The Mob: How Crowds Decide Who Dies - Softcover

SHAH, ASIF

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798187968749

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

The mob is older than the state. Every state is a mob with paperwork. The Mob tracks this argument across five thousand years — from the Athenian execution of the victorious generals after Arginusae, through the Würzburg witch trials in which a German bishop executed his own nephew, the Salem panic, the Tulsa massacre that bombed Black Wall Street from the air, the hundred days of Rwanda, the contemporary online pile-on that ends a career between breakfast and lunch. The book argues that the mob is not an aberration of civilization. It is one of civilization's operating systems, and the contemporary digital pile-on is recognizably the same machine the Athenians ran on the generals — faster, anonymized, distributed across millions of small participants, but structurally identical. The book asks every reader the question they have been quietly avoiding: What mob have you been in this year, in your office, on your phone, that you would prefer not to think about as a mob? It is a study of the floor under our institutions, the pharmakos mechanism that runs underneath civilization, and the small private practice — the pause — that is, on most days, all we have.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798187968749
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 125