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facilitates these campaigns is shaping the movement in its own Web-like image. Thanks to the Net, mobilizations occur with sparse bureaucracy and minimal hierarchy; forced consensus and laboured manifestos are fading into the background, replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured and sometimes compulsive information swapping.
    What emerged on the streets of Seattle and Washington was an activist model that mirrors the organic, decentralized, interlinked pathways of the Internet—the Internet come to life.
    The Washington-based research centre TeleGeography has taken it upon itself to map out the architecture of the Internet as if it were the solar system. Recently, TeleGeography pronounced that the Internet is not one giant web but a network of “hubs and spokes.” The hubs are the centres of activity, the spokes the links to other centres, which are autonomous but interconnected.
    It seems like a perfect description of the protests in Seattle and Washington, D.C. These mass convergences were activist hubs, made up of hundreds, possibly thousands, of autonomous spokes. During the demonstrations, the spokes took the form of “affinity groups” of between five and twenty protesters, each of which elected a spokesperson to represent them at regular “spokescouncil” meetings. Although the affinity groups agreed to abide by a set of non-violence principles, they also functioned as discrete units, with the power to make their own strategic decisions. At some rallies, activists carry actual cloth webs to symbolize their movement. When it’s time for a meeting, they lay theweb on the ground, call out “all spokes on the web” and the structure becomes a street-level boardroom.
    In the four years before the Seattle and Washington protests, similar hub events had converged outside World Trade Organization, G7 and Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summits in Auckland, Vancouver, Manila, Birmingham, London, Geneva, Kuala Lumpur and Cologne. Each of these mass protests was organized according to principles of co-ordinated decentralization. Rather than present a coherent front, small units of activists surrounded their target from all directions. And rather than build elaborate national or international bureaucracies, they threw up temporary structures: empty buildings were turned into “convergence centres,” and independent media producers assembled impromptu activist news centres. The ad hoc coalitions behind these demonstrations frequently named themselves after the date of the planned event: J18, N30, A16 and, for the upcoming IMF meeting in Prague on September 26, S26. When these events are over, they leave virtually no trace behind, save for an archived Web site.
    All this talk of radical decentralization can conceal a very real hierarchy based on who owns, understands and controls the computer networks linking the activists to one another. This is what Jesse Hirsh, one of the founders of the anarchist computer network Tao Communications, calls “a geek adhocracy.”
    The hubs and spokes model is more than a tactic used at protests; the protests are themselves made up of “coalitions of coalitions,” to borrow a phrase from Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange. Each anti-corporate campaign is made upof many groups, mostly NGOs, labour unions, students and anarchists. They use the Internet, as well as more traditional organizing tools, to do everything from cataloguing the latest transgressions of the World Bank to bombarding Shell Oil with faxes and e-mails, to distributing ready-to-download anti-sweatshop leaflets for protests at Nike Town. The groups remain autonomous, but their international co-ordination is deft and, to their targets, frequently devastating.
    The charge that the anti-corporate movement lacks “vision” falls apart when looked at in the context of these campaigns. It’s true that the mass protests in Seattle and D.C. were a hodgepodge of slogans and causes, that to a casual