A collective of artists and activists developed Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD) to transpose nonviolent direct action - blockades and sit-ins - into cyberspace, enabling decentralized participants to mount simultaneous virtual blockades against distant political targets. Their main tool, Flood Net, was a Java applet that automated repeated page reloads to overwhelm web servers; during a dress rehearsal on April 10 it reportedly used more than 8,000 participants to intermittently block Mexican President Zedillo’s site by issuing reloads every seven seconds. A May 10 action against the Clinton White House used a faster three-second reload and multiple mirrors but failed to produce clear blockage, illustrating that target infrastructure size and mirroring affect ECD efficacy.
A June 10 action against Mexico’s Secretaria de Gobernacion provoked a government countermeasure: embedded JavaScript that opened many windows on Flood Net users’ browsers, potentially crashing them. That response demonstrates both the tactical impact of ECD and the rapid escalation to defensive/offensive coding by states. Organizers argue Flood Net is only one tactic in a broader strategy - envisioning “swarms” of coordinated tools and many autonomous nodes - and plan to evolve their software and tactics, present at Ars Electronica, and encourage wider participation in a distributed electronic resistance.
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