F. F. F. F. F. F. F. Hi, welcome to Navarro FM. I'm Eleanor Penny. When we were all clammed up in the mass private delirium of COVID lockdown there was a lot to miss.

I was longing for gigs and marketplaces and festivals and clubs and protests,

inching your way through the throng at a pub, the streets of Soho on a Saturday night.

It wasn't just about the people I already knew and loved, although of course I missed them too.

It was about the experience of being in a big mass of strangers, of being one with the crowd.

I wasn't alone in that longing. Billions of people were

desperately trying to find some proxy to crowd experiences online, but it wasn't

ever a real replacement. So if in-person mass civic life is so fundamental to our

experience of being a person alive in the world today, then we're left with

the question, why do crowds get such bad press?

Take a look at the headlines hand-ringing about mob mentality, heard logic,

faceless baying crowds.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that human beings might be fine on their own, but

get them together in a big group and you are asking for trouble.

And indeed, since the explosion of urban populations during the Industrial Revolution

crowds have been talked about with suspicion. The mass and the mob

spread violence, spread disease, spread moral contagion, and they need to be swiftly dispersed or contained.

So where did this attitude come from?

How does it show up in our politics?

How should we be thinking about political assemblies of all stripes?

And how does the experience of crowd life change us? This week I'm joined by Dan

Hancock's author of Multitudes How how crowds made the modern world.

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