[Originally appeared as the cover article in the August 4, 2003 edition of The Nation.] From MoveOn to meetup.com, the net is facilitating a new citizen insurgency The Battle in Seattle brought to the world’s attention a new global resistance movement that was not only made possible by the Internet but, as Naomi Klein has deftly pointed out, was shaped in its image. Sharing the Internet’s architecture of interconnected hubs and spokes, the new movement was a coalition of coalitions, a decentralized network of campaigns “intricately and tightly linked to one another.” The net allows large mobilizations to unfold with minimal bureaucracy and hierarchy. “Forced consensus and labored manifestoes are fading into the background,” Klein wrote in 2000, “replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured, and sometimes compulsive information-swapping.” But if Seattle was the birth of this new kind of organizing, last February 15’s global peace demonstration marked its coming of age. That day, some 400,000 people turned out onto the streets of New York to protest Bush’s impending war on Iraq, and close to 10 million more turned out in cities across the globe. It was arguably the single largest day of protest in world history; the … Continue reading The Web Rewires the Movement