Read Fences and Windows for Free Online

own kind of localization, to power consolidation with radical power dispersal.
    Joshua Karliner of the Transnational Resource and Action Center calls this system “an unintentionally brilliant response to globalization.” And because it was unintentional, we still lack even the vocabulary to describe it, which may be why a rather amusing metaphor industry has evolved to fill the gap. I’m throwing my lot in with hubs and spokes, but Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians says, “We are upagainst a boulder. We can’t remove it, so we try to go underneath it, to go around it and over it.” Britain’s John Jordan, an activist with Reclaim the Streets, says trans-nationals “are like giant tankers, and we are like a school of fish. We can respond quickly; they can’t.” The U.S.-based Free Burma Coalition talks of a network of “spiders,” spinning a web strong enough to tie down the most powerful multinationals. A U.S. military report about the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, even got in on the game. According to a study produced by RAND, a research institute that does contracts for the U.S. military, the Zapatistas were waging “a war of the flea” that, thanks to the Internet and the global NGO network, turned into a “war of the swarm.” The military challenge of a war of the swarm, the researchers noted, is that it has no “central leadership or command structure; it is multiheaded, impossible to decapitate.”
    Of course, this multiheaded system has its weaknesses too, and they were on full display on the streets of Washington during the anti-World Bank/IMF protests. At around noon on April 16, the day of the largest protest, a spokescouncil meeting was convened for the affinity groups that were in the midst of blocking all the street intersections surrounding the headquarters of the World Bank and the IMF. The intersections had been blocked since 6 A.M., but the meeting delegates, the protesters had just learned, had slipped inside the police barricades before 5 A.M. With this new information, most of the spokespeople felt it was time to give up the intersections and join the official march at the Ellipse. The problem was that not everyone agreed: a handful of affinity groups wanted to see if theycould block the delegates on their way out of their meetings.
    The compromise the council came up with was telling. “Okay, everybody listen up,” Kevin Danaher, one of the protest organizers, shouted into a megaphone. “Each intersection has autonomy. If the intersection wants to stay locked down, that’s cool. If it wants to come to the Ellipse, that’s cool too. It’s up to you.”
    This was impeccably fair and democratic, but there was just one problem—it made absolutely no sense. Sealing off the access points had been a co-ordinated action. If some intersections now opened up and other rebel-camp intersections stayed occupied, delegates on their way out of the meeting could just hang a right instead of a left, and they would be home free. Which, of course, is precisely what happened.
    As I watched clusters of protesters get up and wander off while others stayed seated, defiantly guarding, well, nothing, it struck me as an apt metaphor for the strengths and weaknesses of this nascent activist network. There is no question that the communication culture that reigns on the Net is better at speed and volume than at synthesis. It is capable of getting tens of thousands of people to meet on the same street corner, placards in hand, but is far less adept at helping those same people to agree on what they are really asking for before they get to the barricades—or after they leave.
    For this reason, an odd sort of anxiety has begun to set in after each demonstration: Was that it? When’s the next one? Will it be as good, as big? To keep up the momentum, a culture of serial protesting is rapidly taking hold. Myinbox is cluttered with entreaties to come to what promises to be “the next Seattle.”