Oliver Stone couldn't have done it better. It was like some surreal late 1960s flashback: 50,000 people turning Seattle's Starbuckled 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?For Patrick Woodall of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, one of the major protest organizers in Seattle, the significance "is huge." The protests, says Woodall, show "working people trying to get vested in an international global economy." In some ways, says Andrew Shapiro, author of the The Control Revolution, Seattle "was a wake-up call for globalization, the first time that many people have realized how powerful it is."
The protesters in Seattle are bound together by a widely held fear of corporate power that increasingly leapfrogs national laws and borders with global trade agreements and private deals. 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 Canadian-based multimedia group dedicated to puncturing the corporate mystique. Lasn describes the "global solidarity of activists that the Internet has nurtured" and describes how mass e-mailings and listserve organizing stirred this current anti-WTO movement. "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 Woodall, "because our partners are all over the planet." Global Trade Watch has forged relationships with some 1,500 groups throughout 90 countries in its opposition to the WTO and has helped nearly 7,000 activists, including world trade experts from as far afield as Malaysia and India, travel and find lodging for the week in Seattle. While Woodall points out that it is the issues that bring people to protest, "The WTO has wormed its fingers into so many parts of everyday life," he says. Without Web activism, it's unlikely so much attention would have been drawn to such a complex and amorphous subject.
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, including an up-to-the-minute 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.
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 – other officers call themselves Frank and Earnest). 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 prompting Bush to complain that "there ought to be limits to freedom," claims it is just trying to stir debate. "The WTO has absolutely no sense of humor," says Lucida. In fact, RTMark is delighted by Moore's reaction to its site. Through the power of the Web, says Lucida, "We, as an activist organization, can be as visible as the WTO."
But for how long? Activists such as Lasn fear the laissez-faire freedom of the Internet may soon be hemmed in by commercial and regulatory constraints the way radio and television have been. And not just for freedom of content. Should the WTO ministerial ever get back on schedule, one of the issues it is set to address is how to regulate global e-commerce. That could bring a whole other set of protesters to the barricades.
While some activists would hope to adopt an absolutist stand on the WTO, there is no escaping that the global economy is permanent, and the importance of the Internet looks set to grow with it. As Andrew Shapiro argues, this means society must be flexible enough to change. He points to global Internet regulatory schemes, such as Icann and the Bertelsmann-led content rating system, and identifies "a shift in decision making," away from national governments. "If the locus of decision making in society is going to shift to new organizations, it's important that the tradition of accountability and advocacy that we have developed follow into these areas of rule making."
In other words, if the WTO wants to set the business rules of the next century, it also has to play by the rules of fair labor practices and environmental oversight that 20th-century society has fought hard to establish. And there are plenty of online activists willing to see that it does.
