Cyberspace and "Ungovernability"

This posting has been forwarded to you as a service of the Austin Comite
de Solidaridad con Chiapas y Mexico.

NOTE BENE: The report that follows gives some of the ideas of a RAND 
analyst who has been monitoring our work in cyberspace. This guy 
contacted me last Spring after reading the piece I wrote on "The Chiapas 
Uprising: The Future of Class Struggle in the New World Order". (Which 
can be obtained via gopher eco.utexas.edu faculty/Cleaver/Cleaver 
papers.) He pointed out the similarities between what I had written and 
his own ideas. A collegue of his also contacted me and wanted to 
collaborate in work on the activities of NGOs in Chiapas. I told him 
that I didn't think the NGO's needed the information he wanted to gather, 
that it would only be of use to people who might cause the NGOs trouble with 
it. Needless to say I did NOT collaborate. 

This is an example of the kind of monitoring and studying of our activity 
that I was talking about in a message I posted some time back. In case 
you missed that posting I will attach it to the end of this article.

That the other side is studying what we are doing, is only to be expected. 
Let's make sure that WE study what we are doing and think about the 
implications.(See my comments at the end of the three articles appended 
below.)

At the same time, we can do what they are doing, i.e., study the 
opposition. In the case of the following article, for instance, we can 
ask ourselves about the meaning of the assertion that our work might make 
Mexico "ungovernable". We know that this term was bandied about in Mexico in 
the period before the last elections. Various groups used the term to 
evoke fear and galvanize their own organizational efforts. The term also 
has a history in American policy circles. Remember the THE CRISIS OF 
DEMOCRACY: Report on the Governability of Democracies (1975) published by 
the Trilateral Commission. In the essay on the US by Samuel P. Huntington 
(one of three, two others were on Europe and Japan), Huntington presented 
an analysis of the crisis in the US as a situation in which the "balance" 
between democracy and "governability" had been tipped toward democracy 
and needed to be re-tipped in the opposite direction. In other words, the 
"crisis of democracy" was that there was too much democracy. (Not of the 
formal kind of course but of the grassroots sort, in which everyday 
people were interfering in the usual governing of America.)

So we know that for policy analysts the spector of "ungovernability" is a 
nightmare, a possibility to be avoided at all costs. Many of us, on the 
other hand, are fighting for just that: to make it impossible for those 
who would "govern" to do so, and thus to open space for a recasting of 
democracy in which there are not rulers and ruled, or governors and 
governed, but rather self-governance of the people, by the people and for 
the people. Hmmm have I heard that before somewhere???

The best examples I can think of from recent history in which countries 
became "ungovernable" are all in Eastern/Central Europe during the 
downfall of the Stalinist states of that area. In country after country a 
massive movement of people made it impossible for the communist regimes 
to "govern" and they collapsed, opening the way to new forms of politics 
and new kinds of social relationships. Now, we may not like the way the 
situation has evolved in those countries, but most would probably agree 
that those revolutions were successful in removing undemocratic regimes 
and opening the way to more fluid change.  The usual spector raised by 
policy makers, of course, is that ungovernerability quickly becomes 
lawless chaos (of the sort depicted in Somalia and Ruwanda --or Road 
Warrior for that matter). This has always been the ploy of rulers, to 
present themselves as the only reasonable option, as the only way to 
avoid the disintegration of civilized behavior. (I'm going to leave aside 
for the moment the issue of the historical weight of the term 
"civilization" and assume the usual commonplace meaning, i.e., the 
ability of large numbers of people to live together with all their 
differences and similarities without so much antagonism that 
relationships dissolve into continuing violence and bloodshed.)

But what about Mexico? "Ungovernability" today can only mean the 
breakdown in the ability of the "government" (i.e., the PRI party-state) 
to "govern" (i.e., maintain its power). This is exactly what the 
Zapatistas have called for, and what so many in Mexico desire (as well as 
many of us outside Mexico).  

Now, please note: the emphasis in the Rand analyst's work is on 
"ungovernability" NOT on what might replace the PRI's ability to govern. 
Yet in the situation he describes (and I have discussed elsewhere --the 
article above and the introduction to ZAPATISTAS!DOCUMENTS OF THE NEW 
MEXICAN REVOLUTION --at gopher lanic.utexas.edu Latin American/Mexico) 
is something far more interesting: elements of 
alternative ways of organizing Mexican political and social life. The 
analyst sees that the grassroots movment that has been using cyberspace 
as part of its self-organization "doesn't have the ability to take 
power", but doesn't recognize how the new networks are increasingly made 
up of people who do not WANT to "take power", of people who do not want 
ANYBODY to "take power", of people who are working out conceptions of 
politics where "power" is either abolished, or reconceptualized in new, 
truly democractic ways. 

That their "lack of centralized authority makes them less susceptible 
to cooptation or repression" doesn't strike him as also providing a model 
for a more democratic society in which "repression" and "cooptation" are 
made much more difficult through the organization of the polity. Yet, 
that is exactly what we should be striving for within the organizational 
fabrics we weave. That is exactly what all those who have fought against the
"centralized authority" of rulers/governors/state-bureaucrats have long 
sought. The fabrics we weave today are complex things. They resonate with 
some old models --say the direct democracy of some indigenous villages-- 
but they are also woven within a completely new context: a global 
capitalism in which communications makes it increasingly difficult for 
the would-be rulers to divide (through ignorance) and conquer (via 
repression or cooptation). Now those electronic communications are not 
some neutral technology, even though it may seem that way at first 
glance, as capitalists continue to maintain their very hierarchical power 
structures using the same circuits that we use to undermine them and 
construct alternative sets of relationships.  Indeed, the original 
network, ARPANET, was created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency to 
facilitate the circulation of research for the Defense Department. But 
out of that has grown not only the Internet but cyberspace in which 
diverse and often conflicting goals are pursued, from commercial ventures 
such as America Online or Compuserve to activist networks like PeaceNet 
and EcoNet, from the reinforcement of capitalist power to systematic 
attempts to undermine it. There is no longer a single "electronic 
communication 
technology" but rather the nets themselves with all their structures AND 
contents constitute alternative technologies being elaborated within 
diverse contexts for diverse purposes. Those of us who are using the nets 
to fight for democracy are constructing the technology as we proceed, we 
are not just "users" as the big companies would have us believe.

So, we have to be very self-conscious about what we are constructing as 
we go along. What are the politics of what we are constructing, both in 
cyberspace and within the larger space within which we live and fight. If 
it serves no other purpose, perusal of this report on RAND research, 
should stimulate our collective thinking about how what we are doing can 
contribute "in the doing" to the construction of new, alternative ways of 
social being in which "governability" is put behind us, permanently.

Harry

 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 1995 11:26:27 -0500 (EST)
To: hmcleave@arrow.eco.utexas.edu
Subject: netwars? (fwd)
Content-Length: 7158


COPYRIGHT PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
450 Mission Street,  Room 506
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-243-4364



NEWS ANALYSIS-665 WORDS

NETWAR COULD MAKE MEXICO UNGOVERNABLE

EDITOR'S NOTE: While media attention focuses on the turmoil 
within Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, another 
destabilizing force, which Rand Corp. national security expert David F. 
Ronfeldt dubs "netwar," is spreading. Netwar enables widely dispersed 
and highly marginalized opposition groups to coordinate strategies 
utilizing new information technologies. While their lack of central 
authority makes it unlikely they could take power, they could make 
Mexico ungovernable. PNS contributing editor Joel Simon reports 
regularly from Mexico.

BY JOEL SIMON, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE

MEXICO CITY -- While Mexico reels from the worst financial and 
political crisis in decades, a low intensity "netwar" is also spreading 
across the country. That's the conclusion of social scientist David F. 
Ronfeldt of the Santa Monica-based Rand think tank who studies the 
impact of new information technologies on national security.

Ronfeldt and a colleague coined the term netwar to describe what 
happens when loosely-affiliated networks -- social activists, terrorists, 
or drug cartels -- use new information technologies to coordinate 
action. Throughout the world, these networks are replacing 
"hierarchies" as the primary form of political organization among 
opponents of the state.

Whatever the outcome of the current turmoil in the ruling 
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the gains scored by the 
conservative National Action Party (PAN), Ronfeldt argues that 
netwar will ultimately change the country's political equation by 
giving even the most marginalized leftist opposition new clout. "The 
risk for Mexico is not an old-fashioned civil war or another social 
revolution," he notes. "The risk is social netwar."

The impact of the netwarriors is already clear. In 1993, opponents of the 
North American Free Trade Agreement used fax machines and the 
Internet to coordinate strategy. During the August 1994 Presidential 
elections, a watchdog group called Civic Alliance organized a network 
of observers throughout the country who faxed reports on voting 
irregularities back to Mexico City.

Even the Zapatista Army of National Liberation is fighting a form of 
netwar. The August 1994 National Democratic Convention brought 
together hundreds of diverse groups in the rebels' jungle stronghold to 
fashion a de-centralized opposition. That they succeeded was evidenced 
last month when thousands marched in Mexico City to protest the 
Zedillo Administration's arrest warrant for Subcomander Marcos, 
chanting "We Are All Marcos." Rebel supporters around the world 
followed developments by reading Zapatista communiques on the 
Internet.

Precisely because of their de-centralization, the netwarriors don't have 
the ability to take national power. But, Ronfeldt predicts, they are a 
growing political force which could make the country ungovernable. 
And their lack of any central authority makes them far less vulnerable 
to cooptation or repression.

Who are the netwarriors? They are the traditional leftist opponents of 
the PRI, groups fighting for democratic change, as well as an array of 
special interests, from peasant organizations to gay rights groups. At a 
time when the political and economic crisis has created widespread 
disaffection, Ronfeldt theorizes that network-style organizing will 
enable the opposition to overcome its traditional factionalism. The 
greatest threat to the government could be hundreds or thousands of 
independent groups united in their opposition but "accepting of each 
other's autonomy."

Ronfeldt argues the international non-government organizations 
(NGOs) operating in Mexico provide a "multiplier effect" for 
netwarriors. Electronic communication allows Mexican groups to stay 
in touch with U.S. and Canadian organizations which share their goals 
and can coordinate an international response in the event of a 
government crackdown. These groups are media savvy in a way 
Mexicans may not be; they also have access to the international media. 
Global Exchange, a small humanitarian organization in San Francisco, 
is one example. It began denouncing human rights abuses and 
mobilizing protests in the U.S. only hours after government troops 
dislodged Zapatista rebels from villages last December.

Netwar is not unique to political groups, however. Terrorist 
organizations and drug cartels are also becoming less hierarchical and 
thus harder to control, says Ronfeldt. The Sicilian Mafia is losing 
ground to less centralized drug cartels.

Ronfeldt acknowledges that the potential for transnational netwar in 
Mexico is limited by the deficiencies in the nation's phone system. 
"Netwar doesn't work unless lots of different small groups can 
coordinate...and that requires high band-width communication." 
While fax machines have become ubiquitous in Mexico, electronic 
communication is only starting to take hold.

Still, Ronfeldt cautions that "The country that produced the prototype 
social revolution of the 20th century may now be giving rise to the 
prototype social netwar of the 21st century." If so, the Mexican 
government will have its hands full.

(03131995)	**** END ****	 COPYRIGHT PNS


------- End of Article on Rand Research-------

What follows is a reposting of earlier reflections on other examples of 
being watched.

>From hmcleave@mundoMon Mar 20 11:29:01 1995
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 11:09:51 -0600 (CST)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@mundo>
Subject: Media Recognition: Opportunities and Dangers Mar.5
To: Chiapas95 <chiapas95@mundo.eco.utexas.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.3.89.9503050922.B17175-0100000@mundo>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


Over the last 10 days or so, the mass media has begun to report on what 
we are doing in and with cyberspace.  The following 3 items are examples 
of the kind of reporting on our work that is being done. Some comments 
follow these three examples.


ITEM #1: Tod Robberson, "Mexican Rebels Using A High-Tech Weapon; 
Internet Helps Rally Support" WASHINGTON POST, Feb. 20, 1995, pg. A1 
(complete article)

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico:   They have waged war on the ground 
with stick rifles and World War II vintage  guns, but in fighting the 
international propaganda war, the rebels of the
Zapatista National Liberation Army have invaded cyberspace.

   With help from peace activists and rebel support groups here in southern
Chiapas state, the Zapatista message is spreading around the world, literally
at lightning speed, thanks to telephone links to the  Internet  computer
network.

   Ever since the rebels, most of them peasant Indians, launched their uprising
here 13 months ago,  Chiapas  has become one of the hottest informational topics
on the  Internet,  with computer linkups enabling Zapatista leader Subcomandante
Marcos to circulate his communiques worldwide, at virtually the push of a
button, via Internet bulletin boards like PeaceNet, Chiapas-List, Mexpaz and
Mexico 94.

   A week ago, President Ernesto Zedillo became acquainted with the power at
Marcos's fingertips through the  Internet  when the president announced the
start of a military offensive aimed at capturing the ski-masked Zapatista leader
and bringing the rebellion to a decisive close.

   Within hours, "cyber-peaceniks" and human rights activists here and elsewhere
in  Mexico  had distributed the president's words verbatim via the Internet --
along with a call for "urgent action" to press Zedillo into reversing course.
Included in their computer messages was the direct fax number to Zedillo's
office, as well as the fax line to Interior Minister Esteban Moctezuma.

   "I don't know how effective the campaign was, but I do know that Zedillo's
fax machine broke or was eventually turned off," said Mariclaire Acosta,
president of the  Mexican  Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human
Rights. She estimated hundreds of faxes were sent to the president, who
eventually changed tack and ordered his troops to halt their advance. 

[Ed.Note by the person who originally posted the story to the net:
Actually they did not halt their advance, but have continued deeper into 
 the jungle, and in a number of documented cases have been torturing and 
 killing locals to try and get more info.on the EZLN leaders.] 

   The Chiapas rebels are only the latest group embroiled in conflict or
afflicted by disaster to use the  Internet  to disseminate information and
opinion around the globe -- and given the huge volume, apparently the most
successful in mobilizing international support. Peru and Ecuador have 
used it in their border claims. Warring factions in Bosnia, separatists 
in Chechnya and relief organizations in quake-striken Kobe, Japan all 
circulated reports --some of which reached news organizations 

   "The  Internet  is the best vehicle we have to spread information around.
Before, we used faxes and telephones, and it took forever," Acosta explained.
"Now the information arrives like this," she said, snapping her fingers. "The
feedback is instantaneous."

   It remains a matter of speculation whether Marcos, recently identified by the
government as Rafael Sebastian Guillen, or any other top Zapatista leader has
hooked into the  Internet  directly, although acquaintances say the rebel
leaders are no strangers to computers and high technology. When federal police
raided alleged Zapatista safe houses in Mexico City and the southern state of
Veracruz last week, they found as many computer diskettes as bullets. Reporters
were allowed to examine the captured rebel computer equipment at a press
conference in Mexico City.

   According to federal legislator Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, who met with Marcos at
a jungle hideout last year, the rebel leader typically would write his
voluminous communiques on a laptop computer, which he carried in a backpack and
plugged into the lighter socket of an old pickup truck he used when traveling
between the remote Zapatista strongholds of La Garrucha and Guadalupe Tepeyac.
Today, both villages are firmly under  Mexican  army control, while the
whereabouts of Marcos and his followers remains a mystery.

   Nevertheless, Marcos's communiques continue to flow unimpeded through
cyberspace, usually reaching readers in countries as distant as Italy, Germany
and Russia faster than they can be published by most  Mexican  newspapers. When
the communiques do reach the local press, they appear to have been formatted and
printed on a computer.

   If Marcos is equipped with a telephone modem and a cellular phone, it would
be possible for him to hook into the  Internet  even while on the run, as he
is now.

   "People have talked about trying to get Marcos online . . . but so far it
hasn't happened, at least as far as we know," said Harry Cleaver, a University
of Texas economics professor and frequent supplier of Chiapas -related news on
the Internet.

   Cleaver and other Internet users compiled a book last year, published in
the United States, drawn in part from information and essays about  Chiapas
transmitted through the Internet.  The translation and editing of the book,
"Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution," was coordinated through
the Internet, Cleaver said.

   The information exchange has drawn the attention of the Mexican government.
Among the government's targets for search and arrest warrants here last week was
the office of Jorge Santiago Santiago, a social worker and recipient of grants
from numerous international aid organizations, including Britain's Oxfam, who
was a frequent contributor to the Internet dialogue on  Chiapas.  Zedillo
accused him of being a Zapatista commander. Santiago is currently under arrest
on charges of treason.

   The Catholic Church's human rights office in San Cristobal, another heavy
contributor to  Internet's Chiapas  data, was so concerned about the possibility
of government interference that it refused to allow a reporter into its computer
room to observe employees working on line.

   "Our mission is strictly informative," said the Rev. Pablo Romo, head of the
church's Fray Bartolome Human Rights Center. "We use the Internet to inform
people abroad of what is happening here, but mainly to counter the government's
disinformation."

   For example, he said, "the government circulated a rumor through [the
official news agency] Notimex that I had been arrested. Without the  Internet,
I would have had to spend days on the phone, . . . to tell everyone that it
wasn't true. Now, I just send a message to the bulletin board, and the word goes
out instantly."

   Acosta and other  Internet  users belonging to a confederation of
nongovernmental human rights organizations say their offices have been ransacked
and phone lines tampered with because of their computer communications.

   Critics charge that the Internet is being used by Zapatista 
supporters to distort recent events. When the army began mobilizing, for 
example, word went out on the Internet that San Cristobal was surrounded 
by tanks and armored cars. While it was true that the army prsence had 
increased throughout Chiapas, no tanks were to be found anywhere in the 
state.

   One user group here sent out a report that airborne bombardments were 
underway in several named mountain villages and urged an international 
protest.  They passed on rebel assertions that women were being raped and 
children killed. But reporters who visited those areas and interviewed 
scores of witnesses said they were unable to confirm even one such 
incident.

   The self-declared rebel governor of  Chiapas,  Amado Avendano, used the
 Internet  to distribute an urgent plea to his North American supporters to
travel to  Chiapas.  "We know we can count on America's best men and women, who
will know how to . . . impede fratricide in our nation. There is an urgent need
for international observers to serve as witnesses to the events we are
denouncing," he wrote.

   Some users with access to Chiapas related computer bulletin 
boards have posted messags urging measures to weed out 
untruthful entries.  Others aregue, however, that such proposals smack 
of censorship.

   Nevertheless, the unsubstantiated assertions of army atrocities prompted 
hundreds of Zapatista supporters to converge on San Cristobal from as far away 
as San Francisco and Oregon in recent days.

----end of article---

ITEM #2: Russell Watson et al, "When Words are the Best Weapon. 
Revolution: Information can undermine dictatorships, and the faster it 
flows, the more trouble they're in. How Rebels use the Internet and 
satellite TV." NEWSWEEK, February 27, 1995, pp. 36-40. (excerpts)

   Here's how to wage a revolution in the Information Age: two weeks ago 
Mexican government troops lunged into the rain forests of Chiapas state 
in renewed pursuit of the Zapatista rebels. Wehn the federal soldiers 
reached an insurgent stronghold at Guadalupe Tepeyac, the guerrillas 
melted into the jungle, leaving behind a few trucks but taking with them 
their most valuable equipment --fax machines and laptop computers.  In 
retreat, the Zapatistas faxed out a communique claiming that the army was 
"killing children,beating and raping women . . . and bombing us."  Soon 
the government was taking another public relations beating. It stopped 
the offensive and allowed reporters into the area.  They found no signs 
of atrocities or bombing. But the government attack had been thwarted, 
and the rebels were free to fight on, with words as their best weapons.

   The Zapatistas' chief spokesman, Subcommandante Marcos (the government 
says his name is Rafael Guillen), knows that he will never obtain 
political power from the barrel of a gun. "What governments should really 
fear," he told a NEWSWEEK reporter last summer, "is a communications 
expert".  Information technology has always been seen as a potentially 
revolutionary weapon. Almost as soon as the printing press was invented, 
governments and churches tried to control it, and the Ottoman Empire 
shunned the technology for almost 300 years.  The Amercian Revolution 
was spurred on by Benjamin Franklin, a printer; Thomas Paine, a 
pamphleteer, and Samuel Adams, a propagandist.  In the modern era, 
vulnerable governments have been challenged by proliferating means of 
communication.  Long-distance telephone service, for example, helped to 
undermine the Soviet Union, connecting dissidents to each other and to 
supporters outside the country.  Other Communist regimes have been 
weakened by radio and television signals [. . .] 

[. . . ]

   On a much more modest scale, the Internet also has become a platform 
for the Zapatistas. One of the services offering information about the 
movement is run from Mexico City by Barbara Pillsbury, a 24-year old 
American who works for a development organization.  She transmits 
bulletins about the Zapatistas and communiques from Subcommandante 
Marcos to subscribers around the world. (Her internet address: 
pueblo@laneta.apc.org) She says interest in the Zapatistas helped 
introduce many Mexicans to cyberspace. [. . .]  

[. . .]

   Even in less rigid dictatorships, communications technology cannot 
make a revolution by itself. [. . .] But the flow of information helps to 
undermine such regimes, and the faster it flows, the more trouble they're 
in.  Few states can afford to opt out of teh Information Age; they have 
to keep up with at least some of the latest scientific, technical and 
commercial developments.  [. . .] If dictatorships want to play any part 
in the modern world, they have to risk exposing themselves to ideas and 
information that could inspire reform or spark a revolution"

----end of article----

ITEM #3: TV Globo and CNN Sunday February 26, 1997

   The New York producers of the Brazilian TV network TV Globo, 
called me in my office as part of a story they were doing on the use of 
cyberspace by the Zapatistas and those supporting the struggle for 
democracy in Mexico. They wanted to know if the latest Zapatista 
communiques were available on-line. While I e-mailed the communiques to 
them, they filmed the texts on their computers sitting in their studio. 
The report they put together combined images of Chiapas, pure audio, 
images of the Zapatistas, images of computer screens scrolling through 
the communiques, images of the White Guard attack on the cathedral and 
its defenders in Chiapas. Over these images was an account of the way we 
have been using cyberspace to spread information about what is happening 
in Chiapas and to mobilize support to oppose the military crackdown. They 
reported the overload of protest faxes to Zedillo and said as a result 
"He ordered a retreat." --which overstated the case drastically.  They 
showed taping into the lanic files via gopher and noted the use of net by 
human rights groups. The report ended with the reporter asking "I wonder 
what would have happened if Karl Marx or Che Guevara had had access to 
the Internet?"

The report interested CNN enough for them to run it on their weekend 
World Report Sunday, February 26th.

Comments: 

We are watched. We are read. There are a number of issues here that it 
would be useful for people to pay attention to. 

First, on the positive side, mass media reports 
may facilitate our work by leading more people to be aware of what we are 
doing and how we are doing it, such that they join in. As a result of 
being named in the Washington Post article I have received several 
letters asking for more information by people wanting to help.

Second, the same publicity certainly makes our enemies more aware of what 
we are doing and of its effectiveness. We have evidence of three kinds of 
responses. We know that military consultants are studying what we are 
doing and treating it as a kind of low-level insurgency. I was contacted 
last Spring by two researchers at RAND Corporation --a think tank that does 
much work for the state, including the military-- who had read a paper I 
wrote last February dealing with (in part) the use of cyberspace in the 
struggle. They wanted to share ideas and collaborate! I followed up 
enough to read some of their stuff and discovered their views on these 
issues.  We also know that outside the state, the exteme right wing is 
also monitoring our activities --including the LaRouche people. Such 
proto-fascists can be extremely dangerous. I know of activists (in the 
anti-nuclear power movment) who were attacked physically as a result of 
their activities being monitored and reported by the LaRouche organization.
We know that they are already talking about infiltrating the peace 
brigades being organized for Chiapas. Lastly, we know that there are 
well-intentioned types within such capitalist policy making institutions 
such as the World Bank who are passing on our information to attempt to 
influence policy in more humane directions.

Third, so far it is obvious that we are using the mass media as a source 
of information far more than they are using our material. The information 
we produce and circulate --what the Italians call "counterinformation"-- 
is designed precisely to get the real story out, the story the press and 
TV are not reporting, or not reporting accurately. So far, from what I 
have seen, the big media have used our activities for stories, but not 
our information, while we, on the other hand, continually monitor what 
they do report while assessing its usefulness and accuracy. In the story 
above Tod Robberson impunes the accuracy of our information with unnamed 
sources and fails to report what we all know: namely that misinformation 
gets queried and challenged and corrected here infinitely faster than it 
does in the mainstream media --which prints corrections on back pages if 
at all.

Fourth, as a result of these phenomena I think we should make concerted 
efforts to: 

1. keep track of and document the back and forth between our 
work here in cyberspace and elsewhere, i.e., the paths by which our 
information reaches and influences those who are not in cyberspace, the 
feedback loops by which the activities spurred by those influences are 
reflected in and have an impact on what we do here. For example, I think 
it is very important for our own energy levels to consistently report on 
protest activities prompted by or fueled by information we have provided. 
One of the important lessons of every major protest movement in recent 
decades has been that individuals have more energy to fight when they can 
see how their own, limited individual efforts are part of a much wider 
movement. 

2. We, or at least some of us, should keep a careful eye on the 
activities and discussions of our enemies: HOW they are monitoring us, 
WHO is monitoring us, what they are SAYING about what we are doing, what 
COUNTERMEASURES they are taking against what we are doing. We need to do 
these things because even if we do not want to view them as "enemies" 
many of them DO view us as enemies and are proceeding accordingly. 
Counterinsurgency professionals do this for a living and they believe it 
it. Marcos got labeled a "professional of violence" by those who really 
deserve the title! As far as those who are acting as intelligence 
providers for institutions like the World Bank but do not think of 
themselves as our enemies, perhaps even feel they are on our side, well, 
we can certainly deal with them individually as well-intentioned persons, 
but it is still important to recognize and watch how the institutions 
they are trying to influence actually behaves in the light of the 
information it is provided. The Bank in particular has demonstrated a 
certain capacity for neutralizing some of its opponents by internalizing 
them, i.e., giving them jobs as professional curmudgeons within the Bank. 
We need to watch these things to understand what threatens us and how 
best to deal with it. 

3. We really should mobilize the "Lies of Our Times"-type critics of the 
distortions of the mass media to document the misrepresentations and lack 
of reporting that has been going on. The greatest "unreported story of 
1995", at least so far, is the story of the continuing push by the Army 
--despite the Mexican governments denials-- and their brutal treatment of 
campesinos and grassroots activists in Chiapas. 

4. At the same time, we need 
to keep track of where and how we HAVE been successful at influencing 
what the mass media has reported correctly. For example, when Ken 
Silverstein and Alexander Cockburn published their story on the infamous 
Chase Manhattan report calling for the elimination of the Zapatistas and 
the stealing of the elections in Jalisco very few people read it in 
COUNTERPUNCH simply because their newsletter has a very limited 
readership. After we uploaded their story AND the report itself to the 
nets, the situation changed dramatically. Not only were both items 
reposted over and over again on a wide variety of lists and conferences, 
but they were soon being discussed in the Mexican press and then the 
American press and then in Europe etc. Partly, that success story was due 
to the intrinsic drama of the report. But more important, I think, was 
our ability to get that drama to so many places that it could not be 
ignored and therefore wasn't. Now, it is also of interest to consider who 
did what with it. I know that the Perot people, the Nader people and 
other anti-NAFTA people used it for their purposes of condemning the 
agreement they had been unable to block. Mexican nationalists used it to 
object to Zedillo following the orders of Wall Street. Anti-capitalists 
used it to demonstrate the perfidity of capitalism --once again. 
Financial democracry types (those calling for the demoratization of the 
Fed) used it to attack financial monopoly power. And so on. By 
understanding the array of forces susceptible to use information we 
provide, we are more likely to be effective.

5. After surveying the material we have been providing on the nets, I am 
struck by another thing: we are doing a better job at circulating news 
and analysing it than at providing more indepth material. Yet there is no 
reason why we cannot do this. Certainly some material is best provided in 
bookform, indeed can only be provided that way due the need of authors 
for copyrighted publications. However, the book Zapatistas:Documents of 
the New Mexican Revolution mentioned in the Robberson story above is a 
good counterexample. Not only was that book generated through the nets, 
but it was posted at lanic.utexas.edu BEFORE it was published by 
Autonomedia in Brooklyn. A certain number of more indepth pieces have 
circulated but a great many that might have, or still should have, have 
not. Some of us scurry around to get what we need from whatever source, 
hard copy, e-text, NPR, TV clips, etc. But a great many people cannot do 
that and it would be better if more material was at their fingertips and 
easily accessible. Therefore, I would encourage the uploading of useful 
material, including articles published elsewhere in hard print. The 
authors can usually do this by retaining copyrights. Others can get 
permission. A rapidly growing percentage of authors are crafting their 
material on computers and therefore their material exists in e-text form. 
It is just a matter of knowing it is there, seeing its usefulness and 
uploading it.  The same goes, obviously, for a variety of media that can 
be made available on the World Wide Web --photos, speeches, reports, etc.

Enough. All these comments are simply suggestions as to how we might do 
what we are doing even better, and avoid some dangers. As we care on the 
struggle to roll back the power of the Mexican state (and that of the US 
government, the IMF, etc), we also need to develop the highest state of 
self-awareness possible about what we are doing, how we are doing it, 
what is most effective and what threatens that effectiveness. I would end 
with a call for more frequent discussion of these issues as a part of 
our ongoing work.

Harry


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