The Streets Are Alive
A lot has happened in the six years since the artist collective Critical Art Ensemble first wrote their influential essay Electronic Civil Disobedience in 1994. In the essay, they argued that the streets are dead, hackers and political activists need to form alliances, and "Electronic Civil Disobedience" in the form of "electronic disturbance" - blocking the flow of information (as capital) in cyberspace - should replace traditional civil disobedience in the streets as THE nonviolent tactic of resistance.

Six years later and concretized in a most obvious way last winter in Seattle, it is clear that the streets are not dead, and the division of labor between hackers, artists, activists and performers has become less defined than ever. Six years later, we can now witness as well as participate in a multitude of electronic disturbances that move far beyond information blockage to include faking, altering, rerouting, substituting, distributing, flooding and replacing information, all of which can cause a disturbance both on-line and off. Today, we can see that the Internet is a street, and the street is also a network.