The Rented Crowd
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About This Book
Early in the twentieth century a printed rate card moved among the opera houses of Italy, a price list from a claque, one of the applause brigades that had worked the great theaters of Europe and, two thousand years before them, the courts of Rome. Approval came in grades, the grades came at prices, and a wild ovation cost extra. A hundred years later a company in West Palm Beach sold the same product from a drop-down menu, five hundred followers for ten dollars, more than two hundred million of them moved before a newspaper took the operation apart in 2018. The invoice was older than the empire that first printed it.
Applause is information. Before the poll and the ballot, the sound of a crowd was the only instrument that could report, in public and at scale, how many people approved and how strongly they felt. That report moves us more than our own judgment, and we obey it even when we suspect it is staged. To forge the report is to forge the public mind, and The Rented Crowd is the history of the people who learned to do exactly that.
Across twenty centuries and four technologies, the book follows the trade through four costumes: the rented hand of Nero's paid corps and the Paris claque, the conscripted hand of the state ovation, the recorded hand of canned laughter and the forged chart, and the counted hand of the follower factory and the bot farm. It ends by handing the reader two instruments, a silence test and a footprint audit, for telling a crowd that means it from a crowd that was hired.
The Argument
A crowd is a report. New approval enters a room as sound, and that sound tells everyone present how many others are convinced and how deeply they feel it. We read the room before we trust ourselves, and the laboratory has measured the reflex with uncomfortable precision: put a person among confederates who calmly call the short line long, and about a third of the time the person agrees against the evidence in front of him. A roar does more than express belief; it manufactures belief in the next person who hears it.
Forge the report and you forge the public mind. The book names that forgery in four costumes and follows each through its own century. First the rented hand, the paid kind: Nero's corps of more than five thousand applauders, and the professional claques of Paris with a chef de claque who sold approval by the grade. Next the conscripted hand, the compelled kind: the state ovation a citizen could be punished for refusing to give. Then the recorded hand, manufactured at the source: canned laughter, payola, the forged sales chart, the crowd noise piped into a half-empty stadium. Last the counted hand, the automated kind: the follower factory, the five-star review bought for a few cents, the server racks that applaud by the million with no human palm involved.
What changed is the price. For most of history only princes and impresarios could afford to fake acclaim, so the rest of the world could treat the public roar as roughly honest. Cheap forgery ended that arrangement and handed the work of detection to everyone. The book closes on the one defense that survives the collapse, the right to withhold applause, and on the two questions a reader can carry into any loud room: was the crowd free to go quiet, and does its enthusiasm leave the residue a real crowd cannot help leaving behind?
Table of Contents
Introduction. The Invoice
Gate I. The Rented Hand
Chapter 1. The First Payroll
Chapter 2. The Insurance of Dramatic Success
Chapter 3. The Protection Racket
Chapter 4. The Long Obituary
Gate II. The Conscripted Hand
Chapter 5. The Theory of the Roar
Chapter 6. The Sportpalast Method
Chapter 7. Stormy Applause, All Rise
Chapter 8. The Crack
Gate III. The Recorded Hand
Chapter 9. The Invented Audience
Chapter 10. The Box
Chapter 11. The Reflex and the Receipt
Chapter 12. The Forged Chart and the Piped Stadium
Gate IV. The Counted Hand
Chapter 13. The Follower Factory
Chapter 14. Five Stars for the Shed
Chapter 15. The Perfect Crime
Chapter 16. The Crowd That Books the Theater
Coda. The Right to Silence
Acknowledgments · Glossary · Bibliography · A Note on the Spiral of Silence · About the Author
The Epigraphs
"Their audiences follow them as if they were actors, bought and paid to do so."
Pliny the Younger, Letters, c. 100 AD
"They would still be happy with the applause of a troupe of mannequins, or even of a clapping-machine whose crank they would turn themselves."
Hector Berlioz, Journal des Débats, August 27, 1850
"That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies."
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922
What the Book Traces
From Nero's five thousand drilled in three styles of cheering, through the Byzantine factions who chanted emperors up and down, through the Paris claque that sold a tenor his triumph by the line, into the acclamation states where the applause was law and a citizen clapped under threat, to the December balcony in Bucharest where a bought ovation curdled on live television and a ruler of twenty-four years heard, for the first time, a crowd he had not paid for. Then forward into the machine age: the laugh track built in a Hollywood workshop, the payola that bought a song its airplay, the forged chart, the piped stadium, the follower factory in West Palm Beach, the five-star review for a restaurant that did not exist, and the server farm that applauds by the million. At every station the book asks the same two questions. Was the crowd free to refuse? And does the cheering leave a footprint a real crowd cannot help leaving?
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about counterfeit applause should cost nothing to the people most often asked to swallow it. The free PDF is a complete reading edition, set on 5.5 by 8.5 pages in a serif face with every font embedded so the file reads the same on any machine, with bookmarks and a clickable table of contents that reach all sixteen chapters, the Coda, and every section of the back matter. Download it, read it, and learn to hear the difference between a room that means it and a room that was hired.
Dedication
For Janna Sweenie, and for everyone who declined to applaud.
Author Interview
Featured Articles
Companion essay: The Rented Crowd: Nero's Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America (Boles Blogs), the book's argument in brief.
The Rental Life: What Happens When You Own Nothing and They Own You (Boles Blogs) · Blind Discrimination: Paper Money Feels the Same (Boles Blogs) · The Counterfeit Bargain · Ideas & Inquiry · About David Boles