Armchair activists unite!

BY MARK MAGEE

My first experience with on-line activism occurred sometime in the mid- to late-'90s. A friend who was attending grad school called me to talk about the "virtual sit-in" that was going down at his university. Seems the student leaders at his school had decided that the old '60s style of civil disobedience was simply out-of-date. So instead of bothering with tiresome and time-consuming marches, picket lines and occupations of the admin building, these would-be activists simply set up some Web pages, filled them with students' impassioned emails to the principal and added a bunch of customized happy-face icons to represent the virtual protestors.

Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. The whole point of a sit-in is to disrupt the day-to-day life of your target, but all this one did was give the principal a link he probably never even followed. Maybe the organizers should have just taken their computers and piled them against the principal's door -- at least that would have registered on his radar.

But like I said, this was a few years ago. Since then, many activists have embraced the Internet and are busy turning it into a potentially important and endlessly adaptable revolutionary tool.

Probably the simplest approach to taking activism on-line is to use the Net as an information disseminator. One example is <http://www.protest.net/>, which provides wannabe rabble-rousers with listings for upcoming demonstrations around the world. And while on one hand, a centralized global bulletin board like this is nice in a we're-all-in-this-together sorta way ("Hey, Melbourne's taking on Monsanto this weekend! Go team!!"), the obvious question is, does it really get more people out to the events? Possibly, but as it stands now, unlikely.

The Net can also be used as a collective home base of sorts, a concept that has not been lost on <http://www.tao.ca/>. Originally an anarchist site, tao.ca has morphed over time into a catch-all umbrella site for like-minded groups and projects, such as the Student Activist Network and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. And while this kind of buddying-up makes life easy for lazy surfers, what's much more important is how it promotes cross-pollination and co-operation between organizations that otherwise might never have thought of working together.

Petitions are one of the oldest tools of the activist trade, and sites like <http://www.petitiononline.com/> are updating that tool for the new century. Petitiononline.com allows anyone to create their own digital petition for anything they want. Of course, since this all takes place in the self-centred on-line world, some of the petitions aren't exactly as altruistic as you might wish. But it's not that bad, either. For every petition begging the Backstreet Boys to add Hamilton to their list of tour dates (currently at 32 signatures), there's a 5,000-plus list of names protesting the death sentence of a 20-year-old Ethopian girl.

But probably the biggest double-edged sword in the on-line activism game is the "click for cash" phenomenon. I visited <http://www.eactivist.org/>, where simply clicking on a button causes a charitable sponsor to contribute to some worthy cause. In less than five minutes I forced one site to give cash to the "Clean Air Conservancy," got Wal-Mart to donate nine minutes of nursing care to kids with AIDS and helped save the jaguars (courtesy a donation from proflowers.com). And while this certainly is a quick way to increase corporate charity, I can't help but feel that this sort of painless giving swerves dangerously close to effortless conscience-cleansing.

These are only a few of the activism sites out there, but they illustrate the point well -- that activism on-line is still very much a work in progress.

If I had to pick a favourite approach, it would be the culture-jamming tactics of the pranksters at <http://www.rtmark.com/>. Best known for switching Talking Barbie's voicebox with G.I. Joe's, rtmark.com is now into parodying and defacing deserving corporate Web sites. Check out its take on Shell.com's site -- it's political, subversive and hilarious, all key elements of successful propoganda. And we owe a debt of gratitude for the <http://www.gwbush.com/> site, the existence of which led Dubya to tellingly declare, "There ought to be limits to freedom."