Cyberprotest is raging. Every moment, someone's uploading more. Billions of bits and bytes of bilious assaults on the system. Any system. Calls to Action. E-mail for Anarchy. Around the world, the Internet is fanning the flames of discord. It's all there by the gigabyte: press releases commemorating the Kent State Four site, letters to forward to politicians to stop desecrating native graves, calls for protests to prevent another Timorese massacre. In its own salacious way, the Monica Lewinsky affair brought home the point: Anyone can be a cyberpublisher. Commentators such as Slate magazine editor Michael Kinsley suggest Zippergate -- whose most egregious revelations occurred on web sites run by everyone from the Dallas Morning News to Matt Drudge, the most notorious e-gossip -- has done for the Internet what JFK did for television in general and Saddam Hussein for CNN in particular. The Internet now renders it impossible for governments and the corporate media to be gatekeepers of information. Anyone with access to the Net can broadcast to the world. Even the smallest band of rebels and the angriest young man can make themselves heard and their dyspepsia known. And they are. Last December, when 45 peasants in southern Mexico were murdered by irregular para-militaries with ties to the Mexican government, few * were following their struggle. Today, the Zapatistas' collective voice carries far beyond their home and their use of the Internet has become a harbinger of the future of dissent, protest, revolution and heresy. Wired magazine calls them perhaps the best-organized and most dynamic Net presence of any political group anywhere. The Che Guevera of cyberspace is a man whose nom de guerre is Subcommandante Marcos. The Subcommandante, a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Swift, has an electronic presence and the success he has achieved using the Internet is astounding. Forget about the Five Ws -- who, what, when, where and why -- the proverbial elements of mainstream reporting. The Subcommandante uses poetry, humour, scholarship and parables to engage people in dialogues about issues of power and authenticity that would make a deconstructionist weep. ``Public space has been commodified and mainstream news has been reduced to info-tainment,'' according to Tamara Ford, who works with * Accion Zapatista and ZapNet Collective, Texas groups that jointly * facilitate some of the Zapatistas' major electronic operations. * ``The Zapatistas have been able to rupture that space, in part via Marcos' skill as a performance artist.'' Others also have been quick to seize upon his strategy and this unexpected vehicle for rapid communication and mobilization. In B.C., for instance, despite universally nasty media, the aboriginal rebels involved in the 1995 standoff with RCMP at Gustafsen Lake have used the Net to win support. The Green Group of the European Parliament, the Canadian Alliance in Solidarity with the Native Peoples, the Council of Canadians (Victoria), Moloqil Tinamit and other Mayan organizations in Guatemala, For Mother Earth Belgium, the Black Community Collective & Black Autonomy International - Canada, the Afrikan Frontline Network, Te Ropu Maori, Support for Native Sovereignty, the Tasmania Human Rights Group, and Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general known for his love of lost causes, are just some of the voices now calling for a public inquiry into the standoff. That's quite a change from the days when Ovide Mercredi, erstwhile national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, labelled rebel leader Wolverine (also known as William Jones Ignace) a political extremist. During the Gustafsen Lake siege, U.S. Mohawk Splitting-the-Sky, a.k.a. John Hill, was portrayed by the media as a convicted murderer and participant in the murderous 1971 prison riot at Attica, N.Y. Splitting-the-Sky, who was paroled in 1979, isn't quite as good a performance artist as the Subcommandante, but he has his moments. But the Net has provided the 46-year-old Fraser Valley carpenter and father of four a vehicle to promulgate his beliefs about native rights and justice. ``We found over a number of years in native activist movement the mainstream media will only cover certain aspects of any situation,'' Splitting-the-Sky said in an interview. ``The long and short of it is, we don't trust the mainstream media. At Gustafsen Lake, we feel the RCMP used the media.'' The Internet, by comparison, has proven to be an excellent unfiltered megaphone, he said. ``The Internet is ideal for people like us involved in the justice movement for native rights. It is a tool to put out two sides of a story.'' His views are echoed by activist colleague Bill Lightbown, a 71-year-old native with more than 40 years of protest behind him. ``Our experience with the media is a bad scene -- the censoring has been atrocious,'' said Lightbown, a founder of the United Native Nations in B.C. ``We learned that the only way we could get our story out was over the Internet.'' Another blizzard of dissent blows from University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle. ``I've been doing it since 1993 when I was Bosnia's lawyer and communications with Sarajevo were cut off,'' Boyle said in an interview. ``The only way you could get in there was with satellite phone to have conversations with people and that was very expensive. With the Internet, I could get information right out of Bosnia and I could get my information into Bosnia, even during wartime. It was a vital tool.'' Since then, Boyle has single-handedly mounted human-rights campaigns and become a tireless critic of what he calls U.S. military aggression. ``I believe the Internet will prove just as revolutionary as the printing press was during the time of the Protestant Reformation,'' he said. ``The printing press had a very important role in the spread of that revolution because people could put out their tracts and pamphlets in an inexpensive form and get them around.'' There is growing discussion about creating an intercontinental network of alternative communication to interlink the various protest movements. But governments are not so enthusiastic and the U.S. is leading the charge for Internet regulation. The Mexican administration too recently imposed controls on gathering and disseminating information, in an attempt to hobble the Chiapas rebellion. Corporate and government establishments are worried that the Net might also become a weapon, citing recent computer hacker attacks on U.S. defence sites. As a result, many believe these days may be remembered as the heyday of the electronic pamphleteer. ``I think they are going to try to [shut it down],'' Boyle said. ``But it might be that from the perspective of the U.S. government that what they created is really a Frankenstein monster that they cannot control.'' John Shafer, a 42-year-old Victoria-based actor and radio reporter, is not optimistic. Shafer established the comprehensive native sovereignty site, which includes the Gustafsen Lake archives, using University of Victoria hardware with the backing of the Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group. ``My own sense is that it would be a mistake to build things on the basis of this going to be here forever,'' Shafer warned. He believes it is only a matter of time before regulation or a toll is imposed on Internet traffic, disguised as an attempt to eradicate kiddie porn or hate mongers who have also found the Net a marvellous distribution tool. ``My fear is, once we get into, `We have to stop the Nazis on the Net,' where does it go from there?'' Shafer asked. Still, he added, for people who work in the peace movement, the anti-nuclear movement and the human rights movement, the Internet remains a cause for hope. Few can afford long-distance phone calls, much less the staggering printing bills of a direct-mail campaign of the scope provided for almost nothing by the Net. ``I used to get mad at the mainstream media,'' he said. ``Now it's increasingly irrelevant. I don't have to scan the pages of The Times Colonist to know what's going on in Chiapas. I can read the communiques directly. ``You know, the other thing that's interesting is e-mail is a very congenial way to deal with these issues. In cyberspace, the colour of your skin isn't really important.'' Vancouver Sun editorial, Friday, April 24, 1998
