Find anticorporate manifestos without visiting Seattle's tear-gassed streets.

by Matthew Yeomans, The Industry Standard
December 3, 1999, 10:48 a.m. PT

Oliver Stone couldn't have done it better. It was like some surreal late-1960s flashback: 50,000 people turning Seattle's Starbucks-lined streets into a torrent of organized and anarchistic protest.

And what was it all about? Was it racism or abortion, the issues that typically spark passionate protest? No, Tuesday's battle in Seattle was over a strictly 21st-century question: Who holds the reins of the proliferating, global economy?

The protesters in Seattle are bound together by a widely held fear of corporate power that increasingly leapfrogs national laws and borders. The Internet has partly fueled the rampant expansion of the "borderless" economy, making it easier and easier for companies to complete transactions around the globe.

At the same time, the Internet has also eased the path for the activists to galvanize a force of diverse opposition in Seattle.

"I've been getting stuff sent to me about the WTO for over a year now," says Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters, a multimedia group dedicated to puncturing the corporate mystique. "You know how [other activists] end their e-mails, 'See you in Seattle'?" he says. "When I saw that, I knew I had to go."

"The Internet is a central component of working on international trade issues," says Patrick Woodall of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, one of the major protest organizers in Seattle, "because our partners are all over the planet."

Web of Protests

The Net has spawned a smattering of Web sites from all over the world dedicated to issues about the WTO. Lashed together electronically, they create a miniweb of information. One of the main sites is SeattleWTO, which offers news, a calendar of organized protest events, and links to all the other major sites.

Another site is an alternative news service run by Seattle's Independent Media Center. On Tuesday, IMC beat cable TV and the networks with RealVideo footage of protesters being tear-gassed and an on-the-scene interview with one man hit by rubber bullets.

A Satirical Site

Despite the shock value of the street actions, the form of protest that elicited one of the most vehement retorts from the WTO was the fake Web site put up by RTMark, a for-profit company that acts as a clearinghouse for projects lampooning the corporate world.

RTMark copied the WTO's homepage design, then inserted its own text and links questioning "the global support the WTO has for corporations," according to founding member Candid Lucida (an alias). Last week, WTO director general Mike Moore issued a press release condemning the site as "interfering with the public's ability to obtain information from the WTO."

RTMark, which previously helped organize a fake George W. Bush Web site that prompted Bush to complain that "there ought to be limits to freedom," claims it is just trying to stir debate.

For more in-depth coverage of the Internet economy, visit The Industry Standard.

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External Links

World Trade Organization

Adbusters

Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch

SeattleWTO

Seattle's Independent Media Center

RTMark's WTO Site