlejuice notice to Gen X screen-queen stardom. (The name Lelaina Pierce ought to ring a few bells.) And now Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters is returning with Sex and Death 101, which not only bears a title reminiscent of some key Heathers themes, but also stars Ms. Ryder.

Maybe the grittiest, or at least most original, Gen X activity, skateboarding, was put under glass in Dogtown and Z-Boys and Lords of Dogtown. Tony Hawk hawks himself, and this month The New York Times reported on the largest skate ramp in the world.

Having experienced their own youth, Gen Xers keep selling us—and themselves—a secondhand version of it. They’ve successfully packaged what it means to be young, and we keep buying—even when what we’re buying is a ticket to the awful, treacly, terrifically annoying X-trickle-down Garden State.

Without a doubt, Gen X moved from the margins to the mainstream. Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes gave way to emo tyranny and slouching shaggy-haired dudes (I’m looking at you, Justin Long) shilling Macs and Coca-Cola’s downloadable podcasts of the “freshest talent” in “North American grooves,” while the Left of the Dial: Dispatches from the ’80s Underground boxed CD sets push nostalgia on those too young for Time-Life collections. Cool hunters (thank you, William Gibson) and youth marketers (soon to be joined by Atoosa Rubenstein?) skulk about, while high-school students eagerly enlist in “buzz marketing” campaigns—because the separation of youth and corporation, once the prized plank in the X platform, is no longer an issue.

And Mr. Coupland—Douglas Coupland, the outsider himself—uses his BlackBerry Pearl smartphone to get directions to a hot restaurant in Toronto.

THE CANADIAN COUPLAND SCORED a coup with his depiction of American youth. His novel is the story of three friends who make their lives “on the fringe out in California.” Dag, Andy and Claire are all obsessed with nuclear war (a fear that seemed cutely anachronistic; not so much now since a little dictator in Pyongyang scared the bejesus out of the whole world last month). They tell each other stories to pass the time, an earnest hobby that smacks more of fantasy than of the behavior of any real-life twentysomething, Californian or not.

And in the margins of the oversized book, which measures nine inches by eight, are clever comics and dictionary definitions of Mr. Coupland’s neologisms. One of the words, “McJob,” caught on. The others—“successophobia,” “emotional ketchup burst,” “tele-parabalizing”—never really made it. Vocabulary becomes rhetoric and generations come to stand in for “what are only persons after all,” loopy Renata Adler rather reasonably, and critically, wrote. And so this tale of three dropouts came to stand in for—or rather, take over—the whole society that they tried so hard to escape.

Some people saw it all coming, right out of the gate. Back in 1994, Frank Rich, having just seen Reality Bites and found its coming-of-age crises a bit similar to those his peers had witnessed in The Graduate, asked, “Has nothing changed? Did my generation make a major bore of itself for all these years only to be supplanted by a bunch of kids who are boring in almost the same way?”

Incidentally, the “original” Generation X, according to the British, was the rock ’n’ roll mod generation of the Swinging 60’s, who were interviewed by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson in 1964 in their book called, yes, Generation X. It was so popular that, according to The Guardian, “John Lennon wanted to turn it into a musical.”

The idea of a generation, of course, is always that of said generation’s youth: The spending habits of today’s $400 Stones-ticket-buying baby boomers (another generation that betrayed its promise) is understood as a product of their recovered Flower Children–itis. Xers devour magalogs and gossip rags to fill the hole left by their secular, soulless, single-parent teenage lives. But since Generation X was packaged and sold to Generation Y—the kids who were teenagers when Mr. Coupland was making it big, who got into Nirvana in middle school, who couldn’t wait to get out of school and start slacking—it became a template for how to live your 20’s in any era.

Kids: We keep getting older; they stay the same age.

And then we turn into our parents. Can we even help it? In a New York Times article last August, Nina Munk wrote that “shopping … has become the defining occupation of [Gen X].” She reported that the average Gen Xer spent 18 percent more on luxury goods than the average baby boomer. So much for anti-proliferation. “Our parents’ generation,” Andy thinks in Generation X, “seems neither able nor interested in how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.”

Turning into your parents is easier when your parents are busy turning into their parents. The boomers’ iron hold on the culture tyrannized their Xer kids, forcing them to go slacker. Then X took over and grabbed a page from Mom and Dad’s playbook. Lesson No. 1? No classic rock song is so sacred that it cannot be used to sell health insurance; no Nick Drake number is so dreamy that it cannot work wonders for Volkswagen.

READING GENERATION X IN 2006 ISN'T AS TERRIBLE as you might think it would be. It hasn’t aged well, but it could have aged a lot worse. Yet, it’s hard to jive the idealism of Generation X, which is a book about, more than anything, honesty and an unironic questing for some kind of authentic meaning in your life, albeit done through irony and appropriation. Only a cynic would think that the comics and dictionary terms might make the book more useful as a marketing manual than a work of fiction.

Still, BlackBerry? Isn’t that kind of … yuppie? Kind of … Malcolm Gladwell? Kind of … Jay McInerney?

When we first knew him, Mr. Coupland was the anti-McInerney. He was the one who rebelled against the culture of consumption, who wrote about “real” things, authentic things, like girls in vintage dresses and finding yourself in the desert. He didn’t know about Bolivian marching nights in Manhattan or … whatever else it was that Mr. McInerney wrote about. Mr. Coupland is Canadian, after all: He liked nature and worried about the nuclear threat.

Around 1994, following the publication of his Life After God, the author/screenwriter/art-school grad/lexicographer made six station ID’s for MTV. In 1998, Mr. Coupland did an ad for Absolut, but contrary to Internet scuttlebutt, the $10,000 in profits were donated to the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. In the 2006 BlackBerry Pearl ads (“small, smart, and stylish”), he’s in very tasteful company, joined by modernist auction-house owner Richard Wright and Martin Eberhard, who created the electric sports car. (Mr. Eberhard uses his BlackBerry Pearl to e-mail investors and watch videos of “Roadster prototypes.”)

Mr. Coupland occupies a position not so distinct from Mr. McInerney’s, at the point where the vector of the monthly House & Garden wine column intersects with the axis of personal digital assistants. (All of this conference-calling, text-messaging and private-islanding also prevents Mr. Coupland from returning e-mails, apparently; or it could be, as his agent indicated, that he is “deep underground.” The surface-level marketing team at BlackBerry Pearl was also disinclined to comment.) And Mr. Coupland knows how to appreciate a good ad when he sees one: On his own Web site, there is streaming video of the “best commercial ever made,” the “Khaki-a-go-go” Gap spot that features a team of khaki-clad preppies dancing like mods to an Austin Powers–esque tune.

The original Xers have retired the whole earnest, alienated slacker thing. They’ve grown up, like everyone does, and accepted—no, embraced—what they once despised: the corporate world and its blessings. On a Canadian TV special about Mr. Coupland, Judith Regan described him as “one of the great voices of his generation.” He sure is.

Social conservatism is on the rise; civil war is breaking out in Iraq. Closer to home, we contend with the dual threats of diabetes and luxury condominiums. Union Square has historically been a place where the populace gathered to express itself and rally for its concerns. In 1858, the goal was to demand food for the poor; in 1861, it was to support the Northern cause. In the 1870’s, 80’s and 90’s, socialist and labor union rallies were de rigueur. In 1913, thousands of garment workers took over the square; 40 years later, masses gathered for a vigil to protest the Rosenbergs’ execution.

Now people have pillow fights.

Beating one another with pillows is, after all, ultimately the purest demonstration of leisure time, the essence of frivolity. But these young New Yorkers believe that this is the stuff of civic and artistic engagement, and such activities are thriving.

The participants are in their 20’s and 30’s. Most are overeducated and underpaid. They’re Flickr-savvy. Some bicycle; many shop at Whole Foods. “They’re kind of granola, kind of anarchist,” 19-year-old Kevin Bracken, who founded New Mind Space with 19-year-old Lori Kufner, explained. “It’s not quite art and it’s not quite protest, but it attracts artists and protestors.” Those they attract also like their massive Easter-egg hunts and games of Capture the Flag and subway parties. They share a nostalgia for childhood and a lack of inhibition that might prevent others from diving headfirst into earnest play with strangers.

“The way that wearing a mask would free somebody,” Mr. Bracken said, “being involved in a massive urban event frees somebody.”

But no one not already possessed of a certain exuberant extrovertedness would show up in Union Square with a pillow. Underneath it all, the fluffy fighters fiercely believe that their brief episodes of acting out matter in some critical way, improve the city, make it livable. An earnestness bordering on the devout permeates: They are clever but not ironic, and more than a little self-righteous. If you don’t like what they do, it is because you are the problem—you with your shopping bags and your naysaying and your curmudgeonly newspaper articles.

“Political organizations have the goal to put public space in the forefront of the public consciousness,” Mr. Bracken explained. “We consider ourselves a playful extension of that. We see that public space is being increasingly privatized; billboards are eroding the visual economy of the street. In a city, you can work or you can play. We like to play.

“I think that we’re living life to its fullest,” he added.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, LAST YEAR THAT WEEKLONG CELEBRATION of altered states called Burning Man welcomed a Pillow-Fight Club into its mix of 25,000 people. Held in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, Burning Man celebrates “radical self-reliance” (read: camping) and “community.” Though not affiliated in any way with New Mind Space, it is Burning Man that epitomizes this subset of the population, serving as a sort of pilgrimage for faithful seekers of all things D.I.Y. It’s the strongest and most visible manifestation of that growing contingency of groups that briefly occupy public spaces for their own games, art events and missions.

Last month, Harper’s editor Bill Wasik touched on similar phenomena in an essay outing himself as the creator of the flash mob. In the summer of 2003, he wrote, he managed to whip a social experiment into a media sensation, causing hordes to stare at one another in the Grand Hyatt New York and worship a large-scale Tyrannosaurus rex. Harnessing the power of e-mail, he organized a group in public for the mere purpose of organizing a group in public. Mr. Wasik conceived his project as exposing the vacuity of fashion-obsessed, Strokes-listening “hipsters” everywhere and demonstrating the tendency of the young and avant-garde to “deindividuate” and follow, herd-like, the newest fashion.

Yet by defining his focus group as the hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes, Mr. Wasik gave himself a little too much credit. He seems to think that his mob attracted an urban trendsetting elite, those who, with the help of the Internet, make “the same books, records, films … au courant by all” at the same time. But while Mr. Wasik’s examples—Friendster, Franz Ferdinand, even Jonathan Safran Foer—were all popular things that had brief heydays among some stylish youth, the flash mob never came close to achieving that kind of status. Mr. Wasik is correct to grasp the disposability that mass culture and manufactured “hipness” shares with the mob, but what he mistook for trendiness was in fact the mob’s own unique smugness.

Shaggy-haired hipster girls in leggings are obsessed with recognizing, and outdoing, each other, but the flash mob’s desire is to force everyone else to recognize it. Like an amoebic teenager, flash mobs and their kin insist on their difference from the norm, or life as it is usually lived, free from hundreds of synchronized wristwatches. Look at your bourgeois life! the mob screams at the appointed hour. We are not like you! Then the last grain of sand slips through the hourglass, and they disperse once more.

The flash mob did succeed in demonstrating the power of e-mail and the Internet to organize groups of strangers, and this generation’s desire to show up for the sheer sake of seeing what might happen if they do. What pillow-fighters and other such arty-crunchy performers do is introduce the element of physical play and fun. But they also don’t care who organizes the activity or, really, what it is.

“We don’t call ourselves a flash mob,” said Mr. Bracken. “Flash mobs have no purpose. That is their essence. We have a purpose. The purpose of Capture the Flag is to capture the other team’s flag. Capture the Flag has been played for decades, if not centuries. Millennia, perhaps. There have been pillow fights for as long as there have been pillows.”

Yet the real purpose of these groups is unclear. Improv Everywhere, whose mission is to cause “scenes of joy and chaos in public places,” is the project of Charlie Todd, a 27-year-old improv-theater teacher at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Since August 2001, he has led his “agents” on over 50 “missions” that are, in his words, “essentially pranks.” In late January, more than 160 New Yorkers followed their lead and rode the No. 6 train without pants. On Feb. 18, the group organized 100 people to descend upon the Strand bookstore and blast their “Nokia Tunes” and “Samsung Tunes,” among others, into one grand and annoying “cell-phone symphony.”

“I’m a big believer in organized fun,” Mr. Todd said. “Have fun for fun’s sake. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t take the world too seriously. Slow down and enjoy the unusual things in your world and celebrate them.”

Although those who participate in the no-pants mission and, say, the Idiotarod shopping-cart race (an actual recent event) aren’t cut wholly from the same cloth, there is one common goal: They seek to reclaim public space for public use.

“Once you’ve played capture the flag under the Manhattan Bridge, you never experience the neighborhood in the same way,” Mr. Bracken said. “These spaces were designed with people in mind.”

And these people want to take back those spaces, take them and, by golly, have fun in them. “I had a whole lot of fun,” Gerr from Queens reminisced about the pillow fight, for example, on the New Mind Space message board. “Hopefully I can find myself in one of the many pics that were taken.” They pretend that by doing so, they are expressing a surplus energy that cannot be dominated by capitalist forces.

In interviews, Mr. Bracken and Mr. Todd both derided television and film as passive consumption, arguing that they prefer a creative, proactive experience. On the Nonsense N.Y.C. Web site, the home base of a listserve that often publicizes these types of events, the author writes: “We believe that there is more to life in New York than getting drunk at slick new bars”—suggesting that these folks are the creative types who long to escape the monotony of functional alcoholism.

But massing for massing’s sake—gathering in a crowd to perform a “funny” task for the sake of gathering in a crowd and performing a “funny” task—is no less nihilistic than sitting in the warmth and downing one of many whiskey and sodas. In fact, drinking, after all, is a social activity. There is music; there is dancing. It is the coffeehouse, where ideas are exchanged.

A mass action, on the other hand, refuses the exchange of ideas. It favors the performance of predetermined expressions of “joy” and “fun”; it demands obedience, compliance and discipline. Citizens organized into armies of the absurd decorate streets and shops with their calculated acts and circus tricks. They do not consume, no—nor do they contemplate.

“I plan everything,” Mr. Todd said. “But in terms of just these large things, the people at large, they definitely follow instructions. And oftentimes they show up for these things not knowing what’s going to happen at all.”

Those heady days when one imagined the political potential of large-scale civil disobedience, acts of “culture jamming”—everyone, get together and drive golf balls into the satellite dish on Fox’s studio roof!—have ended. Instead of satisfying political desires, we have the narcissistic pursuit of “experience.” All that remains is technology’s gift of quick and efficient mobilization, citizens all dressed up and nothing to say.

Social conservatism is on the rise; civil war is breaking out in Iraq. Closer to home, we contend with the dual threats of diabetes and luxury condominiums. Union Square has historically been a place where the populace gathered to express itself and rally for its concerns. In 1858, the goal was to demand food for the poor; in 1861, it was to support the Northern cause. In the 1870’s, 80’s and 90’s, socialist and labor union rallies were de rigueur. In 1913, thousands of garment workers took over the square; 40 years later, masses gathered for a vigil to protest the Rosenbergs’ execution.

Now people have pillow fights.

Beating one another with pillows is, after all, ultimately the purest demonstration of leisure time, the essence of frivolity. But these young New Yorkers believe that this is the stuff of civic and artistic engagement, and such activities are thriving.

The participants are in their 20’s and 30’s. Most are overeducated and underpaid. They’re Flickr-savvy. Some bicycle; many shop at Whole Foods. “They’re kind of granola, kind of anarchist,” 19-year-old Kevin Bracken, who founded New Mind Space with 19-year-old Lori Kufner, explained. “It’s not quite art and it’s not quite protest, but it attracts artists and protestors.” Those they attract also like their massive Easter-egg hunts and games of Capture the Flag and subway parties. They share a nostalgia for childhood and a lack of inhibition that might prevent others from diving headfirst into earnest play with strangers.

“The way that wearing a mask would free somebody,” Mr. Bracken said, “being involved in a massive urban event frees somebody.”

But no one not already possessed of a certain exuberant extrovertedness would show up in Union Square with a pillow. Underneath it all, the fluffy fighters fiercely believe that their brief episodes of acting out matter in some critical way, improve the city, make it livable. An earnestness bordering on the devout permeates: They are clever but not ironic, and more than a little self-righteous. If you don’t like what they do, it is because you are the problem—you with your shopping bags and your naysaying and your curmudgeonly newspaper articles.

“Political organizations have the goal to put public space in the forefront of the public consciousness,” Mr. Bracken explained. “We consider ourselves a playful extension of that. We see that public space is being increasingly privatized; billboards are eroding the visual economy of the street. In a city, you can work or you can play. We like to play.

“I think that we’re living life to its fullest,” he added.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, LAST YEAR THAT WEEKLONG CELEBRATION of altered states called Burning Man welcomed a Pillow-Fight Club into its mix of 25,000 people. Held in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, Burning Man celebrates “radical self-reliance” (read: camping) and “community.” Though not affiliated in any way with New Mind Space, it is Burning Man that epitomizes this subset of the population, serving as a sort of pilgrimage for faithful seekers of all things D.I.Y. It’s the strongest and most visible manifestation of that growing contingency of groups that briefly occupy public spaces for their own games, art events and missions.

Last month, Harper’s editor Bill Wasik touched on similar phenomena in an essay outing himself as the creator of the flash mob. In the summer of 2003, he wrote, he managed to whip a social experiment into a media sensation, causing hordes to stare at one another in the Grand Hyatt New York and worship a large-scale Tyrannosaurus rex. Harnessing the power of e-mail, he organized a group in public for the mere purpose of organizing a group in public. Mr. Wasik conceived his project as exposing the vacuity of fashion-obsessed, Strokes-listening “hipsters” everywhere and demonstrating the tendency of the young and avant-garde to “deindividuate” and follow, herd-like, the newest fashion.

Yet by defining his focus group as the hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes, Mr. Wasik gave himself a little too much credit. He seems to think that his mob attracted an urban trendsetting elite, those who, with the help of the Internet, make “the same books, records, films … au courant by all” at the same time. But while Mr. Wasik’s examples—Friendster, Franz Ferdinand, even Jonathan Safran Foer—were all popular things that had brief heydays among some stylish youth, the flash mob never came close to achieving that kind of status. Mr. Wasik is correct to grasp the disposability that mass culture and manufactured “hipness” shares with the mob, but what he mistook for trendiness was in fact the mob’s own unique smugness.

Shaggy-haired hipster girls in leggings are obsessed with recognizing, and outdoing, each other, but the flash mob’s desire is to force everyone else to recognize it. Like an amoebic teenager, flash mobs and their kin insist on their difference from the norm, or life as it is usually lived, free from hundreds of synchronized wristwatches. Look at your bourgeois life! the mob screams at the appointed hour. We are not like you! Then the last grain of sand slips through the hourglass, and they disperse once more.

The flash mob did succeed in demonstrating the power of e-mail and the Internet to organize groups of strangers, and this generation’s desire to show up for the sheer sake of seeing what might happen if they do. What pillow-fighters and other such arty-crunchy performers do is introduce the element of physical play and fun. But they also don’t care who organizes the activity or, really, what it is.

“We don’t call ourselves a flash mob,” said Mr. Bracken. “Flash mobs have no purpose. That is their essence. We have a purpose. The purpose of Capture the Flag is to capture the other team’s flag. Capture the Flag has been played for decades, if not centuries. Millennia, perhaps. There have been pillow fights for as long as there have been pillows.”

Yet the real purpose of these groups is unclear. Improv Everywhere, whose mission is to cause “scenes of joy and chaos in public places,” is the project of Charlie Todd, a 27-year-old improv-theater teacher at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Since August 2001, he has led his “agents” on over 50 “missions” that are, in his words, “essentially pranks.” In late January, more than 160 New Yorkers followed their lead and rode the No. 6 train without pants. On Feb. 18, the group organized 100 people to descend upon the Strand bookstore and blast their “Nokia Tunes” and “Samsung Tunes,” among others, into one grand and annoying “cell-phone symphony.”

“I’m a big believer in organized fun,” Mr. Todd said. “Have fun for fun’s sake. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t take the world too seriously. Slow down and enjoy the unusual things in your world and celebrate them.”

Although those who participate in the no-pants mission and, say, the Idiotarod shopping-cart race (an actual recent event) aren’t cut wholly from the same cloth, there is one common goal: They seek to reclaim public space for public use.

“Once you’ve played capture the flag under the Manhattan Bridge, you never experience the neighborhood in the same way,” Mr. Bracken said. “These spaces were designed with people in mind.”

And these people want to take back those spaces, take them and, by golly, have fun in them. “I had a whole lot of fun,” Gerr from Queens reminisced about the pillow fight, for example, on the New Mind Space message board. “Hopefully I can find myself in one of the many pics that were taken.” They pretend that by doing so, they are expressing a surplus energy that cannot be dominated by capitalist forces.

In interviews, Mr. Bracken and Mr. Todd both derided television and film as passive consumption, arguing that they prefer a creative, proactive experience. On the Nonsense N.Y.C. Web site, the home base of a listserve that often publicizes these types of events, the author writes: “We believe that there is more to life in New York than getting drunk at slick new bars”—suggesting that these folks are the creative types who long to escape the monotony of functional alcoholism.

But massing for massing’s sake—gathering in a crowd to perform a “funny” task for the sake of gathering in a crowd and performing a “funny” task—is no less nihilistic than sitting in the warmth and downing one of many whiskey and sodas. In fact, drinking, after all, is a social activity. There is music; there is dancing. It is the coffeehouse, where ideas are exchanged.

A mass action, on the other hand, refuses the exchange of ideas. It favors the performance of predetermined expressions of “joy” and “fun”; it demands obedience, compliance and discipline. Citizens organized into armies of the absurd decorate streets and shops with their calculated acts and circus tricks. They do not consume, no—nor do they contemplate.

“I plan everything,” Mr. Todd said. “But in terms of just these large things, the people at large, they definitely follow instructions. And oftentimes they show up for these things not knowing what’s going to happen at all.”

Those heady days when one imagined the political potential of large-scale civil disobedience, acts of “culture jamming”—everyone, get together and drive golf balls into the satellite dish on Fox’s studio roof!—have ended. Instead of satisfying political desires, we have the narcissistic pursuit of “experience.” All that remains is technology’s gift of quick and efficient mobilization, citizens all dressed up and nothing to say.

Since March, the park had been a retreat where I enjoyed a respite from my squalid living conditions. In the park, there were no windows crashing into my room and spilling broken glass all over my bed. There were no dirty dishes piled high in the sink. There were only happy families, and soccer games, and sports beverages for sale, and lots and lots of grass.

Friends dismissed my anxieties about leaving the park behind for Greenpoint. You’ll have McCarren Park, they argued. As if one could compare the dead fields and dusty baseball diamonds of McCarren with the rolling greens, the lush hills, the wooded trails of Prospect Park. McCarren Park doesn’t even have any trees! It’s very nice, to be sure, and I’m just as fond of McCarren Pool as the next person, but the two are hardly the same thing.

Sometime in July, I started riding my bike in Prospect Park in the evenings—I figured the only thing worse than leaving the neighborhood was going to be feeling like I missed out on it while I was still there. Occasionally, the odd baby carriage gone astray put the fear of God into my soul, and I wearied of negotiating the inevitable conflicts of interest between serious cyclists and dilettantes like myself, not to mention the ever-present rollerblader problem. But I grew very fond of my evenings on the loop. Cycling in the park made me so happy that when I came home afterwards, I didn’t even hate my fuchsia walls anymore.

A few weeks ago, after throwing my bike down, I sat down on the banks of Prospect Lake. I was moving the next weekend, and I doubted I’d have time to be back while it was still summer. Hordes of dark birds swooped down and skimmed the surface of the lake; a few swans nestled in the bushes on the far shore. About 20 feet to my left, a South Asian man was fishing. I thought about some things, and I thought about nothing, and I thought about how gross it is to fish in the lake, and I wondered what people do with what they catch. I assumed that most of the people I had seen fishing at the lake didn’t plan on catching anything at all, that they were just sitting with a piece of string in the water, sort of how I was just sitting with my legs out on the ground. I wondered if anyone ever ate what he caught. I decided that maybe homeless people did. I felt sad.

A gaggle of blond children and a blond, Russian-speaking woman approached. Two were on bicycles, which they briefly rode in circles before abandoning to gather at the shore. At the same time, we—the children and I—noticed a tugging on the fisherman’s line. “Look, he’s got something!” they cried, and ran to his side.

He stepped backwards and forward, struggling to pull it in. The children were becoming very excited. His face set with determination; he didn’t even glance at them. Wrestling mightily, he pulled it out. It was a turtle.

He laid the turtle on its back and fiddled with his second line. “It’s a turtle! Oh my God, do you see that? A turtle!” The children chattered excitedly. “One time I had a turtle,” one little blond boy boasted. “No you didn’t,” another blonde rejoined. “Yes I did—I had a turtle.” Heeding his task coolly, the fisherman failed to acknowledge the rising commotion. He cut the line from the hook in its mouth and, abruptly, he spoke. “Do you want the turtle?” he asked.

The circle around him tightened as he bent over the turtle, its fat limbs treading the air, and the children crowded around him. By now, I was craning my neck to get a piece of the action. A couple who had been sitting in the gazebo made their way to the circle and stood on its edge; I figured if they could, so could I. I hopped up and trotted over. My hands rested on my hips.

Peering between the heads of children, I watched the fisherman pull the turtle’s neck slowly, coaxing the hook from its mouth. The turtle resisted. The man pulled. The turtle’s neck, like some giant rubbery penis or a clump of Silly Putty, extended to two, three, maybe five times its normal size. The turtle wasn’t giving it up. I knew that a turtle’s neck was flexible, but I couldn’t believe that it was so long.

Then the fisherman pulled out a knife and chopped the turtle’s head off.

Pandemonium. My hand flew to my mouth and my feet jumped back. Embarrassingly enough, I yelped out loud. “Oh my God, he cut its head off!” the children squealed to each other. “Oh my God, did you see that? He cut its head off!” The couple backed away slowly towards the gazebo, shaking their heads. We looked at each other. I can’t be sure, but I think they were just as appalled as I was. I could have sworn he had raised his hand all the way over his head before he brought the knife down.

Totally ignoring, or maybe just not that impressed with, the tumult he had inspired, the fisherman threw the headless turtle towards the lake. Its body turned somersaults in the air, splashing and sinking. Then he carefully pried open its jaws and extracted his hook before tossing the lifeless head back into the water, too. He tended to his line. He didn’t look at anyone.

The blond lady pulled a blanket from her bag and shook it out as it gently billowed to the ground. The children crowded around her, still yammering. I rode away, and the fisherman was alone again.

Fishing is legal in New York City parks, but only with a permit. Permit or no permit, though, it is undoubtedly illegal to catch a turtle, kill said turtle, and dispose of said turtle’s body in the waters from whence it came. I wish I knew how often this sort of thing happens, but I haven’t been back to the park since. I walk by McCarren Park every day now, and that seems good enough. It turns out there are a few trees there after all. I haven’t seen anyone decapitate a squirrel yet, but I figure it’s just a matter of time.

Since March, the park had been a retreat where I enjoyed a respite from my squalid living conditions. In the park, there were no windows crashing into my room and spilling broken glass all over my bed. There were no dirty dishes piled high in the sink. There were only happy families, and soccer games, and sports beverages for sale, and lots and lots of grass.

Friends dismissed my anxieties about leaving the park behind for Greenpoint. You’ll have McCarren Park, they argued. As if one could compare the dead fields and dusty baseball diamonds of McCarren with the rolling greens, the lush hills, the wooded trails of Prospect Park. McCarren Park doesn’t even have any trees! It’s very nice, to be sure, and I’m just as fond of McCarren Pool as the next person, but the two are hardly the same thing.

Sometime in July, I started riding my bike in Prospect Park in the evenings—I figured the only thing worse than leaving the neighborhood was going to be feeling like I missed out on it while I was still there. Occasionally, the odd baby carriage gone astray put the fear of God into my soul, and I wearied of negotiating the inevitable conflicts of interest between serious cyclists and dilettantes like myself, not to mention the ever-present rollerblader problem. But I grew very fond of my evenings on the loop. Cycling in the park made me so happy that when I came home afterwards, I didn’t even hate my fuchsia walls anymore.

A few weeks ago, after throwing my bike down, I sat down on the banks of Prospect Lake. I was moving the next weekend, and I doubted I’d have time to be back while it was still summer. Hordes of dark birds swooped down and skimmed the surface of the lake; a few swans nestled in the bushes on the far shore. About 20 feet to my left, a South Asian man was fishing. I thought about some things, and I thought about nothing, and I thought about how gross it is to fish in the lake, and I wondered what people do with what they catch. I assumed that most of the people I had seen fishing at the lake didn’t plan on catching anything at all, that they were just sitting with a piece of string in the water, sort of how I was just sitting with my legs out on the ground. I wondered if anyone ever ate what he caught. I decided that maybe homeless people did. I felt sad.

A gaggle of blond children and a blond, Russian-speaking woman approached. Two were on bicycles, which they briefly rode in circles before abandoning to gather at the shore. At the same time, we—the children and I—noticed a tugging on the fisherman’s line. “Look, he’s got something!” they cried, and ran to his side.

He stepped backwards and forward, struggling to pull it in. The children were becoming very excited. His face set with determination; he didn’t even glance at them. Wrestling mightily, he pulled it out. It was a turtle.

He laid the turtle on its back and fiddled with his second line. “It’s a turtle! Oh my God, do you see that? A turtle!” The children chattered excitedly. “One time I had a turtle,” one little blond boy boasted. “No you didn’t,” another blonde rejoined. “Yes I did—I had a turtle.” Heeding his task coolly, the fisherman failed to acknowledge the rising commotion. He cut the line from the hook in its mouth and, abruptly, he spoke. “Do you want the turtle?” he asked.

The circle around him tightened as he bent over the turtle, its fat limbs treading the air, and the children crowded around him. By now, I was craning my neck to get a piece of the action. A couple who had been sitting in the gazebo made their way to the circle and stood on its edge; I figured if they could, so could I. I hopped up and trotted over. My hands rested on my hips.

Peering between the heads of children, I watched the fisherman pull the turtle’s neck slowly, coaxing the hook from its mouth. The turtle resisted. The man pulled. The turtle’s neck, like some giant rubbery penis or a clump of Silly Putty, extended to two, three, maybe five times its normal size. The turtle wasn’t giving it up. I knew that a turtle’s neck was flexible, but I couldn’t believe that it was so long.

Then the fisherman pulled out a knife and chopped the turtle’s head off.

Pandemonium. My hand flew to my mouth and my feet jumped back. Embarrassingly enough, I yelped out loud. “Oh my God, he cut its head off!” the children squealed to each other. “Oh my God, did you see that? He cut its head off!” The couple backed away slowly towards the gazebo, shaking their heads. We looked at each other. I can’t be sure, but I think they were just as appalled as I was. I could have sworn he had raised his hand all the way over his head before he brought the knife down.

Totally ignoring, or maybe just not that impressed with, the tumult he had inspired, the fisherman threw the headless turtle towards the lake. Its body turned somersaults in the air, splashing and sinking. Then he carefully pried open its jaws and extracted his hook before tossing the lifeless head back into the water, too. He tended to his line. He didn’t look at anyone.

The blond lady pulled a blanket from her bag and shook it out as it gently billowed to the ground. The children crowded around her, still yammering. I rode away, and the fisherman was alone again.

Fishing is legal in New York City parks, but only with a permit. Permit or no permit, though, it is undoubtedly illegal to catch a turtle, kill said turtle, and dispose of said turtle’s body in the waters from whence it came. I wish I knew how often this sort of thing happens, but I haven’t been back to the park since. I walk by McCarren Park every day now, and that seems good enough. It turns out there are a few trees there after all. I haven’t seen anyone decapitate a squirrel yet, but I figure it’s just a matter of time.