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tree-wearing, lamb-costumed, drumbeating bubble brains. Our mission, according to the conference organizers at the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning, was to whip that chaos on the streets into some kind of structured, media-friendly shape. This wasn’t just another talk shop. We were going to “give birth to a unified movement for holistic social, economic and political change.”
    As I slipped in and out of lecture rooms, soaking up the vision offered by Arianna Huffington, Michael Lerner, DavidKorten, Cornel West and dozens of others, I was struck by the futility of this entire well-meaning exercise. Even if we did manage to come up with a ten-point plan—brilliant in its clarity, elegant in its coherence, unified in its outlook— to whom, exactly, would we hand down these commandments? The anti-corporate protest movement that came to world attention on the streets of Seattle last November is not united by a political party or a national network with a head office, annual elections and subordinate cells and locals. It is shaped by the ideas of individual organizers and intellectuals but doesn’t defer to any of them as leaders. In this amorphous context, the ideas and plans being hatched at the Riverside Church weren’t irrelevant exactly, they just weren’t important in the way that was hoped. Rather than being adopted as activist policy, they were destined to be swept up and tossed around in the tidal wave of information—Web diaries, NGO manifestos, academic papers, homemade videos, cris de coeur—that the global anti-corporate network produces and consumes each and every day.
    This is the flip side of the persistent criticism that the kids on the street lack clear leadership—they lack clear followers too. To those searching for copies of efforts from the sixties, this absence makes the anti-corporate movement appear infuriatingly impassive: evidently, these people are so disorganized they can’t even get it together to respond to perfectly well-organized efforts to organize them. These are MTV-weaned activists, you can practically hear the old guard saying: scattered, nonlinear, unfocused.
    It’s easy to be taken in by these critiques. If there is onething that the left and right agree on, it is the value of a clear, well-structured ideological argument. But maybe it’s not quite so simple. Maybe the protests in Seattle and Washington, D.C., look unfocused because they were not demonstrations of one movement at all but rather convergences of many smaller ones, each with its sights trained on a specific multinational corporation (like Nike), a particular industry (like agribusiness) or a new trade initiative (like the Free Trade Area of the Americas). These smaller, targeted movements are clearly part of a common cause: they share a belief that the disparate problems they are wrestling with all derive from corporate-driven globalization, an agenda that is concentrating power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Of course, there are disagreements—about the role of the nation-state, about whether capitalism is redeemable, about the speed with which change should occur. But within most of these miniature movements, there is an emerging consensus that decentralizing power and building community-based decision-making potential— whether through unions, neighbourhoods, farms, villages, anarchist collectives or aboriginal self-government—is essential to countering the might of multinational corporations.
    Despite this common ground, these campaigns have not coalesced into a single movement. Rather, they are intricately and tightly linked to one another, much as “hotlinks” connect their Web sites on the Internet. This analogy is more than coincidental and is in fact key to understanding the changing nature of political organizing. Although many have observed that the recent mass protests would have been impossible without the Internet, what has been overlookedis how the communication technology that