Flash Crowd

"Flash Crowd" is a 1973 English-language novella by science fiction author Larry Niven,[1] one of a series about the social consequence of inventing an instant, practically free displacement booth.

[2] One consequence not foreseen by the builders of the system was that with the almost immediate reporting of newsworthy events, tens of thousands of people worldwide – along with criminals – would teleport to the scene of anything interesting, thus creating disorder and confusion.

His investigation takes him to destinations and people around the world within the matter of less than 12 hours before he gets his chance to plead his case on television, and he encounters the wide-ranging effects of displacements upon aspects of human behavior such as settlement, crime, natural resources, agriculture, waste management and tourism.

In various other books, for example Ringworld, Niven suggests that easy transportation might be disruptive to traditional behavior and open the way for new forms of parties, spontaneous congregations, or shopping trips around the world.

[citation needed] Multiple other terms for the phenomenon exist, often coming from the name of a particular prominent, high-traffic site whose normal base of viewers can constitute a flash crowd when directed to a less famous website.