Much is made of the difference between 'virtual' and 'actual'. Other than asserting a distinction between 'unreal' and 'real', the uses of such oppositions demonstrates a conflict between different approaches to and mappings of space, as both cyberspace and landscape. The singular experience of the net consists in manifesting a particular sense and use of space—including the so-called 'real' space of the world's surface—that has no place in officially-sanctioned, or rather petrified, maps and models. Because even if the content of various sites remains trapped in conservative and reactionary forms of representation that reproduce norms bequeathed to us by the French Revolution (according to which 'man' is human, has human rights, only insofar as 'he' is the citizen of a nation-state), the experience of the net is otherwise. Moreover, I want to insist, above all, that what is virtual is preamble, that it exists. The virtual spaces of cyberspace have a distinctive connection to that which is immanent and imminent, material and emergent, or better: the net is really, virtually, that which reveals, and increasingly convenes, an antagonism to authorised spatial organisation.

Geopolitics

At the end of the 20th century, nationalism had flourished to become the planetary system, covering every centimetre of the globe, administered by various inter-nationalisms, including the agencies of the United Nations. As landscape, space is delimited by nation-states. Migration policies (border controls) were largely non-existent prior to the 20th C. The consolidation of nation-states that mostly took place in the 19th and 20th centuries—and the tyranny of citizenship (always founded on its exclusions) that was their corollary—meant that the 20th C was fated to be the century of the 'refugee problem', as the UN and many NGOs prefer to apprehend it.

Movement in every sense

In the second half of the 20th C, a movement emerged in every sense. Currently estimated at over 50 million people, very often existing and moving clandestinely, this is the largest movement in history. Out of necessity and desire it refuses the cages and enclosures of nationalism and the pass laws that regulate and control the paths between them. This creates the greatest challenge to the principle role of the nation-state: the 'right' of nation-states (whether as one nation or 'united' nations) to allocate, regulate and control bodies for the purposes of a capitalist production. It connects to a long line of struggles against the geopolitical inscriptions of capitalist production: the enclosure of the commons in England, the laying down of fence-lines for imperial agriculture, the forcing of indigenous peoples into missions and reserves, and the passage of 'anti-nomadic' laws, to name only those most familiar to locals.

Previous centuries were marked by the journeys of colonial powers across the globe as they expanded and consolidated their empires. By contrast, the second half of the 20th C was significant for inverting this process. During that time, people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began moving in significant numbers, relative to pre-ww2 periods, to Canada, the US, the EU countries and Australia. It is as a response to these movements that, by the late 1990s, the US (1996), Australia (1992), and the EU (1997) all passed some of the most vicious border laws imaginable. Like all border laws, these were not meant to stop people moving. Rather, they manage the illegalisation of undocumented workers so they can continue to serve as a reserve for hyper-exploitation in nations like the US and Australia in much the same way as if they had remained in, say, Mexico or Vietnam, as documented workers. Thus the conditions of the global sweatshops (the so-called 'third world') are recreated in the face of the threat transnational movement poses to the border controls that are their precondition. The distinction between 'third' and 'first' worlds increasingly becomes a distinction internal to countries.

In a broad sense, this movement consists of the undocumented, those without papers or sans papier. In other registers it, or parts of it, are composed of 'refugees', 'illegal immigrants', 'asylum seekers', 'economic refugees', 'stateless persons', 'non-persons'. But all these words are categorisations from the perspective of the nation-state (often formally sanctioned by the UN) of the degree to which discrimination and exclusion are authorised in particular cases or of the exact point at which one feels authorised to perform the role of border cop.

Visibility, media and mediation

Whereas real space was generally visible only by way of official mappings, of legal routes and national territories, the actual paths of this movement of flight and escape became visible in cyberspace. This took place in the forms of, for example, the circulation of stories of the struggles of those without papers; the chatrooms and emails that connected people on the move and as they moved (with each other, but also with information, friends and contacts); or simply as experimentation with a language that was not premised on national borders. On the net, ideas of space did not parallel those of national space. Here, those who are juridical 'non-persons' in a world dominated by citizenship found a media for communication.

The 'virtualisation' of the movement against the enclosures doesn't mean it's not real. Rather, it's a result of a history of figuration and the processes by which movements are designated, recognised, given stamps of approval as oppositional—or not. There are those who refuse to acknowledge that it is indeed a movement, those who can only recognise movements when they are designated as such by the media or the self-appointed officials of mediation. Indeed, for a long time, since the Bolsheviks in 1920 adopted Woodrow Wilson's inter-nationalist doctrine of the 'self-determination of nations'—since, that is, they became little more than ambassadors for various nation-states (pro-China, pro-Soviet, pro-Cuba, etc.), in turn regarding flight from such states as traitorous—many could only imagine struggle as the struggle for more nationalisms. In short, many would only recognise movements if they appeared in the form of their opposite: i.e., as enclosure rather than movement, as capture rather than freedom. In doing so, they had a deft hand in the invisibility of this movement, or at best, could only approach it as latter-day missionaries seeking out converts among the dislocated, or as another means to prove their indispensability as mediators between the state and the insubordinate.

But aspirations to mediation are difficult to sustain on the net, not least because if one accepts a version of communication and media such as that operating on indymedia, it is all but impossible to assure the delimited, fixed and mediatory model that claims to representation rely on, and which remain the format of, especially, mainstream news media outlets. The net makes any equation between media as communication and mediation as representation, and the expectation of integration implicit in the latter, difficult to sustain. This is not unrelated to the very possibility of the net making manifest a movement that, since it has no leaders or representatives, would otherwise be characterised as mindless bodies in search of missionaries and representatives—the 'non-persons' of juridical space re-figured as the non-agents of political practice.

(Even so, I'm not suggesting that the net is solely responsible for the de-coupling of mediation from media. The end of mediation is a historical moment, some refer to it as neo-liberalism, where the trade-off between integration and concessions was no longer possible, reducing mediation to a moment of repression and little else. This is why, for instance, the question of discipline overwhelms all other conditions for claims to representation. Self-styled representatives of detainees or 'refugees', for instance, are asked whether they can ensure their ostensible constituency's pacification. If they cannot, they are expected to denounce the actions of detainees. Alternately, they may inaugurate their claims to representation by insisting on the need to 'integrate' detainees, as if the problem stems from detainees being too far outside the circuits of representation. In any case, mediation is no longer, if it ever was, capable of granting concessions or relief.)

Nomadic and netactive

…Chiapas was increasingly subjected to all manner of transnational influences. During the 1980s and early 1990s, it became a crossroads for NGO activists, Catholic liberation-theology priests and Protestant evangelists, Guatemalan migrants and refugees, guerrillas coming and going from Central America, and criminals trafficking in weapons and narcotics. This exposure to transnational forces was stronger and more distinctive in Chiapas than in two other nearby states—Oaxaca and Guerrero—that were often thought to be likely locales for guerrilla insurgencies (and had been in the past). And this helps explain why Chiapas, and not another state, gave rise to an insurgency that became a netwar.
—Rand Corporation
www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR880/MR880.ch16.pdf

The Rand Corporation commentary, cited above, indicates something of the relationship between the experiences of movement and netactivism in generating the particular strategies of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Rather than echoing Microsoft's publicity dream of a borderless world without dissension, where the exploitation of bodies is made invisible, the net has seen the emergence of a language and subjectivity that is antagonistic to the enclosure of the commons. In both landscape and on the net we have seen the emergence of trading posts and routes that are neither officially sanctioned nor reducible to exchange and calculation, where open source meets open borders and undocumented meets techno-nomadic. Here, there is antagonism to the ways a fantasy of a world without bodies (Microsoft) masks a world where bodies are distributed according to pass laws and confined by borders. More importantly still, there is the possibility of a practice that doesn't assume it is 'our' role to grant intellects to mindless bodies.

By way of a conclusion

Some projects which give a sense of some of the above more fully:
border='0' location='yes' make-world.org
teleportica www.teleportacia.org
bordercartograph
www.moneynations.ch/cartographes/eng/index.htm

online action against deportation
go.to/online-demo
stop-depclass.scene.as
xborder
antimedia.net/xborder

For an indication of proposals to draft conventions for cyberspace that re-assert national boundaries, see Sea, Space, Cyberspace: Borderless Domains, V. A. Cebrowski, 1999, US Naval Military College, at www.nwc.navy.mil