Floss (dance)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2016 · Instagram videos by Russell Horning, the Backpack Kid · Also known as Flossing; The floss dance; Backpack Kid dance; The Squeege

What it is

The floss is a dance move. You stand still, swing both arms with your fists clenched from behind your back to in front of you, and swing your hips the other way each time. It looks like you're cleaning your teeth with a piece of dental floss the size of your body. It's quick, repetitive and harder than it looks. Between about 2017 and 2019 huge numbers of children in Britain, America and elsewhere did it constantly, at school, at weddings and in short videos.

Where it came from

Versions of the move were filmed and posted on YouTube as early as 2010, and a 2014 version called the Squeege got onto American daytime television. It took off in 2016, when Russell Horning, an American teenager who danced wearing a backpack and became known as the Backpack Kid, posted videos of it on Instagram. In May 2017 Katy Perry had him dance beside her on Saturday Night Live, a US comedy show broadcast live. Then Epic Games put it into Fortnite, a free online shooting game hugely popular with children, and that's where most children learned it.

Why it mattered

It was one of the first dance crazes that most children picked up from a video game. That raised the question of who owned it. Horning made the move famous, Epic Games sold access to it, and he wasn't paid. In December 2018 his mother sued Epic for copyright infringement, around the same time as similar suits from the rapper 2 Milly and the actor Alfonso Ribeiro over other Fortnite dances. The cases didn't succeed, but they started a public argument about whether a dance move can be owned, and who should be paid when a game turns one into a product.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Children learned a dance from cartoon characters in a game, and the game's maker earned money from a move a teenager had posted for free. Once a company picked up a viral thing, the person who made it go viral had almost no claim on it.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.