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observer it was hard to decode the connections between the treatment of U.S. death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal and the fate of the sea turtles. But in trying to find coherence in these large-scale shows of strength, the critics are confusing the outward demonstrations of the movement with the thing itself—missing the forest for the people dressed as trees. This movement
is
its spokes, and in the spokes there is no shortage of vision.
    The student anti-sweatshop movement, for instance, has rapidly moved from simply criticizing companies and campus administrators to drafting alternative codes of conduct and building a quasi-regulatory body, the Worker Rights Consortium in partnership with labour activists in the global south. The movement against genetically engineered and modified foods has leaped from one policy victory to the next, first getting many genetically modified foods removed from the shelves of British supermarkets, then getting labelling laws passed in Europe, then making enormousstrides with the Montreal Protocol on Biosafety. Meanwhile, opponents of the World Bank’s and IMF’s export-led development models have produced bookshelves’ worth of resources on community-based development models, land reform, debt cancellation and self-government principles. Critics of the oil and mining industries are similarly overflowing with ideas for sustainable energy and responsible resource extraction—though they rarely get the chance to put their visions into practice.
    The fact that these campaigns are so decentralized does not mean they are incoherent. Rather, decentralization is a reasonable, even ingenious adaptation both to pre-existing fragmentation within progressive networks and to changes in the broader culture. It is a by-product of the explosion of NGOs, which, since the Rio Summit in 1992, have been gaining power and prominence. There are so many NGOs involved in anti-corporate campaigns that nothing but the hubs-and-spokes model could possibly accommodate all their different styles, tactics and goals. Like the Internet itself, both the NGO and the affinity group networks are infinitely expandable systems. If somebody feels that he or she doesn’t quite fit into one of the thirty thousand or so NGOs or thousands of affinity groups out there, she can just start her own and link up. Once involved, no one has to give up individuality to the larger structure; as with all things on-line, we are free to dip in and out, take what we want and delete what we don’t. It seems, at times, to be a surfer’s approach to activism—reflecting the Internet’s paradoxical culture of extreme narcissism coupled with an intense desire for community and connection.
    But while the movement’s Web-like structure is, in part, a reflection of Internet-based organizing, it is also a response to the very political realities that sparked the protests in the first place: the utter failure of traditional party politics. All over the world, citizens have worked to elect social democratic and workers’ parties, only to watch them plead impotence in the face of market forces and IMF dictates. In these conditions, modern activists are not so naive as to believe change will come from the ballot box. That’s why they are more interested in challenging the mechanisms that make democracy toothless, like corporate financing of election campaigns or the WTO’s ability to override national sovereignty. The most controversial of these mechanisms have been the IMF’s structural adjustment policies, which are overt in their demands for governments to cut social spending and privatize resources in exchange for loans.
    One of the great strengths of this model of laissez-faire organizing is that it has proven extraordinarily difficult to control, largely because it is so different from the organizing principles of the institutions and corporations it targets. It responds to corporate concentration with fragmentation, to globalization with its