Well, that "virtual march on Washington" that I mentioned in class the other day did make it into the mainstream media, though who knows whether or not it was effective (or how you'd even measure that, short of our government deciding NOT to go to war). Here's the article from the NYT:

February 26, 2003
An Antiwar Demonstration That Does Not Take to the Streets
By JOHN TIERNEY

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 ? The Mall was quiet, but the switchboard on Capitol Hill was swamped today as anti-war protesters conducted what they called the first "virtual march" on Washington. The organizers, a coalition called Win Without War, said that hundreds of thousands of people were sending messages by email, fax and telephone to the Senate and the White House.

There was no way to confirm those estimates, which the organizers said were based on the number of people who had registered online to join the protest. The virtual headquarters of the march is www.moveon.org/winwithoutwar/.

On Feb. 15, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets in cities across the United States, Europe and Asia, protesting the Bush administration's threatened invasion of Iraq. While those protests were largely peaceful, the logistics of organizing such conventional demonstrations can be overwhelming.

The decision to march electronically, beginning at 9 a.m. today, may have come as a relief to Washingtonians struggling with yet another snowstorm. The streets of the city have been clogged for the past week by snow left over from a blizzard on President's Day Weekend.

A virtual march might seem an ideal form of protest for a snowy day, although even electronic protest has its hazards. The protesters were urged online to help set the agenda by "sharing your thoughts on greats goals for our nation in our unique ActionForum," but this forum did not work as well as the old-fashioned kind in Rome. Virtual marchers who clicked on the link this morning and afternoon got a message that it was closed for "routine maintenance."

The event's organizers say it is the first virtual anti-war march ever held. They say 32 groups are involved, including the National Council of Churches, the N.A.A.C.P., the Sierra Club, the National Organization for Women and MoveOn.

The Sierra Club's Web site, www.sierraclub.org, encouraged its members to send this message to senators: "Don't rush to war. Let the United Nations inspectors do their jobs to resolve the Iraq situation peacefully. And reduce the chance of war in the future by ending the U.S. dependence on oil."

The Web site also maintained that this form of protest could be effective. "Senators pay attention when their phones and fax machines light up ? and stay lit up ? from morning until night. They'll get the message that Americans want peace, that we care deeply about saving lives, and that we are well organized."

If any chant will be remembered from this march, it may be the one heard by people who tried calling the Capitol Hill switchboard today. They got the same message over and over, a series of tones followed by a woman's voice saying: "We're sorry. All circuits are busy now. Will you please try your call again later?"

The organizers of the march said they were sending gift baskets to the switchboard operators and secretaries who had to handle the flood of phone calls and faxes today.

Here is our discussion question, followed by our answers to the "questions to guide reading," from Moira and Ryan.

Discussion question:

• What analytical possibilities are opened up when we include non-human things in the study of networks? Does treating non-human things as actors (rather than simple “tools” or background elements) have the potential to reveal insights about neoliberalization and possibilities for resistance to neoliberalization? Or is it a dead end that contributes little to theory or political practice?

Questions to guide reading:

1) All but Hartwick conceive of networks as heterogeneous assemblages of human and non-human actors. In these case studies, the actors are enrolled (whether knowingly or unknowingly) in these networks for a particular political purpose. While other approaches might conceive of networks as formed by groups of people linking to one another, actor-network theory (ANT) insists that non-human actors (e.g., deer, gold, camcorders) play important roles in the formation and activity of the network. Another important distinction between ANT and other approaches is the agency attributed to network actors. Agency is conceived as an effect of relations between and among actors, rather than as an attribute possessed by individuals. Hartwick, on the other hand, argues that many of the non-human things to which ANT attributes agency are in fact social relations taking the form of commodities. She criticizes ANT as insufficient to analyze and expose the power relations involved in chains of consumption.
2) The case studies (Woods, Holloway, and Murdoch & Marsden) all discuss networks organized for political action. The networks in the case studies move between local, regional, and national scales; “local” political issues are addressed at multiple scales as different actors are enrolled in the networks. Woods, for example, discusses the controversy over a local ban on hunting, which was ultimately resolved when one of the networks (the hunters) enrolled extra-local actors to support them. In contrast, Hartwick discusses material commodity chains rather than political coalitions.
3) The three case studies trace the relations among actors within particular political coalitions. Instead of explaining the actor-networks as the effects of some sort of causal mechanism (such as the structures of capitalism or the intentions of individual human subjects), they focus on describing the networks and their effects. This approach emphasizes that agency, and therefore power, resides in the networks themselves. Thus structures and individual intentions are understood as effects of these networks.
4) A) The conceptualizations of networks in the case studies lead to such questions as:
a. Who are the actors enrolled in the network?
b. How do these actors come to be associated, and how do they work in unison?
c. How are actors represented?
d. Which links in the network hold, and which fall apart?
e. What are the political and material effects of the network?
On the other hand, the case studies don’t ask the following kinds of questions:
a. What is the overall political and economic context in which the network is operating?
b. What kinds of inequalities and hierarchies are there within networks?
B) These authors don’t undertake analyses of the efficacy of the networks they study. Instead of asking why some networks and not others are successful in achieving particular political objectives, they seek to use the network as an ontological framework to explore the workings of political coalitions.