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THE DECISION to invade had apparently been set in stone long
before grass-roots opposition had really gotten rolling. Of course, had
the military conflict dragged on, then street rallies might have
mattered. But the word “quagmire” never did rise to the headlines, and
in the end, the peace rallies didn’t stop the war.
One way of interpreting the failure of the peace movement to
affect U.S. foreign policy is that it failed strategically. While
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld planned (and perhaps executed) a
21st-century war plan in Iraq, antiwar protestors largely relied on
20th-century tactics. Street marches may be the peace movement’s
equivalent of heavy armor and lots of infantry—which has been
supplanted by high-tech weaponry that supposedly requires fewer troops.
Maybe rather than taking to the public square, protestors should have
taken to the new commons: the Internet.
Recent online social movements range from relatively
straightforward petitioning drives (many of which can be found at the
clearinghouse thepetitionsite.com) to the innovative (like
voteswap.com, which allowed people in hotly contested states who wanted
to vote for Nader in the 2000 elections but did not want to tip the
state into Bush’s column to trade their vote with Gore supporters in
states where the outcome was pretty much already determined).
Straightforward approaches, like e-mail and Web-based petition drives,
generally adapt a classical political strategy and apply it to the
relatively new medium of the Internet. The upside of the ease by which
letters can be e-mailed to senators and petitions can be drawn up and
circulated is also their downside: they get more easily ignored by
public officials who know that e-mail is cheap, so to speak.
Voteswap.com, by contrast, does something through the Internet that
would not have been possible in the early 1990s. Likewise, underdog
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean has used the Internet
site meetup.com to organize local volunteer campaign groups. So far,
there are 25,000 people who have signed up and about 225 monthly
meetings across the country.
The most interesting uses of Net technology for political
protest are even more innovative and radical than Voteswap and Meetup.
One interesting example is Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT): a New
York-based group that organizes virtual sit-ins
(www.thing.net/%7Erdom/ecd/ecd.html ). How EDT works is this: they
publicly distribute an applet called FloodNet that, when activated,
sends automatic browser “reload” requests to the targeted Web site
every few seconds. EDT then organizes specific times where certain Web
sites will be hit by thousands of protestors. The hope is to bring down
the site. For example, in 1998, in support of the Zapatista autonomy
movement in Chiapas, Mexico, EDT targeted the servers of the Pentagon
and Mexico’s president Ernesto Zedillo. In January 2002, 160,000 people
downloaded FloodNet from the EDT Web site and deluged the World
Economic Forum site; the server failed after a few hours and stayed
down for the rest of the week. Ricardo Dominguez, EDT’s cofounder,
claims that the official goal of such sit-ins is not necessarily to
disable Web servers but merely to disturb them; in fact, EDT calls the
actions “performances.” Of course, the distinction between disturbing
and hacking is a fine line that is walked with a wink and a nod.
Another fairly radical group is the Bureau of Inverse Technology
(bureauit.org), or BIT. Like many of these groups, this is an anonymous
organization that straddles the line between activism and art, billing
itself as an “information agency serving the information age.” One of
the latest BIT projects is the antiterror line. This is a phone
number—actually two, one in the United States and one in Britain—to
monitor infringements on civil rights by government authorities in the
wake of antiterror legislation. The principle is simple: you, the user,
preprogram the number into your cell phone and if you are ever
confronted by the police, press the number and the machine at the other
end of the line will record the interaction as evidence. Marchers going
off to a protest might gear their phones up; blacks who are likely to
experience racial profiling might also want one-touch dialing, and of
course other populations that are particularly vulnerable under the USA
Patriot Acts and its possible successors—such as foreigners,
particularly those from Islamic countries—might want to be on the
ready. If you are not able to record the actual interaction (after all,
it’s pretty hard to get your cell phone to work if you are being
bludgeoned by a policeman’s billy club), then you can call to report
the event to the phone number after the fact. In this way, the Web
server will build an archive of information about the government
that—in its public accessibility—stands in stark contrast to the way
the Feds are increasingly collecting secreted information about the
population.
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A common thread in the online activist and arts community is the
use of “kits” to enlist other activists. A kit can be as simple as
EDT’s FloodNet program or a complicated as BIT Radio: instructions on
how to build a transmitter to jam local radio programming, overriding
it with an activist message. BIT did this in New York City during the
World Economic Forum, broadcasting environmental information over
National Public Radio’s frequency. The brevity of the illicit
broadcasts prevents the transmitter stations from being found out.
Anyone across the world can theoretically set up a BIT Radio station if
they follow the instructions that are downloadable at the BIT site.
Another “hactivist” tradition is that of impersonation. While
impersonation for political purposes has a long tradition—dating at
least as far back as 1703, when Daniel Defoe was arrested for
distributing his satire of Anglican Tories, which was taken to be
serious at first—the Net opens up completely new possibilities. For
example, the Yesmen (theyesmen.org ) have pretended to be the World
Trade Organization, by registering the site of the organization that
the WTO was meant to replace (gatt.org). They then issue press releases
that fly in the face of official WTO policy; some unwitting journalists
then publish stories based on them—all the while documenting the
reaction. They also accept speaking invitations on behalf of the WTO
through the Web site.
The Yesmen also registered the site dow-chemical.com. They used
this platform to explain why Dow Chemical will not take responsibility
for the 1984 Bhopal, India, chemical disaster nor offer more than $500
compensation per victim. The response was overwhelming. However, for
added irony, when they registered the site they chose to list it under
“James Parker,” the son of the Dow’s CEO, and used his real address.
When the real Dow found out about what was going on, they immediately
got James Parker to re-register the domain name as his own, deleting
the misinformation. End of story—for now at least. No worries for the
Yesmen—they had already achieved their purpose by getting plenty of
media attention to the issue, which had been long forgotten by most
Americans.
To varying degrees, what EDT, BIT and the Yesmen share in common
is the ability to generate media attention for their actions and to
draw together like-minded individuals across vast spaces, thereby
reducing the need to generate a crowd in any particular locality. One
BIT engineer calls this “scale.” Beside unifying a geographically
diverse protesting community, another benefit of this kind of networked
activism that BIT points to is the fact that—for the most part—the
police cannot shut you down with horses, water hoses, rubber bullets
and mass lock-ups; they can merely reregister your domain name or take
down your server.
Whereas Ricardo Dominguez claims that street protest is a relic
of a bygone era, the Yesmen and BIT demure. “There is nothing that can
replace the generative power, the connections that are made in
face-to-face contact during protests,” claims a BIT spokesperson. Says,
“Andy,” one of the Yesmen, in an e-mail interview: “It’s clear that
traditional forms of protest are still the most powerful. It’s always
hard to measure the effects of such things, but we know that people
taking to the streets helped shut down the [WTO’s] Seattle Ministerial
[meeting], forced [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair to stop
pretending he was representing the majority, etc.—lots of signs that it
works.”
The biggest payoffs may to be in the linkage of the Net to actual
live protest marches. The peace marches of Feb. 15 represented the
largest worldwide protests ever recorded. As it turns out, they were
not completely 20th century. They had been coordinated by many Net
activists, but they still required people to show up, shout, beat
drums, get arrested and so on. They just happened to not work. But
maybe they are just the beginning. If the Bush administration has more
war plans lurking up its sleeve, the protestors will be ready—on line
and off.
Dalton
Conley directs the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New
York University. He is a member of the National Bureau of Economic
Research and the author of “Honky,” a memoir, and “The Pecking Order:
Which Siblings Succeed and Why” (due out in February).
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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