The New Radicals

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What you'd have had to look very hard to see in Washington was anyone resembling a leader. Because there isn't one, in the usual sense. No Abbie Hoffman. No Pat Robertson. Sure, Ralph Nader is wandering around (see accompanying story), and so is satirical filmmaker Michael Moore, but they're not calling the shots or giving marching orders. The Mobilization for Global Justice isn't a top-down affair. Like the Internet itself, and unlike the coalition's corporate enemies, the antiglobalist movement is a body that manages to survive, and even thrive, without a head.

It has lots of arms instead, some of them stretching far out into cyberspace. "The Internet has helped people keep in touch in a shorter time frame," says Chuck Munson, 34, who runs a website called Infoshop.org that acts as a meeting place for anarchists, who are notoriously hard to organize. "The advantage is that we can communicate with each other quickly."

The Web breeds a sense of togetherness too, and togetherness is important to these activists, so many of whom have spent the last few decades of market capitalism uber alles feeling more than a little isolated. "From my perspective, and I came out of the '60s," says Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, "Seattle was the first time where you saw multigeneration, multiclass and multi-issue in the streets together." Pope remembers marchers hugging each other and a bracing moment when a group of young radicals gave a clenched-fist salute to several construction workers, who responded in kind.

This feeling of solidarity grew online long after the last splinters of glass from Seattle's vandalized Starbucks had been cleaned up. While their foes were busy checking real-time quotes for Intel and GE, the antiglobalists were swapping digital photos of police brutality, reading Noam Chomsky's essays on media brainwashing and posting tips on defending against pepper spray (wear a handkerchief soaked in vinegar). The irony of all this is stark, and possibly galling to the technocrats: the Web was supposed to be globalism's great tool, not a forum for its enemies. The Web was supposed to weld together markets into one enormous worldwide trading floor, not organize thousands into picket lines.

Juliette Beck, 27, is as close to a bigwig as the movement has, but even she feels like a tiny link in the wired cosmos of antiglobalism. An organizer for Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human-rights group, Beck arrived in Washington fresh from a 20-city road show that was organized largely via e-mail. "We got housing and food for nine people on the road," she says. "The events and the nonviolence training and the political theater--the Internet made it possible." Beck, who planned to demonstrate in costume along with 20 others in her "affinity group" (she was to play the Statue of Liberty, she said), takes pride in the movement's branching, networked structure. "We have lots of Lilliputians all acting autonomously and at the same time connected," she says.